A Year with Rumi

I am spending a year Rumi and,
after yet another night filled not with
dancing sugarplums, sheep, or even recuperation,
rather saturated by you,
I read Rumi’s take on it:

   The Miracle-Signs
   Here are the miracle signs you want,
   that you cry through the night
   and get up at dawn asking,

   that in the absence of what you ask for,
   your day gets dark, your neck thin
   as a spindle, that what you give away
   all you own, that you sacrifice belongings,
   sleep, health, your own head.
   …
   When acts of helplessness become habitual,
   those are the signs.

The signs have been here for some time.
More than a thousand days and nights,
the nights being the longer of the two,
I awake and contemplate their meaning.

Forgetting, it seems, is not possible;
having tried and tried, it just won’t happen,
not with this thing called you.
Letting go, well that’s another matter.
I have let go of so much;
The ancient live oak at the farmhouse
where we were to grow ancient ourselves,
our marital bed,
the belief that deep and profound love
can conquer all,
that in the course of the unfathomable trials, tribulations,
plagues, pestilence, sickness, and death sent our way,
we were merely being tested,
   (We withstood these for quite some time, if you will recall)
and that you were the one.  The only.  And I was yours.

So, I ask, speaking to the empty air in my restless sleeping chamber
or Rumi, of which the question was asked I am not clear,
   “Why can’t I be cleansed of the sins of our past?”
   “Why is my heart so fractured, that I can’t stitch it together in the face
    of another who would do anything, really anything, for me?”

Perhaps, I ask Rumi, the answer lay in the question a friend once asked,
   “Why in the world would you do that?”

I purged, catharted, cleaned every nook and corner of my world,
and attempted to surrender control.

I dug $40 holes for $5 trees,
and planted aimlessly, overfilling my space with beauty.
When the beauty unfolded, I tended it, loved it,
fighting back the overgrowth,
the relentless weeds which would conspire to overtake my garden.
In this, I came to know that silence and being unaccompanied are not a blight.

Ultimately, I sat, meditated, and enjoyed the fruits of my labor and,
In sitting still, I heard the answer.
Rumi’s Miracle Signs: I am helpless when confronted with you.

~ Mk Michaels, June 2013