These Spiritual Window Shoppers

These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?'
Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."

Even if you don't know what you want,
buy _something,_ to be part of the exchanging flow.
Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.

Rumi,

the door

A man went to the door
of the Beloved and knocked.
A voice replied, 'Who is there?'
The man answered, 'It is I.'
The voice said,
'There is no room for 'I' and 'Thou.''
The door remained closed.
After a year of solitude
and deprivation he returned
and knocked again.
A voice from within asked,
'Who is there?'
The man said, 'It is Thou.'
The door was finally open.

 Jelaluddin Rumi

Rumi - Only Breath

	Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,
	Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
	or cultural system. I am not from the East
	or the West, not out of the ocean or up
	from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
	composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
	am not an entity in this world or the next,
	did not descend from Adam or Eve or any
	origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
	of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
	I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
	worlds as one and that one call to and know,
	first, last, outer, inner, only that
	breath breathing human being.

Coleman Barks and Robert Bly

the snow world melts

Think of the phoenix 

coming up out of ashes,
but not flying off.
For a moment we have form.
We can't see.
How can we be conscious 

and you be conscious
at the same time and separate?
Copper,when an alchemist 

works on it, loses its copper
qualities. Seeds in Spring
begin to be trees, no longer seed. 

Brushwood put in the fire changes. 

The snow-world melts.
You step in my footprint and it's gone.

It's not that I've done 

anything to deserve
this attention from you. 

Predestination and freewill: 

We can argue them,
but they're only ideas. 

What's real
is a presence, like Shams.

- Rumi, Ghazal 3071, version by Coleman Barks, from Open Secret