Secret Places
Rumi
Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make transactions
with beauty.
Reason says, Nonsense.
I have walked and measured the walls here.
There are no places like that.
Love says, There are.
Reason sets up a market
and begins doing business.
Love has more hidden work.
Hallaj steps away from the pulpit
and climbs the stairs of the gallows.
Lovers feel a truth inside themselves
that rational people keep denying.
It is reasonable to say, Surrender
is just an idea that keeps people
from leading their lives.
Love responds, No. This thinking
is what is dangerous.
Using language obscures
what Shams came to give.
Every day the sun rises
out of low word-clouds
into burning silence.
Have you ever asked, or been asked “why do you love me?” Realistically, it is an impossible question, but many have tried to answer it clearly and logically. Each answer I have offered in the past I immediately recognized as incomplete and wanting as soon as the words flowed out of my mouth. Each time I’ve asked the question, perhaps I secretly just wanted to hear “I don’t love you,” as though to render the person questioned unable to answer meant that I was the victor in an invisible debate. This society we’ve built for ourselves is predicated on very conflicted and frankly, strange ideals. We implore to love thy neighbor and to treat others as we would like to be treated, yet we also commend those that have no issue coldly crushing their opponents on the path to material success.
Nowhere in our ideals rests the idea of surrender. I can recall many people that have wronged me, made me furious, or truly wounded me. In stunning detail, I can relive those conflicts and clutch hatred close to my heart with the impenetrable logic that I mustn’t let go of that negative thought. We build walled cities in our souls out of hostility and trepidation. Painted on those walls are the faces of those that have wronged us, and those we have wronged. I often find myself afraid of encountering people from my past, living out hypothetical nightmares in my mind what if they too hold on to the same animosity that I drown in. I begin to realize now that surrender was the answer to my woes. Instead of railing against myself and others with logic and words, I should have simply felt and grown.
There’s a tint of hypocrisy if you choose to see it in this post: to say that love cannot be clearly defined with words, poetry or science, in a series of posts that attempt to identify how to control our emotions instead of being controlled by them. We will need our language and words to some extent on our journey, but our true clarity will be achieved by leaving them behind. The Persian poet Rumi understood this irony best: every day the sun rises, out of low word-clouds into burning silence.