The
poetry of Mawlana Jalaluddin Muhammad Balkhi Rumi is a treatise on
interactive Divine love that nurtures spiritual stirrings in the depth
of the human heart. Rumi employs the poetic vernacular to the optimum in
his search to find a blueprint for the path to perfection. Through his
supplications, contemplations, meditations, as well as his lyrical
yearnings for the Divine love Rumi weaves the weft of mysticism from the
woof of Qur’anic fiber turning it into a woolen cloak that mantles the pious and the pure. Rumi’s magnum opus, Mathnawi-i Ma’nawi or the Spiritual Couplets begins with a calling of the reed flute as a longing to rejoin its original source in eternity. In the suspense between reason and rhyme Rumi clarifies the mythical to the ascetic and the aesthetic to the mystified.
While
words can never convey the full depth of thought, poetic parlance
occasionally compensates for this inadequacy as it attempts to reveal
the jealously guarded meaning from behind the veils of seclusion—where
meaning is woven from metaphors and allegories beyond the literal and
the interpretive. Rumi’s poetry
defies cultural and linguistic stereotyping despite attempts to reduce
the universality of his thought to cultural confines. Rumi’s work has
been translated beyond place and time so that the beauty of thought does
not surrender to vernacular dominance nor is it sacrificed at the altar
of poetic niceties.
The
mind journeys in the footsteps of the heart and realizes that the peace
of mind is a mere temporality towards attaining the tranquility of the
soul with the ultimate aim of arriving at the state of being content and
contented with the Divine through subconscious connectedness. There,
one hopes for a fleeting glimpse of a spiritual ambiance that soothes
the soul in the sublime.
While
clarity and ambiguity play their games through a discourse of
linguistic simplicity and philosophical complexity, Rumi artfully
simplifies challenging thoughts and beautifully infuses complex issues
by inviting us into the garden of the Mathnawi
from whence bridges span horizons between the violet mist of daybreak
and the magenta dusk of nightfall. In the realm of the imaginal one may
glimpse the beauty of thought flourishing as a lotus on the serene
surface of a reflective pond gazing into the indigo firmament for
inspiration while firmly grounded in the nurturing womb of the earth
beneath. As the blue-violet hue of the lotus petals unfurl around the
stamen in contemplation, one may be able to lift up layers of unfolding
meanings, from the lotus and life. Like Rumi you too may spin in the
cosmic whirl of the sacred lotus with the resonance of the ‘voice
within.’