Which one am I ?

Rumi has come back in my life through the modern device called mobile phone. Some years ago, I took a trip to Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi’s world, which lasted a month or so. I ended up reading most of his works from the web and buying some of his books. ‘Some’ here reflects my financial status during those days when I was myself like a ‘poor dervish’ on a certain high (or at least, that’s what I would like to think about myself during those times).

Coming back to Good Ol’ Rumi and my new age mobile phone…my good friend works for a firm called ‘Webaroo’ which, apart from other things, is into providing a free service of sending smses to those who subscribe, on subjects like ‘Sufism’, ‘Riddles’, ‘News’, ‘Music Trivia’ etc. On my friend’s insistence, I subscribed to this free service a couple of weeks ago. And now, throughout the day I keep receiving some interesting stuff on my mobile, including Sufi quotes from Rumi.

Rumi was born in what is today’s Afghanistan in the year 1207 AD to a family of learned theologians. He was introduced into the mystical path by a wandering dervish, Shamsuddin of Tabriz. His love and his bereavement for the death of Shams found their expression in a surge of music, dance and lyric poems. In the writer’s opinion, their relationship had shades of homosexuality but this has no relevance in the current context.

The name Rumi stands for Love and ecstatic flight into the infinite. The object of love in his works as is true for all Sufi poetry, is God. Before I get into my personal views regarding the subject of God, allow me to present a few translations of his writings. They were all written in Persian and as translation takes away half the beauty of the work, imagine the original beauty of these.

"In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art."

"The garden of Love is green without limit
and yields many fruits other than sorrow and joy.
Love is beyond either condition:
without spring, without autumn, it is always fresh."

They were all written in Persian and as all translations take away half the beauty of the original work, one can imagine the original beauty of these words. The one which came on my mobile and made me write this post is this.

"I wonder from these
thousands of 'Me's'
which one am I?"

If you also want to subscribe to this free service, you can visit http://sms.webaroo.com/commands and you will get the details. As for me, I just got another sms!