Rumi

Finally - I'm ready for Rumi.

Why did it take so long? After all, I've been a poetry lover since I could read. As a teenager I was passionate about all the English classic poets like Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. Then I discovered the women like Edna St. Vincent Millay. Then there was Haiku and Kenneth Rexroth's fantastic poetry.

Now, thanks to Roger Houdsen's book, "Saved by Beauty" I have finally picked up my Rumi and really begun to read it. My game is to open the book at random and to pick out a "verse for the day."

Here is today's:

Make peace with the universe.
Take joy in it. It will turn to gold.
Resurrection will be now. Every moment
a new beauty, and never any boredom.

Oh - this speaks to me. The book spoke to me as well. However, I believe there is a caveat here. Housden writes about "the other Iran" - the Iran of art and beauty and intellectuals and people who live and laugh and love - ordinary people and extraordinary people. At the end, however, he is detained by the secret police and almost doesn't get out of the country.

I would say to the author that if he had gone to Hitler's Germany before the war (and even during the early stages of the war) he would have found many artists and intellectuals speaking out against the regime. He would also have found many ordinary people living ordinary, happy lives. That's the way it is.

Perhaps a country needs to be judged by it's politics - people, for themselves.