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You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
-- the Buddha
Your new collection refers to Rumi as "the ultimate poet of love." In your introduction, you say that the media and popular culture have lied to people about love. What are they saying that doesn't ring true?
I don't focus so much on the lies as on the truths that Rumi is trying to open for us. But there are ideas that are out there for sentimental reasons. There's the idea that you can take the personal into a deep love. Rumi says you really have to empty out to be in the state he calls love. It's akin to something like work. The lover and the worker are identical. It's rare that you have a love song in our culture that ends, as Rumi often does, in the admonition that you need to have a daily practice--something to remind you of the deepest part of your being which is beyond the emotions and beyond desire.
But there are all different stages of love, and Rumi affirms them all, no matter how shallow. All that emotion drawing together is from the movers, part of the action of the mystery. Rumi says the way that lovers are brought together, and why one person is drawn to one person rather than to another, is God's sweetest secret. It's a total mystery. Rumi says that in the motion from romance to friendship [we reach] a deeper level of connection. Maybe that's what the popular culture is lying about. There's this idea of romance—that ache of separation and longing—you find in
Dr. Zhivago or Romeo and Juliet. Lovers are always in a rush in train stations. That ache of unsatisfied passion is celebrated, and has been, in Western culture since the 12th century.
In one poem, Rumi says "Fall in love in such a way that it frees you from any connecting." This is unusual and counterintuitive in terms of what we're brought up with.
People who are together just are each other; they don't feel the phone call angst. [In another poem, Rumi says] "Lovers don't meet somewhere, they're in each other all along."
-- Rumi translator Coleman Barks, interviewed on beliefnet.com
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can't do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
A help, a love, a you, a wife.
-- Alan Dugan, “Love Song: I and Thou”
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