Friends, the Beloved has blocked every escape:
we are lame deer and He a prowling lion.
Cornered by a fierce and blood-thirsty lion
what is there to do but surrender?
This Beloved, like the sun, neither sleeps nor eats:
He makes souls sleepless and hungry,
saying,
"Come, be Me, or one with Me in nature,
so when I unveil Myself, you may behold My Face.
And if you had not beheld it,
how would you have become so distraught?
You were earth, and now
you long to be quickened with spiritual life."
Already the Beloved has bestowed gifts
from that world of spacelessness,
otherwise why would your spiritual eye keep gazing there?
Mathnawi VI: 576-581
Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski
Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance
Threshold Books, 1996
