Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots.
Two Kinds Of Intelligence
There are two kinds of intelligence: One acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its spring box. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.
The Essesential Rumi, Translation by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, Harper, San
Francisco, 1995. ‘I
When a bird gets
free it doesn’t go back for remnants
left on the bottom of the cage!
Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
Up to where you’re bravely working.Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been waiting to see.Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
You would be paralyzed.Your deepest presence is in every small
Contracting and expanding.
The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
As birdwings.
Prayer is an egg. Hatch out the helplessness.
Rumi’s Masnavi (III, 2175)
from The Soul of Rumi - transl by Coleman Barks
Birdsong brings relief
to my longing
I’m just as ecstatic as they are,
but with nothing to say!
Please universal soul, practice
some song or something through me!
Rumi
