Your beginning and your end

"I am only the house of your beloved,

not the beloved herself:

true love is for the treasure,

not for the coffer that contains it."

The real beloved is that one who is unique,

who is your beginning and your end.

When you find that one,

you'll no longer expect anything else:

that one is both the manifest and the mystery.

That one is the lord of the states of feeling,

dependent on none:

month and year are slaves to that moon.

When He bids the "state,"

it does His bidding;

when that one wills, bodies become spirit.

Mathnawi III: 1417-1421 

Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski

"Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance"

Threshold Books, 1996

If you want to find yourself...

Leave the stream and join the river

If you want to live, leave your banks,

as a small stream enters the Oxus, miles wide,

or as cattle moving around a millstone

suddenly circle to the top of the sphere.

Version by Coleman Barks

"Unseen Rain"

Threshold Books, 1986

(CREDITS - robertfeateckbert)

Are you searching for your soul?

Then come out of your prison.

Leave the stream and join the river

that flows into the ocean.

Absorbed in this world

you’ve made it your burden.

Rise above this world.

There is another vision…

Translation by Azima Melita Kolin and Maryam Mafi

Rumi: Whispers of the Beloved

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 1999

if you want to find yourself

leave yourself alone

wade in no little creek

swim in the big flow

you are that bull

who carries the world

revolt for once

and topple the globe.

Translation by Nader Khalili

Rumi, Dancing the Flame

Cal-Earth Press, 2001

Change Our Vision

There was a billionaire who was bothered by severe eye pain. He consulted so many physicians and was getting his treatment done. He did not stop consulting galaxy of medical experts; he consumed heavy loads of drugs and underwent hundreds of injections. 

But the ache persisted with great vigour than before. At last a medicine man who has supposed to be an expert in treating such patients was called for by the billionaire. The medicine man understood his problem and said that for sometime he should concentrate only on green colours and not to fall his eyes on any other colours.

The billionaire got together a group of painters and purchased barrels of green color and directed that every object his eye was likely to fall to be painted in green colour just as the medicine man had directed. 

When the medicine man came to visit him after few days, the billionaire's servants ran with buckets of green paints and poured on him since he was in red dress, lest their master not see any other colour and his eye ache would come back. 

The medicine man laughed said "If only you had purchased a pair of green spectacles, worth just a few dollars, you could have saved these walls and trees and pots and all other articles and also could have saved a large share of his fortune. You cannot paint the world green." 

Let us change our vision and the world will appear accordingly. It is foolish to shape the world, let us shape ourselves first. 

(Received via email - Author unknown)

(image credit - catpicturescatpictures.net)