Shams, Rumi and the invisible web

“The universe is one being. Everything and everyone is interconnected through an invisible web of stories.” – Shams

I first met Shams in a bookstore in Denver last winter break. We were in town visiting M’s family for the holidays, and took a trip on the light rail as a family into the renovated downtown corridor. We had dinner, and after dinner walked to Tattered Pages (Tattered Cover?). I play this game with myself sometimes, walking through aisles of books, letting the right one find me.

It was a book of Rumi poems.

The foreword was written by Coleman Barks (I only remember the name because it’s so stinking cool), a scholar at University of Georgia. I do not usually retain details like this, except our friends M and J moved to Cincinnati from Athens, and so it all comes together. Invisible web of stories.

So Mr. Barks tells a story in his foreword to a book of Rumi poems that talks about Rumi hitting it off with his teacher-friend, Shams. Rumi was doing his own thing, but then he noticed Shams, and felt drawn to him, inexplicably. Here is how they met:

Rumi was reading his books and being all Rumi. Shams basically comes up to him and says, “you’re not gonna find anything you’re looking for in there.”

Rumi’s all, “says who, dude?”

And Rumi’s book tumbles into the fountain… he’s worried that it’s ruined his valuable book… Shams is like, “relax. Nothing you need is in there.”

And when Rumi wades into the fountain to retrieve his book, he picks it up and it’s bone dry.

I like to think Sham’s had a small if imperceptible grin on his lips, as Rumi looks back at him.

I’m making some of this up. But the meet-cute gist is there. Rumi. Book. Shams. Fountain. Looking in the wrong place for what it is you seek. Magic.

So anyway, Rumi and Shams had this connection. I’d never heard about Shams before, in reading about Rumi. But Mr. Barks made it clear that Shams kinda activated Rumi, before Rumi was Rumi.

I kinda got the sense that Rumi was writing his love poems not just to a divine inner friend, but to his real friend Shams.

I watched my modern American binary black-white brain scramble itself before giving up. “So, were they lovers? Was Shams his straight-up mystic teacher? Were they dear friends?”

I grasp to place this relationship in familiar terms.

Then I gave up, realizing it didn’t really matter.

What mattered was the connection — the relationship — that existed between them.

I recognize what it is to have an invisible connection with another person that just lights up your whole being, illuminates the way you relate to being alive, and bends what physics would have you expect.

Mr. Barks’ story about Rumi and Shams is a story about that — times 10.

Rumi is in my thoughts these days. He’s been a bit coopted, by the same force that puts Georgia O’Keefe and Monet images on mouse pads, tote bags and coin purses, but there is still something so present about his words, and what he was using them to point at.

In the manila folder in my mind that stores information (which reveals how little I actually know and how much I ‘shorthand know’ things through association, image, and seating new things next to things I recognize), Rumi is: a Sufi mystic… long time ago… 12th century maybe?… possibly one of those guys who spins in place as a form of worship… poet… knew what’s up.

I always think of Rumi as a guy whose presence cuts through all the centuries between us, speaking to us — to me — as though he were whispering in our ear, right in this moment.

Dude was a magician.

But not in the wizard hat and wand way, in a way that humans who come into their own power and wisdom have.

I think Rumi was talking to god, but I also get the sense that he would have things to riddle me back on that. I don’t think he understood god in the way many people today do. This is what gives me hope. I could be making this up, but my sense of Rumi is that he saw god as not ‘up there’ or ‘out there’ or ‘over there’… something external to our lives on the earth…

He didn’t buy into the vertical divinity idea.

I get the sense he believed in horizontal divinity. That god is between us. In our midst. On the ground.

So when I think about Rumi meeting and hanging out with Shams, I like to imagine how good it felt for him to finally have someone who got it, and got him. And that being the basis of their holy friendship, and his development as… well, Rumi.

I could be making that up.

Doesn’t matter.

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