I have recently become re-enamored with the poetry of Rumi. Actually not only Rumi, but Rumi spoken in Persian with the haunting music of the ney flute played live behind it. I remember hoping it would never end. I remember being transported to an amber desert on a camel's back. Thinking this is what heaven will sound like. All this just before the whirling dervish began to spin right before my eyes... How fluid the dervish was. How transported he seemed to be. Taken from his body somehow to another place, spinning towards the center.
Hard to imagine anything more beautiful, except maybe death. But death that day did not come. Death was there in the room with all of us. And I remembered as I was sitting there waiting for the ambulance, all the deaths that I have been blessed to witness, to be a part of, to sit in stillness with. And those compressed moments are shrouded with mystery, with silence, with reverence and sorrow. But there is often an air of comfort that comes during that time. An air that is like release. You breathe it in and it wafts over you like a blanket, keeping you safe in your grief. Waiting for that instant when there is no more. When the poem of that beloved person's life is over. When the realization that the spirit of that person no longer resides in the shell of the body you know and connect with that person's being. How little the body matters when the spirit is gone. Eerie to be with the body when the soul has left. So hard to let go.
And the spirit of that person begins to feel like an ancient language that resides inside of you. That when you hear that strange language you remember the feeling of that person, their essence. And that language seems familiar although you have not heard it before. It soothes and calms and is intriguing. Like all of us in that room that day listening to Rumi spoken in Persian who died this year 800 years ago. All of us who were transported that day, by the spinning, by the ney flute, by the language of Rumi that lives forever with in each of us naked and true.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY80cJ6DM_U
