The Paradoxical Commandments
by Dr. Kent M. Keith

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.
  

From today's reading of "The Essential Rumi"
Translated by Coleman Barks.

Don't unstring the bow.
I am your four-feathered arrow
that has not been used yet.

I am a strong knifeblade word,
not some if or maybe,
dissolving in air.

I am sunlight slicing the dark.
Who made this night?
A forge deep in the earth-mud.

What is the body?
Endurance.

What is love?
Gratitude.

What is hidden
in our chests?
Laughter.

What else?
Compassion.

Let the beloved be a hat pulled down firmly on my head.
Or drawstrings pulled and tied around my chest.

Someone asks, How does love have hands and feet?
Love is the sprouting bed for hands and feet!

Your father and mother were playing love games.
They came together, and you appeared!

Don't ask what love can make or do!
Look at the colors of the world.

Happy New Year: "Dance in Your Blood"

Happy New Year and may you  be free this new year. Free of fear, free of sadness, free of the limitations of your mind and spirit.

From "The Turn: Dance in Your Blood" by Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks.
"Inside water, a waterwheel turns.
A star circulates with the moon.
We live in the night ocean wondering,
What are these lights?

You have said what you are.
I am what I am.
my head here in my hands
with something circling inside.
I have no name
for what circles
so perfectly.

A secret turning in us
makes the universe turn.
Head unaware of feet,
and feet head. Neither cares.
They keep turning."

"This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in the one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle's eye a turning night of stars.

Keep walking, though there's no place to get to.
Don't try to see through the distances.
That's not for human beings. Move within,
but don't move the way fear makes you move.

Walk to the well.
Turn as the earth and the moon turn,
circling what they love.
Whatever circles comes from the center.
I circle your nest tonight,
around and around until morning
when a breath of air says, Now,
and the Friend holds up like a goblet
some anonymous skull.

No better love than love with no object,
no more satisfying work than work with no purpose.
If you could give up tricks and cleverness,
that would be the cleverest trick!

Some nights stay up till dawn,
as the moon sometimes does for the sun.
Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way
of a well, then lifted out into the night.

I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?

Look at your eyes. They are small,
but they see enormous things."
"When you feel your lips becoming infinite
and sweet, like the moon in a sky,
when you feel that spaciousness inside,
Shams of Tabriz will be there too.

The sun is love. The lovers,
a speck circling the sun.
A Spring wind moves to dance
any branch that isn't dead.

Something opens our wings. Something
makes boredom and hurt disappear.
Someone fills the cup in front of us.
We taste only sacredness.

Held like this, to draw in milk,
no will tasting clouds of milk,
never so content.

I stand up, and this one of me
turns into a hundred of me.
They say I circle around you.
Nonsense, I circle around me."
"I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocked on a door. It opens,
I've been knocked from the inside!

Real value comes with madness,
matzub below, scientist above.

Whoever finds love
beneath hurt and grief
disappears into emptiness
with a thousand new disguises.

Dance, when you're broken open.
Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you're perfectly free.