bedding of flame
By: alexanderlewin
Tags: Coleman Barks, fire, pen-drawing, pilgrim, Rumi
Category: Photography, Poetry, Rumi, Sufism
| Aperture: | f/2.4 |
|---|---|
| ISO: | 400 |
| Shutter: | 1/0 sec |
| Camera: | Lumia 520 |
As long as have not set fire
to everything you call yours,
you are not alive. You are not here!
Your happiness is not real.A true wandering pilgrim
sleeps on bedding of flame.
Burn, as you rove the world,
or you are not walking with us.
In his notes, Coleman says : “This is attributed to Baba Afzaluddin (d. 1274), but Gamard and Farhadi (the source of Rumi translations Coleman currently works with) are fairly sure that the first two lines of the second stanza are Rumi’s…In the thirteenth century, poets were not as concerned as we are about copyright and intellectual ownership. They would not have accepted such claims. We are all in this together, they say instead, trying to sing praise and make beauty. They celebrate a communal creativity. It’s a chorus. Find a poem you love by anybody, change it to suit you, and include it in ‘your’ collection. To our jealous and competitive minds here in the twenty-first century, their fluidity seems like petty theft. It’s hard to imagine what a book was in the thirteenth century. It must have felt like a rare, invaluable complex of overlapping worlds, something as gorgeously alive as a city in central Asia. Balkh, Chigil, Samarkand.”
Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273)
tr.Coleman Barks
from Rumi: Soul Fury
Rumi and Shams Tabriz on Friendship
HarperCollins 2014
Ruminations 
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