The 11th century Sufi poet, Rumi, knew a lot about returning and about not giving up.
Rumi
Through the brilliant translation of Coleman Barks, here in modern North America, Rumi can still share with us these thoughts:
Come, come, whoever you are.
Wonderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.
This poem has framed my journey for the last 14 years since I first heard it read, and it keeps unraveling itself to show me more.
From these lines I’ve learned… that it’s never too late to answer the call in my own heart. And that there’s really no point in feeling badly about our absence, “It doesn’t matter”.
And, sure, OK, I’m probably not going to be able to stick with whatever I commit to 100% the first time. That’s what the “lover of leaving” part means to me.
Its much more likely that I’ll walk away and come back over and over again. And I’ve noticed that feeling bad about staying away just makes me stay away longer.
But now I know, “It doesn’t matter”. The only thing that ever matters is the returning, the coming again.
I understand now what Rumi is saying with the “thousand times” – that every return to what we want, what we love, what we long for is a triumph. And there’s no such thing as a number of times so high that we can’t come again. Every return makes our resistance to returning smaller.
So all this is the prelude to saying “I’m back”. I stepped away from blogging for a bit while I acquired a business and about 40-60 hours per week of additional work.
And yet, it never stopped calling to me, this dialogue. The important things never really leave us alone – they keep tugging on our sleeve as long as we’re still breathing.
So if you’re still breathing, and something’s still tugging on your heart, it’s not too late to come, come again.
