Sometimes I Forget Completely — Rumi
Sometimes I forget completely
what companionship is.
Unconscious and insane, I spill sad
energy everywhere. My story
gets told in various ways: a romance,
a dirty joke, a war, a vacancy.Divide up my forgetfulness to any number,
it will go around.
These dark suggestions that I follow,
are they a part of some plan?
Friends, be careful. Don’t come near me
out of curiosity, or sympathy.
I hear that we are all One. I hear that separation is an illusion, is a phony. We leave the warm bed of Union to go for a jaunt down here on Earth, where it’s made up to look like a bunch of tiny details and objects and someones who have nothing to do with each other. It’s very convincing.
I am on the trail, noticing the crumbs and clues I left for myself. I’m sure I knew how tiring I was making this path, didn’t I? I’m sure I did and still it didn’t stop me. What a cheeky bastard. Or I had a lot of faith in myself. Probably a bit both, let’s be honest.
I am fascinated and mostly baffled by this model of separation to teach us connection. The number of personality quizzes I have done to simply differentiate myself from others is a clear indication that I feel separate to a large degree. I haven’t felt resonance with what others appear to experience, so I go looking for it. Where do I fit? And how can I not fit here? How can it be that all my truest needs feel met elsewhere? Could it be that I, as the soul, am merely wriggling and fidgeting with the illusion? Maybe I don’t fit because it actually isn’t real? I conjecture that I am the more real thing poking more and more holes in this gauze. It is losing more and more air, with the cyclical rhythms of heart opening and heart breaking.
This path to Home looks like finding it in a person’s voice then losing it in a long e-mail, then finding it in a baby’s hands then losing it in a custody battle, then finding it in a kiss, then losing it in a disease. The path to the Heart is somehow long and winding though it sits inside me.
Either this deep desire of mine
will be found on this journey,
or when I get back home!It may be that the satisfaction I need
depends on my going away, so that when I’ve gone
and come back, I’ll find it at home.I will search for the Friend with all my passion
and all my energy, until I learn
that I don’t need to search.The real truth of existence is sealed,
until after many twists and turns of the road.As in the algebraical method of “the two errors,”
the correct answer comes only after two substitutions,
after two mistakes. Then the seeker says,“If I had known the real way it was,
I would have stopped all the looking around.”Excerpt from “In Baghdad, Dreaming of Cairo; In Cairo, Dreaming of Baghdad”— Rumi
While we are drenched in our mother’s fluids upon arriving, we are also drenched in forgetting our true nature, sent out to recover it, one day at a time. We reminisce deep inside, while we stumble over governments and cultures, test scores and aging skin, with our maddening need for others when we’re tiny and when we’re old and all the in between. But then we remember it in the way a person’s hands make bread, in centurial trees spanning up over our heads, in crashing sounds of thunder in the night, and a telepathic glance between lovers. We remember and keep making little notes to ourselves that we’ll one day read out loud.
(And yes, I’m on a Rumi kick)
