Liza Field

Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.

Recent columns

• Don't lose sight of the unseen 'big picture'
• Remember: There's more to life than what we see
• From suffering can come growth, joy

You that give new life

Come.

-- Rumi

What is great in man is that he is a bridge, not a goal.

-- Nietzsche

After writing late-autumn columns about the wisdom of local elders, I couldn't end the year without mentioning an old friend. And I do mean old.

2007 marked the 800th birthday of Rumi, the Afghan poet. True, it would seem from those details that Rumi isn't a local, living wisdom figure -- but a dead foreigner, from a region many Westerners associate with backwardness and violence.

But such an estrangement only offers another gap for this funny, euphoric, lively mystic to burst across. Rumi would say he comes not from one place or time, but "from wherever spring arrives to heal the ground, from wherever searching rises in a human being."

This invitation to freedom from boundaries may partly explain why the soul of Rumi is being revived among Americans -- or how this poet is helping revive the American soul.

A 'viable' poet

I called poet Judy Beale of Blacksburg to ask her opinion of Rumi and his current appeal.

"When you read Rumi," she supposed, "it's as if the words came through yourself. Yet, they take you beyond yourself. They convey beauty, like a mountain that is beyond you, and yet whose beauty changes you."

For the same reason, Beale said, Rumi's verse helps the reader "accept a person as a person, for their humanness -- not to get something they have or to change them."

This may be one reason that Rumi has been called a bridge between people, religions, nationalities and time periods -- a needed balm for hostile times.

"Contain all human faces in your own," Rumi advises, "Without any judgment of them."

Indeed, when a Turkish couple moved to the United States and landed next door to Beale, they stopped by her house and were immediately heartened by a book of Rumi's poetry on her table.

"Rumi, to many people growing up in the Middle East, is like Robert Frost would be to us -- every schoolchild would have read it," Beale said her neighbors explained. They asked her why Americans liked these poems, and so did I.

"Viability," she ventured. "Rumi's work is viable -- and it makes you feel viable. It touches whatever part of you is alive. It's like a chemical reaction -- somehow you're changed."

Rumi himself holds this "being changed" -- by encounters with people, life and God -- as highest in the human experience. After all, he implies, we aren't here to preserve, but to lose ourselves -- to be annihilated by love. Territorialism, Rumi indicates, only delays our true calling.

"A northern wind arrives that burnishes grief and opens the sky. The soul wants to walk out into that cleansing air and not come back."

'Being changed'

Rumi's poetry conveys us toward the unknown, writes Georgia poet Coleman Barks, who has spent 30 years translating Rumi's work from old Persian into contemporary English. This poetry is not for academics to pick apart or acquire. Instead, "we must be changed," Barks writes in the introduction to his 2007 birthday collection of Rumi verse.

Though "being changed" is hardly the goal of nations, religious authorities or even many academics, Rumi has led former English professor Barks to welcome such alchemy.

Despite warnings from friends and authorities, Barks accepted an invitation by chancellor Ayatollah Zanjani to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Tehran. Like many Middle Easterners, the ayatollah was impressed by Americans' enthusiasm for Rumi.

So in May 2006, while communication deteriorated between U.S. and Iranian political leaders, Barks and his old mentor Robert Bly were greeted warmly in Tehran, decked in gold-trimmed robes and hats, and given honors and tours and dinners by Iranian scholars and residents.

Of one thunder-punctuated cookout, Barks writes, "The humor and depth of this gathering felt European to me. It would be absurd to ever go to war with these people, our brothers and sisters. But that, of course, is true of everyone. Let us sit down to dinner, lamb, and listen to the rain."

This is Rumi's invitation to us, today.

"Rumi is a bridge to the heart," Barks suggests, and "a call to prayer and a new kind of praying."

Ours seems a time of broken or burned bridges -- between mind and heart, between nations, between religions, between man and nature. 2007 also revealed that even America's infrastructure of bridges had grown dangerous from neglect.

Rumi's 800-year-old, ever-new bridge is still extended, however, to show people of every nationality and religion a way to leave our static encampments, restore some bridges and walk across the divide. May a yearning to revive that circulation flow through our world in 2008.