Commonplace Correspondence IV: Reflections on Rumi

A linguistic stream of consciousness.

halah هالة (Arabic): halo of light around the moon

I’m not grieving. Why should I grieve? / The halo around the moon is enough for me / and I can’t eat sorrow.

agape ἀγάπη (Greek): the highest form of love, in contrast to philia (friendship) and eros (romance)

In Rumi’s poetry, love is sometimes something we hold, sometimes the vessel, and other times the body itself. It is everything and everywhere, and something utterly divine, encompassing yet altogether escaping the frail grip of romance.

Death announced itself in my life multiple times this week. It feels like a reminder of something I’d forgotten—that though the day exists for a beautiful eleven hours, the light always departs. And yet, how can we hold onto the dark when the sun always returns to eclipse it? I find myself more patient with it now, no longer begging for death to latch onto me as I once did.

Dear God, where are You? Here is the church where people are looking for You, in a fever they call faith. There were days I, too, tried to be religious. I really did try, and I was good at trying, because I am nothing if not partial to routine. Thinking I was worth saving made me something close to happy, even if happy had its limits. Your devotees, those churchgoers, are not fools—I know that. And I do not regret believing in You, fleetingly. But I know better now than to blindly trust words on pages I do not know the authors of. And if that makes me unhappy, so be it.

It is always a curse when knowledge that has been living in your brain, at last, reaches your heart. You do not want it to. You want to keep believing in the myth. But when it gets there, it stays, firm as stone. You cannot turn back to the soft, illusory soil once you know of the fiery crust beneath it.

From dust we were made, they say, but I don’t believe it. I think we were water, and all that we do and feel returns unto it. In our rawest form, we are liquid—tears, sweat, sickness.

I know it’s over. Really, it never happened. I dreamed it did, though. So in some capacity, we must have existed together, if only in fantasy. You are sweetness on the tongue, in the ears and eyes. How, then, can you only be in my mind?

My copy of Water, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, lies gingerly on the floor, just finished, waiting for me to pick it up and read it again, and again, and again. A Jeff Buckley record spins idly in the background, and instantly, my room fills with the beautiful grief we call poetry.

Lately, a cold has settled within me. It entered in an ice rink, and I found when I left, it neglected to leave. And now, here, in this chill bowl of fruits, it seems that it will stay indefinitely. Cold has found this home between my bones before, yet this time I find it is gentler. Comforting, even protective. Like a thin layer of ice atop a shoreline, insulating the water beneath, keeping the little fish alive.

You cannot count all the pages in a book—only see them as one whole rectangle, a singular entity. The people around you cannot see your every minute flaw, or at least, the parts of yourself you have perceived as flaws. They cannot see each thing that ails you, what you are haunted by, the individual plagues of your mind, or every little second that holds the end of the world. So let the end of the world be just that—a page.

For once, I wish to be soil, not stone. I want colors and the greenness of life to grow from and be nurtured, not hindered, by me. I dreamt of soil years ago, falling atop my eyelids as I woke. I smelled the earth above and below me and wanted to stay down. I dug myself out in those dreams to see flowers for others. Soon afterward, because time flies swiftly when you are no longer alive to detest it, petals fell on me too, wilted and unreplenished. One day, I decided I’d spent too long in caskets. Like a zombie, I stood and tried to remember how to live again.

It ends with a morning, because it always does. In those days, the mornings did not arrive. When the previous night tired of me, when the weight of my pain in its tendons grew cumbersome, it thrust me out into light I was never prepared for. Nights and days are linear now, structured with a beginning and end. I realize everything is mechanical. Even then, the congealing of sun and moon was its own kind of regimen. This one, with its timestamps and expectations, is only slightly different.

But, as I said, I have always liked routine.

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welcome to the commonplace archive! my essays are categorized into “drawers”, akin to an archival filing system. the piece you just finished reading is part of THE DISPATCH. here’s a guide to help you find your way:

I. THE SOLARIUM

A place where inner things are warmed into bloom. These pieces are intimate, introspective, and botanical: growth, soft and succulent, often roots here.

II. THE MIRROR ROOM

Holding up mirrors to culture, media, and the self, these pieces are collective, dissective, and critical—taking a scalpel to our societal anatomy.

III. THE ARCHIVE OF CHANGING LIGHT

The shelving of light that is lost or gained. Waxing and waning by directive of the moon, these pieces are seasonal, cyclical, and mark time through memory.

IV. THE DISPATCH

Our Commonplace Correspondence and occasionally, a slice of life. Thoughts in transit, notes to self (in public), and wax-sealed letters from me to you.

with ink and intention,

ben (head archivist)