Click
here to read
about This Business of Dance and Music's Project Proposal with Room To
Read. Let's
get involved in literacy for children! I
want these kids online for one o' my workshops!
Resolute (Painting
- Oil on primed, loose, medium textured, white canvas fabric)
RUMI: The Tavern
[A source of inspiration for this novel]
The Tavern: Whoever brought me here will have to take me home
In the tavern are many wines – the wine of delight in color and form
and taste, the wine of the intellect’s agility, the fine port of
stories, and the cabernet of soul singing.
Being human means entering this place where entrancing varieties of
desire are served.The
grapeskin of ego breaks and a pouring begins.
Fermentation is one of the oldest symbols of human transformation.When grapes combine their juice and are closed up together for a
time in a dark place, the results are spectacular.This is what lets two drunks meet so that they don’t know who is
who.Pronouns no longer
apply in the tavern’s mud-world of excited confusion and
half-articulated wantings.
But after some time in the tavern, a point comes, a memory of elsewhere,
a longing for the source, and the drunks must set off from the tavern
and begin the return.The
Qur’an says, “We are all returning.”
The tavern is a kind of glorious hell that human beings enjoy and suffer
and then push off from in their search for truth.The tavern is a dangerous region where sometimes disguises are
necessary, but never hide your heart, Rumi urges.Keep open there.A
breaking apart, a crying out into the street, begins in the tavern, and
the human soul turns to find its way home.
It’s 4 A.M. Nasruddin leaves the tavern and walks the town aimlessly.A policeman stops him.
“Why are you out wandering the streets in the middle of the night?”“Sir,” replies Nasruddin, “if I knew the answer to that question, I
would have been home
hours ago!”
[The Essential RUMI – translated by Coleman Barks w/ John Moyne – page
1, 1995 Harper Collins Publishers]
Museful (Pastels
on a high quality, 'toothy' black pastel card coated with an, acrylic based
primer giving a resultant velvety grained surface.)
The Leonard Cohen Files
-
Master Song"
-
"UNDER THE SPELL OF STRANGER MUSIC" by Paul Monk in the Analysis
section of this site. "...Erotically, Cohen makes
Keats seem as though he had
freeze-dried testicles and
Byron as though he had no heart..."
