The ecstatic poems of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, a Persian poet and Sufi master born 807 years ago in 1207, have sold millions of copies in recent years, making him the most popular poet in the US. Globally, his fans are legion.
Rumi was also a jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic. Rumi’s influence transcends national borders and ethnic divisions in the Muslim world and beyond. … Rumi speaks of Love in much of his poetry, and there is some equation of love with the divine, as well.
His most famous poem, “Only Breath,” is one of Rumi’s most powerful poems on the Spirit. Here he so clearly shows us that we are all one and inextricably linked to each other even though, through thousands of years, we have been conditioned to believe otherwise. Our true nature transcends race, religion, gender and borders.
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 and Eve or any origin story. My place is the 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.
A Sufi’s way of life is to love and be of service to people, deserting the ego or false self and all illusion so that one can reach maturity and perfection, and finally reach Allah, the True, the Real. Sufism is less an Islamic sect than a mystical way of approaching the Islamic faith. It has been defined as “mystical Islamic belief and practice in which Muslims seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God.”
