Wine, Words & Wednesday, No. 62

I’m having another one of those stop-the-ride-I-want-to-get-off kind of weeks.  I have way too many irons in the fire.  It’s my own fault, though.  I was supposed to get rid of one of my volunteer jobs.  Instead, I violated the NAVY principle:  Never Again Volunteer Yourself.

I volunteered.  Again.

And so, today’s words (and my motto for this week) come from 13th century Persian poet and mystic, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, better known to the western world as simply, Rumi.

I’ve never read Rumi before.  I mean, he wrote poems (and if you’ve read my blog for a while, you know poems give me a headache).  But these words . . . these words spoke to me.

I always try to find some kind of source for the words I post in Wine, Words & Wednesday, so I don’t contribute to the spread of wrongness on the Internet.  That said, I couldn’t find these exact words, but I did find what are almost certainly the real words.

The real words appear in a Rumi poem, called The Instrument:

Who is the luckiest in this whole orchestra? The reed.
Its mouth touches your lips to learn music.
All reeds, sugarcane especially, think only
of this chance. They sway in the canebrakes,
free in the many ways they dance.

Without you the instruments would die.
One sits close beside you. Another takes a long kiss.
The tambourine begs, Touch my skin so I can be myself.
Let me feel you enter each limb bone by bone,
that what died last night can be whole today.

Why live some soberer way and feel you ebbing out?
I won’t do it.
Either give me enough wine or leave me alone,
now that I know how it is
to be with you in a constant conversation.

And so the question begs . . . how much is enough wine?

I’ll leave the interpreting to you.  I’ve got some volunteer work that needs doing!  😉

Salud!