I wonder how many people know that Rumi is the best selling poet in America? I wonder how many people care? The latter is not a facetious question if you consider the low sales books of poetry reportedly bring in. We are not a nation of poetry readers.
Be that as it may, I just found out myself about Rumi being the best selling poet in America a couple of weeks ago. I was surprised. The last best selling poet that I am aware of was Rod McKuen, whose many little books were popular in the late 60's and early 70's --quite a different kettle of fish.
I first discovered the poems of Jela'luddin Rumi, the Sufi mystic and poet, about 20 years ago. I was already familiar with other kinds of poetry that you might call spiritually oriented, like Chinese lyric poetry and Japanese Haiku. I also had a little knowledge of mysticism, if one can say that, from a Buddhist and a Christian perspective, with maybe a little Hindu thrown in. So when I read the poems of Rumi, some of the shorter quatrains, I leapt (or leaped) where Rumi took me.
What do I mean by that? I'm not sure I can explain it. There are things that you think about, and things that you read, that you try to understand by way of reason--a chain of logical thoughts where you go from step 1, to step 2, to step 3 and on till you reach a coherent conclusion. But there are other things, certain spiritual truths and certain poems to name two, that can't be approached in this linear fashion. For those, logic will only take you so far, and once you've gotten to that point where logic leaves you stranded, you must take what I have called a "leap" to achieve understanding, or to see. The "leap" as I have experienced it, and as at least one other friend of mine has, feels like an act of will in which you "open" up your mind so that an intuitive flash of insight can come. Does it come in through the chinks you've opened up by silencing your reasoning brain? It also feels a little like you relinquish something--the death-grip of logic in your brain--for another kind of knowledge.
If you've ever read a Zen koan and appreciated it, you've probably experienced it. The famous one which asks "We know the sound of two hands clapping, what is the sound of one hand clapping" comes most immediately to mind. A koan should "jolt" you out of your established thought patterns as well as your complacency and allow something new to enter your experience. Interestingly enough, sometimes the Zen Masters used an actual physical "jolt" on their students, whacking them physically with whatever was handy if they'd been hovering too long on the edge of achieving "satori" but never quite tumbling into it. Some of Rumi's poems are definitely "whackish" in this way, it's what I love about them.
I mean, what a gift and a joy it is to be shown something different, a different perspective, a different way of being in the universe. That doesn't happen every day, we are comfortable in the grooves our life has settled into. I know I am. But then Whack! here comes a poem by Rumi and everything has changed, but, mysteriously, it is also somehow as I've always known it was.
I don't know if every one of those thousands of people who are said to be reading Rumi today get exactly that from him or not, but I'm sure he wouldn't mind. A tiny chink of light on the wall of your room can be a beautiful thing in itself.
