UNFOLD YOUR OWN MYTH- RUMI -2023

The best-known work of Rumi, Mathnavi, or Mathnavi-e Maanavi, contains 24,660 couplets spread across seven books. Rumi described his own task as one of destruction-the annihilation of the earthly in order to embrace the Divine. The author forewarns the reader to be ready to let go of everything:
Every venture one's life may replete
Mathnavi's purpose is the Great Defeat.
Set afire, burning with cleansing heat,
On the anvil, egos ply and beat.
This book, if you open, read, entreat
Your life, a mendicant's, in the street.
Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob blind with grief and age,
smells the shirt of his lost son
and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down and brings up
a flowing prophet? Or like Moses goes for fire
and finds what burns inside the sunrise?
Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to the other world.
Solomon cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet
and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop.
Now there's a pearl.
A vagrant wanders empty ruins.
Suddenly he's wealthy.
But don't be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you.
Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy
and tired. Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you've grown,
lifting.