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In the meeting of Rumi and Shams, in that vital encounter, healing and the truest life begins. Any form of beauty of wisdom or celebration that puts one back in friendship with the soul is where the opposites find rest. "How can I be separated and yet in union?"
Who is this Shames of Tabriz? The question is often asked if Rumi and Shams were lovers in the sexual sense. No. their meeting in the heart is beyond form and touch and time.
One of the startling prospects that Rumi and Shams bring to the world of mystical awareness, which turns out to be ordinary consciousness as well, is the suggestion that we "fall in love in such a way that it frees us from any connecting." What that means is that we become friendship. "When living itself becomes the Friend, lovers disappear." That is, a human being can become a field of love (compassion, generosity, playfulness), rather than being identified with any particular synapse of lover and beloved. The love-ache widens to a plain of longing at the core of everything: the absence-presence center of awareness. Rumi went in search of the missing Shams. The story is that he was
on a street in Damascus when the realization came that he was their Friendship. No separation, no union, just he was that at the silent core. I’d have to say that’s the
baraka (a blessing, the particular grace of taking in presence), the mystery of the ecstatic life.
-- Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi
The most living moment comes when
those who love each other meet each
other’s eyes and in what flows
between them then. To see your face
in a crowd of others, or alone on a
frightening street, I weep for that.
Our tears improve the earth. The
time you scolded me, your gratitude,
your laughing, always your qualities
increase the soul. Seeing you is a
wine that does not muddle or numb.
We sit inside the cypress shadow
where amazement and clear thought
twine their slow growth into us.
-- Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)
Alfred Depew, Harry
Faddis, and Michael Cohen (above)
Don and Uncle Fred (below)
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