Rumi and the Full Moon of my Birth

This poem, Buoyancy, by Rumi today took my breath away today. I have read it already dozens of times in my life. But today, this day, after the biggest full moon of the year last night – I cried when I read this. Sucked air in and almost coughed and laughed with the majesty of his presence. Rumi, that is.

“Love had taken away my practices and filled me with poetry”

OH YES! Rumi, lay it on us. Thick and clean like fresh butta’

I feel I love on the edge of passion’s quivering lip. Never sure just how much to take in and how much to leave out. My reason is compromised by a fire in my spirit lit long ago – has it been since birth? Since my first kiss? Since my parents laughed me into the light, that night long ago, while partaking of questionable substances?

My father, much younger than my mother, I know has secretly never stopped loving her…but love can make fools of us. And does. Last night’s moon, the full moon felt as much like a fool moon to me. Though I drank it in with a friend hoping to catch a shimmer of moondust on my soul to light my path. And did.

“I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?”

In a book my mom wrote me about my arrival on earth called Pink McCloud Peonies and Rose Colored Glasses (unpublished edition, private collection of the artist known as Shiloh Sophia) – here is what she said:

“As I was saying…at that special time when you were born, we were under the sign of those twins, Gemini, nigh of the cusp of God’s old Zodiac.

Well at the time of your birth, Our Lord and Ruler of The Galaxy (and everything else) had the planets and stars all lined up in a most extraordinary way. The sky held both the sun and the full moon! Visible! At the very same time! Hangin’ there, side-by-side, in her early morning blue! Like a sister and a brother, long separated from one another, and they were about to come together and dance, for the first time after many a year.”

Is it any wonder, that I turned into a hopeful and relentless romantic and lover life because of a mother, Caron McCloud who writes their children such lines as these at the impartation of their little pink form on earth?

Rumor has it I was conceived to I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight by Bob Dylan….
I can just hear it now. And then there was the instance of walking naked down the street in Forrest Knowles with only cowboy boots…but then legends do have a way of inventing themselves.

But tonight, in the residue of the last night’s moon I sit sipping rose petal sangria and listening to Cesaria Evora wondering at the possibilities life holds – what a joy. What a drama. What a tragedy. What a possibility, if we will only breath it in and not spit it back out due to bitterness.

What do you think? Do you believe in true love? Do you believe true healing is possible no matter how we have been hurt? Do you believe that change, true change can come to the one desiring that? Do you believe in your own glorious buouyancy? I mean – why not? I do. I do. I do.

But enough about me. I am writing tonight to share Rumi with you – and I do so hope there is someone in your precious life you feel you could send this writing too – lover, teacher, friend, family – we can all, like Rumi says:

let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy

WHOOOOSH,

Shiloh

Love had taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours,
but I couldn’t.

I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?

A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That’s how I hold your voice.

I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.

I saw you and became empty.
This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence!

The sky is blue. The world is a blind man
squatting on the road.

But whomever sees your emptiness
sees beyond blue and beyond the blind man.

A great soul hides, like Muhammad, or Jesus,
moving through a crowd in a city
where no one knows him.

To praise is to praise
how one surrenders
to the emptiness.

To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.

So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where?
Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck
we could have. It’s a total waking up!

Why should we grieve that we’ve been sleeping?
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been unconscious.

We’re groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.

~ RUMI

thank you Rumi. thank you. I raise my glass to you 2night. I live off of love like bees live off of flowers. Drinking to their fill, drunken with yellow dust only to stumble into another flower and be just as delighted as you were just moments before….