Thursday – Valentine’s Day
Kathy Hamman, a dear family friend, alerted my mother and me to this wonderful Rumi poem for Valentine’s Day. (My mother ran it in her Sewanee Messenger poetry column.) I have used other poems suggested by Kathy in the past, but this is particularly meaningful because Kathy is currently fighting late stage cancer. That her heart should be open at such a time is testimony to the power of love when death threatens.
“Some Kiss We Want” informs us that, while we have a pearl within us, some part of us resists the seawater that offers to release it. Instead of stepping out of our shell, we retreat, even though deep down we desire immersion in Love’s boundless ocean. We are a lily that wants to join the wild lillies of the field.
Part of the problem, Rumi suggests, arises from how we use language and reason as our primary doorway to the world. We cordon off the intuitive parts of ourselves rather than respond with our whole life.
There’s nothing wrong with either language or reason, of course—Rumi himself uses language—but they can be used to build up defenses. Rumi says we need to open ourselves to the non-rational. We must let the moon press its face against us through the windows of the soul rather than focus only on what enters through the doors of the thinking mind.
If we open up our love window and breathe our longing into the night air, spirit will touch the body.
Some Kiss We Want
By Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks
There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of
spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.
And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At
night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its
face against mine. Breathe into
me. Close the language-door and
open the love-window. The moon
won’t use the door, only the window.