Shams of Tabriz, whom Rumi called a human torch, believed that separation from the beloved was spiritually very good for people. People say, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder…or forgetful." The question is one of how fond I can make my heart. I didn't know how to put this into my own (collection of) words, really, until I saw Alice Walker's lines, "The mystery we are is shared but inviolate."
Sometimes it has helped me to see similar messages coming from different people. It seems that Rumi learned a lot from his father, and that, having his father always around, he was able to lean on him spiritually in some ways without recognizing that. When Shams left, after lighting Rumi on fire, Rumi was devastated. But, as I see it, there is something to be found in that devastation and distance that is hard to feel and see if we have never had to feel it and come to grips with it.
For anyone who has felt alone spiritually, it is possible to feel jealous of others who are not such foreigners within their own social groups. Being a foreigner, you see things differently. As I understand it, the goal is not to feel foreign but to see from many angles, to feel one's individuality, to appreciate connections for all they are worth so that you won't live a life of only "knowing what you've got when it's gone". Devastation, foreignness, and separation take away the often unrecognized sense of taking connection for granted. When one becomes totally unable to take things for granted in a spiritual sense, it soaks into everything you do. It frees one's soul from a demanding sort of expecting into being able to just want with everything. If God loves, I think it is something like loving with everything. It is like, at the end of this poem, the author is very clear--maybe for the first time--where his heart is and has always been. There is a new and alive tenderness in saying once again, "Every place is the Heart." There is no escape; at some point, we no longer settle for pretending otherwise.
My certainty
when You are gone
is this yearning
for You.
It looks as if I am lost.
But nothing is clearer.
These pretend disappearances
into each other,
into the world,
---into the other world---
clearly depict
how, in every appearance,
You were already here;
how, in every disappearance,
You were already there;
how, in all of this,
the mystery we are
is shared
but inviolate.
I am within.
You are within.
My skin still blushes
where your hand was,
where it is not.
There's no need, then,
to tell You
how my heart is.
Copyright 2007 Todd Mertz