My outer world, including my blog, looks like I’ve been lazy, because I’ve been busy working internally, feeling for which way to turn my spiritual work and service.  I’m enjoying the fresh world of having left a career that was drying me up, beating me down, and sucking the life out of me.  After seriously practicing doing only what I want to do every minute of every day and avoiding the clock, my blood pressure, without drug or supplements and after I’ve been enjoying poetry, chocolate and cognac tonight, is 112/72.  I’ve been eating and drinking anything I like, anytime, and declaring seriously,  that I am youthing—growing younger, not older.

~

Do you ever go across the web, finding one inspiring person after another?  Great painters, teachers, scientists and artists of all kinds?  And sometimes you wind up in a virtual place you’ve visited before.  Tonight, AGAIN, I’ve been listening to poems on YouTube by thirteenth-century Persian Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi.  Coleman Barks is the genius whose spiritual mission is to have brought the mystical poetry of Rumi to us in the West.  Coleman Barks grew up in Chattanooga, given the poetic soul of a southerner, gifted with the passion, intelligence, humor, feeling for music, and education of a Southerner, blessed with a rich voice that can make anybody love poetry, and with a mystical bent.  He was well prepared for his mission.  I wonder if he IS Rumi.

I’ve created a YouTube playlist called Rumi.  It kicks off with three of Rumi’s poems read by Coleman Barks, to give you a taste and a taste for more.  Then (don’t let the word scare you) an entertaining documentary with Bill Moyers, and the rest, “just” Rumi.  At times, listening, I feel spiritual electricity, as it draws my Higher Self nearer, until the satisfaction of the longing for my Self, that touch of my Higher Self against my personality self, brings tears that end that touch.

If spirituality is new to you, then forget spirituality, and simply feel…Rumi.

Link to Rumi Playlist

Coleman Barks, born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, went to school at the University of North Carolina and the University of California, Berkeley. He taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia for thirty years. After meeting Robert Bly in 1976, he began translating the 13th Century mystic, Rumi. His first publication of the Rumi work, Open Secret: Versions of Rumi, was awarded the Pushcart Writer’s Choice Award by William Stafford. His Rumi translations were collected in a definitive best-selling anthology, The Essential Rumi, and re-issued in 1997. His work with Rumi was the subject of a segment in Bill Moyers’ Language of Life series on PBS, and a special, Fooling with Words, aired on PBS in 1999. A selection of the Rumi translations appears in the prestigious 7th edition of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. The father of two grown children and grandfather of three, he is now retired in Athens, Georgia.

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