Best Laid Plans…

Once again, led astray by gremlins in my computer, I didn’t get to spend the day writing as I had hoped. Sigh.

Instead, I will leave this poem by Rumi:

Zero Circle

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see the beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying
If we say No, we don’t see it,
that No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
besides ourselves, and only that so
miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
we shall be saying finally,
with tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
we shall be a mighty kindness.

3 Comments Best Laid Plans…

  1. puddlehead June 19, 2007 at 9:10 am

    Sorry that the gremlins got to you. But you read, instead right? So it’s not all bad. I like Rumi, and that last line is pretty nice. The rhyme of “be” and “mighty” closes the piece out well. Also, what exactly is a “zero circle?”

    Reply
  2. Meg June 19, 2007 at 10:04 am

    All systems are go again, thank god.

    Re: Zero Circle. Well, like most poetry, I think it is open to interpretation, but I view zero circle as the naked self—stripped of ego, property, attachments, etc., vulnerable. Or maybe it is the very beginning of life. Maybe there is a mathematical definition too.

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  3. puddlehead June 19, 2007 at 3:17 pm

    Hey, Meg. Yeah, I like the idea of being stripped of ego and think the piece supports that reading. Especially with the Sufi mysticism and whirling dervish stuff in all the other work I’ve read of his. Anyway, check this guy’s definition for Zero Circle. Polar Planimeter Theory…hmmm.

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