Rumi says:
| Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. |
Keeping things in our heads helps no one. Being requires action and yet action requires mindfulness, thinking through the implications of our actions.
These concepts belong to no individual tradition. Rumi was a 13th-century Persian poet, Islamic jurist, theologian, and mystic. And yet what he says is valuable to my Buddhist friends and me as a Christian. We need to be mindful in a broad way, in my humble opinion.
1 comment:
I like Rumi's metaphor of a musical instrument because it suggest to me that mindfulness is not all in our small brains. Rather mindfulness is a collaboration with the mental systems in us and around use.
Concert violinist won't allow amateurs to play their instruments lest the violin "remembers" the horrible screeches that might produced. Still, every violinist begins so perhaps a violin learns along with the human player how it is together music is made.
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