Noticings of the Last Two Weeks

I didn't know that Rumi's poetry was speaking until the end of the these two weeks

My noticings this week are rooted in a poem that I experienced Thursday in a monthly clergy group.  It is by Rumi, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori

Open your eyes to the four streams
flowing through you—
water, milk, honey, wine.

Pay no attention to what gossips say.

They call the wide-eyed flower jasmine.
They call the wide-eyed flower a thorn.
The wide-eyed flower doesn’t care what they call it.
I adore that freedom. I bow to it.

Some say you worship fire.
Some say you follow scripture.
What do they know?
Labels blind and tear us apart.

Your eyes are not a vulture’s beak.
See through the Beloved’s eyes.
See one when your mind says two.
The angels adore your Love-drunk eyes.

Open them
and dismiss the vicious judge
from the post you gave him.

Bow to a human
and greet the angel.
Rumi. Gold (p. 28). New York Review Books. Kindle Edition.

When this was first read, I was immediately drawn to the lines in the 3rd to the last stanza.

• Your eyes are not a vulture’s beak...what I heard there was a reminder of how we are to see others - we are not to look to tear things apart (as a vulture’s beak does with a carcass) but instead as the next line says...

• see through the Beloved’s eyes... who is the beloved?  Is it God?  Is it someone close to you?  Is it just another person?   But it is through eyes connected to love regardless of whose eyes they are.

• See one when your mind says two... see what unifies rather than separates.  See what can make wholeness rather than brokenness.

• The angels adore your Love-drunk eyes...dismiss the vicious judge from the post you gave him // Bow to a human and greet the angel... All of this...let go of the judgmentalism and see the holy and the divine in the other and all around.

I didn’t know it but these beautiful words framed my last few weeks.  There have been many moments that have felt like “thin places” where the divine and the everyday seem to meet much more closely than normal.  There have been places where I have felt caught in the middle between different forces and seeking to find a connection between.  There have been times when I have felt extra sensitive to what is around me almost like I could feel every tiny touch of a gentle breeze.  There have been moments when I have felt the very close and very real presence of God and then other moments when I felt far from.  But as I write this, it feels very much like going back to what I shared in 2020 and 2022 of bowing to all of these moments.  Bow to them, acknowledge them, honor them for all the ways they have changed me, and then stand and maybe see the angel in them and move forward.

Some of my visual noticing...

The “supermoon” setting and the sun rising while standing on a bridge between.

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Once again, Lisa’s labyrinth where such a profound moment took place at the heart of it.

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Part of a turkey family that I saw one morning. My wife called the baby turkeys “goblets”. I love it!

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And then a series of images from Friday morning while Rumi’s poem was still very much in my heart.

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And of course one of Scout who was with me for most of these noticings

GPLJ