[Act Of Helplessness]

Here are the miracle-signs you want:

that you cry through the night and get up at dawn, asking,

that in the absence of what you ask for your day gets dark, your neck thin as a spindle,

that what you give away is all you own,

that you sacrifice belongings, sleep, health, your head,

that you often sit down in a fire like aloes wood, and often go outto meet a blade like a battered helmet. When acts of helplessness become habitual, those are the signs.

But you run back and forth listening for unusual events, peering into the faces of travelers.

“Why are you looking at me like a madman?” I have lost a friend. Please forgive me.

Searching like that does not fail. There will come a rider who holds you close. You faint and gibber. The uninitiated say, “He’s faking.” How could they know?

Water washes over a beached fish, the water of those signs I just mentioned.

Excuse my wandering. How can one be orderly with this? It’s like counting leaves in a garden, along with the song-notes of partridges, and crows.

Sometimes organization and computation become absurd.

Rumi, the 13th century Persian philosopher, theologian, poet, teacher, and founder of the Mevlevi (or Mawlawi) order of Sufism was born on September 30, 1207, in the city of Balkh (Now Afghanistan) and finally settled in the town of Konya (Now Turkey). Rumi's life story is full of intrigue and high drama mixed with intense creative outbursts. However, his life changed forever when in 1244, at around the age of 39, he met the wandering mystic and thinker Shams-e Tabriz, with whom he shared an intense student-master relationship that unlocked Rumi’s poetic talents. Today, Rumi's works have been widely translated into many of the world’s language.