I thought that to begin our foray into thought we might begin with a difficult subject: the abstract nature of the artist. Jalal ad-din Muhammad Rumi was a great poet, and spiritualist from the Sufi mystic tradition, which is a branch of Islam. His love poems, most referring to God in one way or another, are amongst the great works of penmanship in history.
- When a baby is taken from the wet nurse,
- it easily forgets her
- and starts eating solid food.
- Seeds feed awhile on ground,
- then lift up into the sun.
- So you should taste the filtered light
- and work your way toward wisdom
- with no personal covering.
- That’s how you came here, like a star
- without a name. Move across the night sky
- with those anonymous lights.
Below is a translation of a poem called “A Star Without a Name”:
Rumi’s poem refers to a person’s soul, or individual spirit. His unique voice conveys the effortless way a baby seems to live right. Notice how even the hardest of heart seem to melt at the sight of a baby, they cannot help but recognize that the baby is living the way we all wish to. Babies do not commit crime, acts of violence, or think selfishly. The only tendencies that show any selfish concern is in the baby’s demand for love, and if one really ponders that desire can it be considered selfish. For once a baby is familiar with anything, or any person his love automatically encompasses that object. A baby is incapable of withholding love from any object within the realm of its environment. As the baby grows into an adult it is taught by example, and sometimes even in words that there is such a thing as hatred. The young adult begins to deem himself a righteous judge presiding over a court which spans the width and breadth of the known universe. Yet some seem able to recapture their natural state of all-encompassing love, isn’t that what saints really are? Buddha, Jesus, Moses, the first Hindu sages, Muhammad are not foounders of religions, but men who realized their nature as divine souls or “Sons of God”. Spurred on by this realization, they saw with deep insight that this capability was within every soul, in fact this way of divine living was the natural state of human beings. So dropping our various closely held ideologies, can we all believe in an all-encompassing love? The very love that we exhibit for a short period after our birth without any effort? Is it possible that this love is after all second nature to us, and will come easily if we embrace it whole-heartedly? Finally, why do we hold ourselves back from the gift of this beautiful love?
Please join the conversation! You may or may not believe in your own power, but just for the sake of experimenting, try and see if you can change your paradigm, and thereby begin to change the world…
its a fantastic poem
thanks, i thought so too. it stunned me that someone could have the vision to think of a human as a star without a name???