This is a series of chants/songs that I am writing based on poems by the 13th century Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, now known most often as just Rumi.
Don’t Look for Love
Rumi’s poem: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
My interpretation:
Don’t look for love
look for all the walls inside yourself
that you have built against it.
Fly Toward the Secret Sky Above
I wrote this chant in the phrygian mode. The Ab major scale over the drone of the Cm chord.
Rumi’s poem: This is love: to fly/ toward a secret sky/to cause a hundred veils/to fall each moment/First to let go of life/Finally to take a step without feet.
My interpretation:
Fly toward the secret sky above
Lose the hundred veils that have hidden you.
Let them go to love.
Bird of My Soul
Rumi wrote: “Oh, bird of my soul, fly away now, For I possess a hundred fortified towers.” The meaning of this, for me, is the intriguing idea that he is telling his soul that his mind isn’t fit, at the moment; and that his soul should come back to him when he is in a mental state to truly be at one with his soul.
My words:
Bird of my soul
Bird of my soul
Bird of my soul fly away,
fly away, bird of my soul.
I have these walls
I have these walls
I have these walls made of
grief and of rage, bird of my soul.
Spread your wings wide
Spread your wings wide,
So wide, so wide,
And I’ll join you, join you in time.
There is a place
There is a place
There is a place where you’ll find
peace of mind, bird of my soul.
Someday I’ll rise
Someday I’ll rise
Someday I’ll rise from this
pain and be whole, bird of my soul.
Then we’ll be one
Then we’ll be one
Then we’ll be one and we’ll both
fly again, bird of my soul.
What You Love
Rumi’s poem:
“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”
I changed it slightly and added the line “it will lead you home.”
More
More Rumi chants will be posted soon. If you liked this, you might like my Carpe Diem Credo.
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