The moon is a metaphor—it reflects light, it illuminates the darkness, and it looks to us as if it suddenly appears from nothing, grows to fullness, and then wanes until it’s completely gone. Yet no matter how it looks, the actuality is unchanging. The moon is a symbol of spiritual awakening, of tenderness and love, and of the cyclic nature of manifest existence. We see birth, growth, and death, but our inner experience is that the life force we sense within us is still the same at every stage of life. The unchanging nature of existence itself is woven through all appearances and disappearances. And through all its appearances and disappearances, the moon continues in its orbit, cycling through its phases. Sometimes it hides in the dark, and sometimes it reveals itself and we see everything in a new light.
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Today I Was Happy, So I Made This Poem
As the plump squirrel scampers
Across the roof of the corncrib,
The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,
And I see that it is impossible to die.
Each moment of time is a mountain.
An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,
Crying
This is what I wanted
-James Wright-
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The Moon Won’t Use the Door
There is some kiss we want
with our whole lives,
the touch of spirit on the body.
Seawater begs the pearl
to break its shell.
And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling!
At night, I open the window
and ask the moon to come
and press its face against mine.
Breathe into me.
Close the language-door and
open the love window.
The moon won’t use the door,
only the window.
-Rumi-
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In Your Light
In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.
-Rumi-
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Rumi translations by Coleman Barks
