Premiere Night Ruminations

Yesterday night was the big screening/premiere of "Aisha". As usual, it was an unusual and complicated night for me. The storm that lives in the hollows of my bones came out and hammered against my shell like a demon rattling its cage. That heady, almost cloying feeling somewhere between nausea and elation built in me like the sudden urge to run screaming through the street. I think I might have hugged a few too many people too hard.

But the night ended like any night, with me under my reading lamp with a book in my hands. I had picked up a book of poems by Rumi. And as I lay there reading them in random order, my storm grew quiescent and the fever left me. I moved past the need to feel anything at all just because it was THAT night. So rather than tell you what I was feeling and get overly prosaic as I'm wont to do sometimes, I thought I'd share some of those poems :-

What was in that candle's light
that opened and consumed me so quickly?

Come back, my friend! The form of our love
is not a created form.

Nothing can help me but that beauty.
There was a dawn I remember

when my soul heard something
from your soul. I drank water

from your spring and felt
the current take me

_________x__________

When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.

Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

_________x__________

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute
of eternity. We are pain
and what cures pain, both. We are
the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

I want to hold you close like a lute,
so we can cry out with loving.
You would rather throw stones at a mirror?
I am your mirror, and here are the stones.

_________x__________

There is a light seed grain inside.
You fill it with yourself, or it dies.

I'm caught in this curling energy! Your hair
Whoever's calm and sensible is insane!

_________x__________

When I put away the book finally and turned off the lights, I lay back on my bed and stared up at the dark ceiling with its murmuring fan and peopled the darkness with all the lights of my future. And felt good. I felt right. I felt I had deserved the quiet peace of this night, and the storm inside curled happily around me like an old dog, wagging it's tail periodically with contentment.

I am who I was meant to be. More than less, I am the man I wanted to be.

Amen