03/12/2024
Dear Brave Souls: Few realize the blessed poet Rumi was a tormented refugee.
[As was the Holy Family, Blessed Maria fleeing in the night through the cold desert, just having given birth-- fleeing to escape the massacre of the innocents--
[all boy babies under two years old slaughtered by the mad king who feared a dear child had already been born who would topple him-- the new child would do so with kindness, regard, bridging and love...
[instead of the king's filthy and evil ways of ranting, insulting, trying to invade, attempting to force souls away from their true paths called by Greater, who threatened the spirit and soul lives of others through arrogance and vile judgements on other's lives, judgements belonging only to Source without source.]
Rumi the gentle Poet, in early life was also an Inocente who witnessed Death at every doorway... and his tortures and empty stomach and torn feet from traveling at night over deadly ground, ought never be erased from his lyric words...
Rumi is to me one of the dearest of the Patron Saints of Refugees everywhere.... for we cannot keep exact count of souls suffering so in our exact time: Rohingya, Karon, Kurds, Afghanistanis, Iranians, Iraquis, Uyghurs, Tigray, Australian souls of aboriginal hopes after DECADES of dashed hopes, still strong in determination, truly strong.
--Like Rumi, we are with the inocentes: the people who lost everything: their kin, their health, their peace, their art, their security in food, animals, flowers, shelter, livelihood.
Rumi, who was born Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī in 1207 — on what is now the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan. When a child, his father led his family to flee the bloody lootings, rapings and massacres of the Mongol invasions.
Rumi and his dear inocentes family fled for days through forests where birds still sang, through dry land where trickles of water still sparkled --and where Death was in the eyes of so many.
Rumi and his family trekked and hid and sheltered through what is now Iran, Iraq and Syria, before they found refuge in the outlying communities of Konya in modern-day Turkey.
Bedraggled, beaten, starving, Blessed Rumi rose up, not with insult, not with revenge, not with opprobrium, not with hatred, not with scorn, not with screed, not with self-designed ad hominem attacks against others, not with insane rantings.
As here in the following poem/prayer, in acknowledging Greater, Rumi rose up in immaculate love and peace with integrity.
Rumi bridged, I believe, to Blessed Martin Luther King --who had as one of Martin's irrevocable premises — how to EFFECTIVELY progress against hatred and deadly exclusion: that one MUST daily —if not every minute — self-purify from egotistical outrage, personal resentment, projection of faults, hatred and desire to split the world into more shatters by ineffective sloganeering and declaring oneself arbiter of all others.
Ive been in touch with some at the Haig re cease fires in Ukraine and Gaza and several other wholesale bloodshed sites, including Venezuela. I'll update as I have more information.
[One of the most effective actions I've seen in all the many harms to inocentes going on, is one brave man lodging a formal complaint to the war crimes oversight group at the UN. Brave, Brave soul.]
May all be healed, may peace come this second, starting with our own peaceful hearts --our broken hearts sewn together to hold the middle --so that not all is torn asunder by those who do not study, who do not follow the ways of peace building.
It is easy to be enraged, but takes FAR more muscle of Spirit and Soul to be engaged
--Within one's own reach--
As said before here, ally with groups of aid and bridging and feeding and sheltering, already embedded however and wherever your better angels call you ...
Here is the instructive Love from Rumi to your hearts, dear souls. Thank you to my friend Coleman for his translation to the English.
I’ll Meet You There” (Rumi)
“Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down
in that grass, the world
is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language,
even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.” -Rumi
Pick up a stone that fits inside your hand.
Feel the weight of it. Feel its touch.
For ninety-one weeks,
in words and words and words,
I’ve been trying to figure something out.
I’ve been trying to help.
I’ve been trying to solve problems,
provide answers, offer support
and understand. And there’s something wonderful in all of that.
But there is also quiet.
A breath.
Pick up a stone. Any stone. Feel it. Sometimes that is my doorway to the field.
I don’t find healing there,
but I do find a pattern
larger than all my hurts.
I find something like peace and strength.
I find being.
There is quiet.
A breath.
Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
No lack of love,
dr e
- raised in her war refugees, immigrant and deportee families.
