Once upon a time word arrived through the countryside grapevine that a Dervish was headed toward a small village. The village's people were thrilled, because it was a great honor to be visited by a Dervish. They spruced up their village and cooked a great meal and put on the best of their simple clothing, and they walked to the edge of their village to await the Dervish. They saw someone walking on the dirt road leading to the village, and as the person neared, they saw he was an old man, his hair and beard were unkempt, he was dressed poorly, he looked dirty. He walked past them to the well in the center of the village where a donkey was tethered to a post. The old man leaned down and talked for a while into the donkey's left ear, and then the old man straightened himself up and walked out the other side of the village.
Some might say the Dervish was the Sufi poet Rumi’s teacher, Shams. Some might say it was someone else.
When I lived in Key West, I met a man who said he was a big fan of the Sufi poet Rumi, and he was surprised that a homeless person, me, knew about Rumi, and he was even more surprised that I knew about Shams, and he eventually started calling me, Shams. A few years later, I met a woman in Key West, who was a big fan of Rumi, and she started calling me Shams and she called herself Chickpea in our conversations about matters of life and spirit. The context of her calling herself Chickpea is a Rumi poem, for which I have found two translations.
by Coleman Barks
A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot where it’s being boiled.
‘Why are you doing this to me?’
The cook knocks him down with the ladle.
‘Don’t you try to jump out. You think I’m torturing you. I’m giving you flavor, so you can mix with spices and rice and be the lovely vitality of a human being. Remember when you drank rain in the garden. That was for this.’
Grace first. Sexual pleasure, then a boiling new life begins, and the Friend has something good to eat.
Eventually the chickpea will say to the cook,
‘Boil me some more. Hit me with the skimming spoon. I can’t do this by myself. I’m like an elephant that dreams of gardens back in Hindustan and doesn’t pay attention to his driver. You’re my cook, my driver, my way into existence. I love your cooking.’
The cook says, ‘I was once like you, fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time, and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings.
My animal soul grew powerful. I controlled it with practices, and boiled some more, and boiled once beyond that, and became your teacher.
by Chittick:
Look at the chickpeas in the pot, how they keep on jumping up, driven by the fire.
At every instant the chickpeas boil up to the top and let out a hundred cries: “Why are you tormenting us with fire? Since you showed your appreciation for us by buying us, why do you treat us with contempt?”
The housewife keeps stirring with the ladle:
“Now, now! Boil sweetly and do not jump back from the one that made the fire.
I do not cook you because I dislike you: I want to gain taste and savor.
You will become food and then mix with the spirit. You do not suffer tribulation because you are despicable.
Fresh and succulent, you used to drink water in the garden; your water-drinking was for the sake of this fire,”
His Mercy is prior to His Wrath, so that Mercy could acquire a stock-in-trade: existence. For without pleasure, flesh and skin do not grow.
If they do not grow, what can love for the Friend waste away? Gentleness will come again, asking forgiveness:
“Now you have purified yourself and jumped across the stream to safety.”
She says, “Oh chickpeas! You fed in the spring pasture, and now suffering has come as your guest.
Receive it well. So that the guest may return in gratitude and tell of your generosity before the King.
Then in place of benefits, the Benefactor will come; all benefits will envy you.
I am Abraham, you are my son. Place your head before the knife: I saw in a dream that I must sacrifice you.
In the Sufi tradition, there is a human teacher and his students, similar to Jesus and his disciples in the Gospels. Yet, I found no reports that Shams had a human teacher. I imagine he bumped into people along the way, who helped him evolve spiritually in and not of this world, but it seems he was in direct communion with something much bigger and smarter and more rigorous and exacting than himself, and that’s how it has gone for me.
Left to my own devices, left to the religion in which I grew up, Christianity, I might be like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnel, JD Vance, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or Tim Waltz. Or, I might be a drunk, or in prison, or insane, or dead.
Angels made me someone I never would have become on my own. They told me when they first showed up in early 1987, that I would be pushed to my limits, but I had asked for it, and they were going to give it to me. I had asked God for help and had offered my life to human service. I had no clue what I set in motion when I made that prayer. No clue. I lost count of the mirrors I was made to stand before, looking at myself, the beams in my own eyes, and it never stopped.
Imagine that happening to Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, J.D. Vance, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tim Waltz, the unwoke and the woke, twiddly dee, twiddly dum, flip sides of the same blind leading the blind coin, thinking they are the cat’s meows, God’s gifts to America.
God help America, which has proven crystal clear that it has run off the rails into an abyss, the tar baby of all tar babies. In the original tar baby story, the rabbit is still mired in the tar baby the fox built to trick the rabbit, and the fox is firing up his cook pot to cook the rabbit for dinner.
Meanwhile, some weird unwoke comic relief from CNN yesterday, after I read several news reports yesterday that Trump threatened to sue former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown for saying he never was on a helicopter with Trump. F-ing WEIRD.
CNN
—
Former Los Angeles city councilman and California state Sen. Nate Holden said Friday that he was with former President Donald Trump in the helicopter ride that made an emergency landing, despite Trump saying it was former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said in an interview with Politico late Friday. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”
“I guess we all look alike,” he added.
Trump told reporters gathered at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Thursday that he was involved in a helicopter emergency landing with Brown, who has since rejected Trump’s account as “obviously wrong” during a phone call with CNN. “I’ve never been in a helicopter with him in my life,” Brown said.
Thursday wasn’t the first time Trump referenced the incident as something he’d experienced with Brown. In a book, “Letters to Trump,” the former president recalled the event as “a little scary for both of us.” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung pointed that out on Saturday in a post on X.
Holden said that he was in touch with Trump’s team in the 1990s as Trump was trying to build on the site of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, in the district that Holden represented at the time, according to Politico.
Holden recalled meeting with Trump at Trump Tower before departing for Atlantic City, New Jersey, where they were planning to tour Trump’s since-closed Taj Mahal casino. Also aboard was Barbara Res, Trump’s former executive vice president of construction, who told Politico that the man on the helicopter was definitely Holden.Res recounted the experience in her book “All Alone on the 68th Floor,” where she said the helicopter landed safely in New Jersey after the pilot said they would need to make an emergency landing. She recalled Trump joking about Holden being scared on the flight, with Holden noting to Politico that it was Trump who was “scared sh*tless.”
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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