Read this and weep

If my friend, you are feeling really sad or depressed or beaten down, read this poem of Rumi's and weep...

Checkmate

By Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

Borrow the beloved’s eyes.

Look through them, and you’ll see the beloved’s face

Everywhere. No tiredness, no jaded boredom.

“I shall be your eyes and your hand and your loving.”

Let this happen and things

You have hated will become helpers.

A certain preacher always prays long and with enthusiasm

for thieves and muggers who attack people

on the road. “Let your mercy, Oh Lord, cover their insolence.”

He doesn’t pray for the good,

but only for the blatantly cruel.

Why is this? His congregation asks.

“Because they have done me such generous favors.

Every time I turn back toward the things they want,

I run into them. They beat me and leave me nearly dead

in the road, and I understand, again, that what they want

is not what I want. They keep me on the spiritual path.

That’s why I honor them and pray for them.”

Those that make you return, for what ever reason

to God’s solitude, be grateful to them.

Worry about the others who give you

delicious comforts that keep you from prayer.

Friends are enemies sometimes, and enemies friends.

There is an animal called an ushghur, a porcupine.

If you hit it with a stick, it extends its quills

and gets bigger. The soul is a porcupine,

made strong by stick beating.

So a prophet’s soul is especially afflicted

because it has to become so powerful.

A hide is soaked in tanning liquor and becomes leather.

If the tanner didn’t rub in the acid

the Hide would become foul-smelling and rotten.

The soul is a newly skinned hide, bloody and gross.

Work on it with manual discipline,

and the bitter tanning acid of grief,

and you will become lovely and very strong.

If you can’t do this work yourself, don’t worry.

You don’t even have to make a decision

one way or another. The Friend, who knows

a lot more than you do, will bring difficulties,

and grief and sickness, as medicine, as happiness,

as the essence of the moment when you’re beaten,

when you hear Checkmate, and can finally say,

with Hallaj’s voice,

I trust you to kill me.