"Iluminating Rumi" by Michael Green
from Common Ground, Dec. 2005
Seven years ago, I collaborated with Georgia poet Coleman Barks to create a book called The Illuminated Rumi. I wanted to combine words and images in a way that would reach people who don’t ordinarily read poetry, or Rumi. Something came together right, and the book became a national bestseller.
But times change; 9/11 brought a whole new mean-spiritedness to the ethers, and it seemed like a call for a new Rumi book. As I began, I was thinking about a particular piece of Iroquois wisdom, which describes three kinds of healing. First, there’s personal medicine, as when a doctor fixes a sprained ankle. And then spirit medicine, the business of opening hearts and shining light into dark places, which is what good ministers do, and grandparents, and best friends, and certainly what Rumi did in his native land. This is what the First Nations call clan medicine, the healing of an entire community.
I realized, yes, that’s what Rumi is doing now. For centuries a beloved soul guide in the East, now, astonishingly, he’s the most widely-read poet in the West. Somehow, in a media world populated with weird, even madhouse, images of Muslims, a gentle Sufi mystic has not only become part of our culture, he’s emerged as the most sympathetic Muslim figure we know, an icon for fundamental sanity. At the very moment when our community, which is the global community, is busy building walls to divide religions, along comes Rumi throwing up a bridge of light over these walls, connecting hearts and cultures. Pure planetary healing!
My teacher, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, who was also a Sufi, was once asked what his religion was. “Whatever religion God is, that’s my religion,” he replied. Rumi would have answered the same way, as would any deep believer. But, as we know, the devil is in the details, those picky little details where paths don’t cross-reference, the place where “We’re right and you’re not.”
Here’s where Rumi really matters, because the place where we find God’s religion, where all the songs make “one song,” is in another state of being altogether, a state of grace where some fundamental construct of the “I” with all its non-negotiable dogmas and theologies, is left behind. In this place, God alone is real. Ultimately, Rumi matters because he’s witnessing from this place, which is not only outside of mind, but also outside of time. Rumi witnesses right now as well as back then. It’s this immediacy, or presence, that comes though in his poetry, even in translation.
Rumi’s poetry is not just word play; it’s something sourced from “central intelligence.” It’s the Truth that passeth all understanding, the Truth that turns swords into plowshares, and Rumi’s genius is in finding fresh ways to restate that Truth. “All religions,” he says, “All this singing, one song.” It’s a vast truth, and hard to defend, but considering how we’re all getting ramped up for jihad right now, it may be the message of the hour. Rumi has another poem, which begins, “Something big is coming. It’s still secret, but arriving everywhere…” The poem ends with these words: “The atmosphere is charged with longing and searching. Then the sound of prayer drifts across the dawn. It’s Muslim, Jew, and Christian all mingled…”
That marvelous longing and searching and mingling has a mighty good feel to it, but these are mighty times, and right now great masses of people are discovering a very different and exciting power in the “I’ve got it and you don’t” experience. When you’re with a whole army of believers with the same inside scoop, it’s positively thrilling. And intensely masculine “I talk, you listen” so it’s a difficult field to approach. But if we can effect a quiet shift of focus away from duelling belief systems to a deeper layer of being, to looking for who it is that’s “got it,” we may discover that that old, cloven-hoofed deceiver “I” is somehow running the show again, albeit this time from the pulpit and wearing theologian’s robes. As George Harrison’s song lyrics note, the problem is always I, me, mine.
What’s marvelous about Rumi is that he’s not a misty, New Age Buddhist/Wiccan/Hindu/whatever devotee; he’s a card-carrying Muslim. He works within a certain set of beliefs. One minute, he’s a Muslim moth, circling the candle flame according to Muslim precepts. In the next moment, he suddenly just chucks it and dives for the light, burning everything up as he goes: beliefs, models, differences, self, anything other than the indestructible great mystery. So his field reports and his teachings are always trying to convey a subtle figure, a ground shift.
From one perspective, we can buy into a package, a Way, a tradition full of richness and wisdom. Shifting our point of view, we have the profound realization that we can’t bring that package through the gates of heaven, that, in the end, it is a model for something that can’t even be talked about. To look in this direction is to somehow start granting the others, the Jews, or the Muslims, or the Christians, their space too. Then the work is about keeping an open-heart connection, so that they don’t become the Other, and to recognize that the differences are only harmonies inside one song. Many people sense the grandeur of this view now, realizing that it’s growing and expanding and gathering strength: “Something big is coming.”
But this “one song” is more than an idea or an insight. It’s an opening, an embracing, a letting go, a feeling. A taste. Which is probably why Rumi’s poetry was always spread as song. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. It is also why the newest Illuminated Rumi also offers a CD of songs by The Illumination Band, whose members had the great insight to recognize that that traditional American folk forms of Appalachian/blues/gospel music are a perfect vehicle to convey the soul-longing of Rumi’s poetry. It is the joining of two great rivers; because the carrier wave is so familiar to our ears, there’s no distancing the message. Coleman calls the music “Down home and transcendent.”
The Illumination Band is comprised of old friends who are also old pros, and my son Kabir, who gets in a lick or two and lends a note of generational grace to the mix. The band has been playing around the country for a couple of years now. No matter how much work goes into putting a song together, when it is finally performed, there’s a deep sense that we’re just a delivery system for something a lot bigger than us, and audiences always seem to get it.
The same applies to the art in the book. It comes via the Michelangelo school of art. Michelangelo was once introduced as a great sculptor. “I’m not a sculptor,” he said, “but sometimes I look at a block of stone and see a figure inside. All I do is remove what doesn’t belong and set it free.” The best of what I do seems to be an act of discovery, of setting something free. When I do a book, I work a lot with the digital format, a medium with this terrific fluidity and forgiveness of “What if this, what if that?” It lets me doodle and fish around until I recognize something. If things go well, that something starts to have an echo-like quality, a presence that I home into.
I’m not exactly a huge fan of digital technology. But while it has its hidden costs, it does seem to afford one the magical powers to access and utilize the entire body of human esthetic/spiritual achievement, and to create marriages that are virtually shamanic between wildly diverse source materials. I’m able to take a traditional Krishna and drop him into that 18th century Peaceable Kingdom painting by Edward Hicks. And doesn’t it look just about right! I could have just drawn the images myself, and I do elsewhere in the book, but my drawing would have diluted the alchemy of allowing the actual images and cultures to interact. Somehow, I feel this is authentic to Rumi, to the “mingling.”
Coleman loves that mingling too. “Rumi reminds us,” he says, “of the radiant depth inside that is present in grief and in love, in being ecstatically here in the moment. What he celebrates has many names: the soul, Buddha nature, the person of Christ, the nur, and Rumi praises them all at one table. There is no quarrel about names or scriptures in Rumi. His work does not divide; it includes, and that is a blessing in these sectarian days. Rumi represents a nourishing exchange for both the East and the West, as the Silk Road was in his day, when the beauty of the great religions, and the storytellers, poets, and their music, flowed together and created a new and vibrant fusion.”
Creating these books is a big experiment, a public act of intimacy. What I hope I am doing is returning to the initiatory origins of art – art as catalyst for sacred perception – and bringing the traditional approach of illumination into a new dimension. I once heard of a book entitled The Re-enchantment of Art. What a great phrase. If it’s a movement, count me in.
Michael Green’s latest work, One Song – A New Illuminated Rumi (Running Press) is a powerful collaboration between word, image, and music. His art can be viewed and purchased at www.michaelgreenarts.com. He is presently working on a large-scale exhibit to accompany the band. The Illumination Band’s music can be streamed at www.rumibook.info
Friday, January 06, 2006
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Friday, January 06, 2006
Illuminating Rumi
"Iluminating Rumi" by Michael Green
from Common Ground, Dec. 2005
Seven years ago, I collaborated with Georgia poet Coleman Barks to create a book called The Illuminated Rumi. I wanted to combine words and images in a way that would reach people who don’t ordinarily read poetry, or Rumi. Something came together right, and the book became a national bestseller.
But times change; 9/11 brought a whole new mean-spiritedness to the ethers, and it seemed like a call for a new Rumi book. As I began, I was thinking about a particular piece of Iroquois wisdom, which describes three kinds of healing. First, there’s personal medicine, as when a doctor fixes a sprained ankle. And then spirit medicine, the business of opening hearts and shining light into dark places, which is what good ministers do, and grandparents, and best friends, and certainly what Rumi did in his native land. This is what the First Nations call clan medicine, the healing of an entire community.
I realized, yes, that’s what Rumi is doing now. For centuries a beloved soul guide in the East, now, astonishingly, he’s the most widely-read poet in the West. Somehow, in a media world populated with weird, even madhouse, images of Muslims, a gentle Sufi mystic has not only become part of our culture, he’s emerged as the most sympathetic Muslim figure we know, an icon for fundamental sanity. At the very moment when our community, which is the global community, is busy building walls to divide religions, along comes Rumi throwing up a bridge of light over these walls, connecting hearts and cultures. Pure planetary healing!
My teacher, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, who was also a Sufi, was once asked what his religion was. “Whatever religion God is, that’s my religion,” he replied. Rumi would have answered the same way, as would any deep believer. But, as we know, the devil is in the details, those picky little details where paths don’t cross-reference, the place where “We’re right and you’re not.”
Here’s where Rumi really matters, because the place where we find God’s religion, where all the songs make “one song,” is in another state of being altogether, a state of grace where some fundamental construct of the “I” with all its non-negotiable dogmas and theologies, is left behind. In this place, God alone is real. Ultimately, Rumi matters because he’s witnessing from this place, which is not only outside of mind, but also outside of time. Rumi witnesses right now as well as back then. It’s this immediacy, or presence, that comes though in his poetry, even in translation.
Rumi’s poetry is not just word play; it’s something sourced from “central intelligence.” It’s the Truth that passeth all understanding, the Truth that turns swords into plowshares, and Rumi’s genius is in finding fresh ways to restate that Truth. “All religions,” he says, “All this singing, one song.” It’s a vast truth, and hard to defend, but considering how we’re all getting ramped up for jihad right now, it may be the message of the hour. Rumi has another poem, which begins, “Something big is coming. It’s still secret, but arriving everywhere…” The poem ends with these words: “The atmosphere is charged with longing and searching. Then the sound of prayer drifts across the dawn. It’s Muslim, Jew, and Christian all mingled…”
That marvelous longing and searching and mingling has a mighty good feel to it, but these are mighty times, and right now great masses of people are discovering a very different and exciting power in the “I’ve got it and you don’t” experience. When you’re with a whole army of believers with the same inside scoop, it’s positively thrilling. And intensely masculine “I talk, you listen” so it’s a difficult field to approach. But if we can effect a quiet shift of focus away from duelling belief systems to a deeper layer of being, to looking for who it is that’s “got it,” we may discover that that old, cloven-hoofed deceiver “I” is somehow running the show again, albeit this time from the pulpit and wearing theologian’s robes. As George Harrison’s song lyrics note, the problem is always I, me, mine.
What’s marvelous about Rumi is that he’s not a misty, New Age Buddhist/Wiccan/Hindu/whatever devotee; he’s a card-carrying Muslim. He works within a certain set of beliefs. One minute, he’s a Muslim moth, circling the candle flame according to Muslim precepts. In the next moment, he suddenly just chucks it and dives for the light, burning everything up as he goes: beliefs, models, differences, self, anything other than the indestructible great mystery. So his field reports and his teachings are always trying to convey a subtle figure, a ground shift.
From one perspective, we can buy into a package, a Way, a tradition full of richness and wisdom. Shifting our point of view, we have the profound realization that we can’t bring that package through the gates of heaven, that, in the end, it is a model for something that can’t even be talked about. To look in this direction is to somehow start granting the others, the Jews, or the Muslims, or the Christians, their space too. Then the work is about keeping an open-heart connection, so that they don’t become the Other, and to recognize that the differences are only harmonies inside one song. Many people sense the grandeur of this view now, realizing that it’s growing and expanding and gathering strength: “Something big is coming.”
But this “one song” is more than an idea or an insight. It’s an opening, an embracing, a letting go, a feeling. A taste. Which is probably why Rumi’s poetry was always spread as song. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. It is also why the newest Illuminated Rumi also offers a CD of songs by The Illumination Band, whose members had the great insight to recognize that that traditional American folk forms of Appalachian/blues/gospel music are a perfect vehicle to convey the soul-longing of Rumi’s poetry. It is the joining of two great rivers; because the carrier wave is so familiar to our ears, there’s no distancing the message. Coleman calls the music “Down home and transcendent.”
The Illumination Band is comprised of old friends who are also old pros, and my son Kabir, who gets in a lick or two and lends a note of generational grace to the mix. The band has been playing around the country for a couple of years now. No matter how much work goes into putting a song together, when it is finally performed, there’s a deep sense that we’re just a delivery system for something a lot bigger than us, and audiences always seem to get it.
The same applies to the art in the book. It comes via the Michelangelo school of art. Michelangelo was once introduced as a great sculptor. “I’m not a sculptor,” he said, “but sometimes I look at a block of stone and see a figure inside. All I do is remove what doesn’t belong and set it free.” The best of what I do seems to be an act of discovery, of setting something free. When I do a book, I work a lot with the digital format, a medium with this terrific fluidity and forgiveness of “What if this, what if that?” It lets me doodle and fish around until I recognize something. If things go well, that something starts to have an echo-like quality, a presence that I home into.
I’m not exactly a huge fan of digital technology. But while it has its hidden costs, it does seem to afford one the magical powers to access and utilize the entire body of human esthetic/spiritual achievement, and to create marriages that are virtually shamanic between wildly diverse source materials. I’m able to take a traditional Krishna and drop him into that 18th century Peaceable Kingdom painting by Edward Hicks. And doesn’t it look just about right! I could have just drawn the images myself, and I do elsewhere in the book, but my drawing would have diluted the alchemy of allowing the actual images and cultures to interact. Somehow, I feel this is authentic to Rumi, to the “mingling.”
Coleman loves that mingling too. “Rumi reminds us,” he says, “of the radiant depth inside that is present in grief and in love, in being ecstatically here in the moment. What he celebrates has many names: the soul, Buddha nature, the person of Christ, the nur, and Rumi praises them all at one table. There is no quarrel about names or scriptures in Rumi. His work does not divide; it includes, and that is a blessing in these sectarian days. Rumi represents a nourishing exchange for both the East and the West, as the Silk Road was in his day, when the beauty of the great religions, and the storytellers, poets, and their music, flowed together and created a new and vibrant fusion.”
Creating these books is a big experiment, a public act of intimacy. What I hope I am doing is returning to the initiatory origins of art – art as catalyst for sacred perception – and bringing the traditional approach of illumination into a new dimension. I once heard of a book entitled The Re-enchantment of Art. What a great phrase. If it’s a movement, count me in.
Michael Green’s latest work, One Song – A New Illuminated Rumi (Running Press) is a powerful collaboration between word, image, and music. His art can be viewed and purchased at www.michaelgreenarts.com. He is presently working on a large-scale exhibit to accompany the band. The Illumination Band’s music can be streamed at www.rumibook.info
from Common Ground, Dec. 2005
Seven years ago, I collaborated with Georgia poet Coleman Barks to create a book called The Illuminated Rumi. I wanted to combine words and images in a way that would reach people who don’t ordinarily read poetry, or Rumi. Something came together right, and the book became a national bestseller.
But times change; 9/11 brought a whole new mean-spiritedness to the ethers, and it seemed like a call for a new Rumi book. As I began, I was thinking about a particular piece of Iroquois wisdom, which describes three kinds of healing. First, there’s personal medicine, as when a doctor fixes a sprained ankle. And then spirit medicine, the business of opening hearts and shining light into dark places, which is what good ministers do, and grandparents, and best friends, and certainly what Rumi did in his native land. This is what the First Nations call clan medicine, the healing of an entire community.
I realized, yes, that’s what Rumi is doing now. For centuries a beloved soul guide in the East, now, astonishingly, he’s the most widely-read poet in the West. Somehow, in a media world populated with weird, even madhouse, images of Muslims, a gentle Sufi mystic has not only become part of our culture, he’s emerged as the most sympathetic Muslim figure we know, an icon for fundamental sanity. At the very moment when our community, which is the global community, is busy building walls to divide religions, along comes Rumi throwing up a bridge of light over these walls, connecting hearts and cultures. Pure planetary healing!
My teacher, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, who was also a Sufi, was once asked what his religion was. “Whatever religion God is, that’s my religion,” he replied. Rumi would have answered the same way, as would any deep believer. But, as we know, the devil is in the details, those picky little details where paths don’t cross-reference, the place where “We’re right and you’re not.”
Here’s where Rumi really matters, because the place where we find God’s religion, where all the songs make “one song,” is in another state of being altogether, a state of grace where some fundamental construct of the “I” with all its non-negotiable dogmas and theologies, is left behind. In this place, God alone is real. Ultimately, Rumi matters because he’s witnessing from this place, which is not only outside of mind, but also outside of time. Rumi witnesses right now as well as back then. It’s this immediacy, or presence, that comes though in his poetry, even in translation.
Rumi’s poetry is not just word play; it’s something sourced from “central intelligence.” It’s the Truth that passeth all understanding, the Truth that turns swords into plowshares, and Rumi’s genius is in finding fresh ways to restate that Truth. “All religions,” he says, “All this singing, one song.” It’s a vast truth, and hard to defend, but considering how we’re all getting ramped up for jihad right now, it may be the message of the hour. Rumi has another poem, which begins, “Something big is coming. It’s still secret, but arriving everywhere…” The poem ends with these words: “The atmosphere is charged with longing and searching. Then the sound of prayer drifts across the dawn. It’s Muslim, Jew, and Christian all mingled…”
That marvelous longing and searching and mingling has a mighty good feel to it, but these are mighty times, and right now great masses of people are discovering a very different and exciting power in the “I’ve got it and you don’t” experience. When you’re with a whole army of believers with the same inside scoop, it’s positively thrilling. And intensely masculine “I talk, you listen” so it’s a difficult field to approach. But if we can effect a quiet shift of focus away from duelling belief systems to a deeper layer of being, to looking for who it is that’s “got it,” we may discover that that old, cloven-hoofed deceiver “I” is somehow running the show again, albeit this time from the pulpit and wearing theologian’s robes. As George Harrison’s song lyrics note, the problem is always I, me, mine.
What’s marvelous about Rumi is that he’s not a misty, New Age Buddhist/Wiccan/Hindu/whatever devotee; he’s a card-carrying Muslim. He works within a certain set of beliefs. One minute, he’s a Muslim moth, circling the candle flame according to Muslim precepts. In the next moment, he suddenly just chucks it and dives for the light, burning everything up as he goes: beliefs, models, differences, self, anything other than the indestructible great mystery. So his field reports and his teachings are always trying to convey a subtle figure, a ground shift.
From one perspective, we can buy into a package, a Way, a tradition full of richness and wisdom. Shifting our point of view, we have the profound realization that we can’t bring that package through the gates of heaven, that, in the end, it is a model for something that can’t even be talked about. To look in this direction is to somehow start granting the others, the Jews, or the Muslims, or the Christians, their space too. Then the work is about keeping an open-heart connection, so that they don’t become the Other, and to recognize that the differences are only harmonies inside one song. Many people sense the grandeur of this view now, realizing that it’s growing and expanding and gathering strength: “Something big is coming.”
But this “one song” is more than an idea or an insight. It’s an opening, an embracing, a letting go, a feeling. A taste. Which is probably why Rumi’s poetry was always spread as song. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. It is also why the newest Illuminated Rumi also offers a CD of songs by The Illumination Band, whose members had the great insight to recognize that that traditional American folk forms of Appalachian/blues/gospel music are a perfect vehicle to convey the soul-longing of Rumi’s poetry. It is the joining of two great rivers; because the carrier wave is so familiar to our ears, there’s no distancing the message. Coleman calls the music “Down home and transcendent.”
The Illumination Band is comprised of old friends who are also old pros, and my son Kabir, who gets in a lick or two and lends a note of generational grace to the mix. The band has been playing around the country for a couple of years now. No matter how much work goes into putting a song together, when it is finally performed, there’s a deep sense that we’re just a delivery system for something a lot bigger than us, and audiences always seem to get it.
The same applies to the art in the book. It comes via the Michelangelo school of art. Michelangelo was once introduced as a great sculptor. “I’m not a sculptor,” he said, “but sometimes I look at a block of stone and see a figure inside. All I do is remove what doesn’t belong and set it free.” The best of what I do seems to be an act of discovery, of setting something free. When I do a book, I work a lot with the digital format, a medium with this terrific fluidity and forgiveness of “What if this, what if that?” It lets me doodle and fish around until I recognize something. If things go well, that something starts to have an echo-like quality, a presence that I home into.
I’m not exactly a huge fan of digital technology. But while it has its hidden costs, it does seem to afford one the magical powers to access and utilize the entire body of human esthetic/spiritual achievement, and to create marriages that are virtually shamanic between wildly diverse source materials. I’m able to take a traditional Krishna and drop him into that 18th century Peaceable Kingdom painting by Edward Hicks. And doesn’t it look just about right! I could have just drawn the images myself, and I do elsewhere in the book, but my drawing would have diluted the alchemy of allowing the actual images and cultures to interact. Somehow, I feel this is authentic to Rumi, to the “mingling.”
Coleman loves that mingling too. “Rumi reminds us,” he says, “of the radiant depth inside that is present in grief and in love, in being ecstatically here in the moment. What he celebrates has many names: the soul, Buddha nature, the person of Christ, the nur, and Rumi praises them all at one table. There is no quarrel about names or scriptures in Rumi. His work does not divide; it includes, and that is a blessing in these sectarian days. Rumi represents a nourishing exchange for both the East and the West, as the Silk Road was in his day, when the beauty of the great religions, and the storytellers, poets, and their music, flowed together and created a new and vibrant fusion.”
Creating these books is a big experiment, a public act of intimacy. What I hope I am doing is returning to the initiatory origins of art – art as catalyst for sacred perception – and bringing the traditional approach of illumination into a new dimension. I once heard of a book entitled The Re-enchantment of Art. What a great phrase. If it’s a movement, count me in.
Michael Green’s latest work, One Song – A New Illuminated Rumi (Running Press) is a powerful collaboration between word, image, and music. His art can be viewed and purchased at www.michaelgreenarts.com. He is presently working on a large-scale exhibit to accompany the band. The Illumination Band’s music can be streamed at www.rumibook.info
1 comment:
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Edward Ott said...
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you have a very excellent blog. i like your articles they seem well written and well thought out.
peace -
11:31 PM
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1 comment:
you have a very excellent blog. i like your articles they seem well written and well thought out.
peace
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