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.’