Daniel Ladinsky here, posting my very first blog on this site.

This article, I was invited to write: "Having a Beer With Rumi and Buddha," appeared recently in a small town northern New Mexico newspaper. And liked the article enough, and felt it was presented well enough to share it with any who may read it.

Having a Beer With Rumi and Buddha

I have been working with the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz most everyday for some 30 years now. And as a result have seven books with Penguin Random House. And consciously, or unconsciously, I think part of the phenomena in the Western countries today with Hafiz and Rumi is: well, reading them, sitting quiet with them, can be like having a beer with Buddha in a wonderful and wild -- life changing bar ... where your inner feet get tapping. And your heart, your ken, can kiss more of the earth and sky. That 'quiet' (connecting to them) can turn into some very valued movement-dance ... life. Aka: More love in your eyes, more color on your cheeks.

Every poem I have ever published of mystical poetry is really all about freedom, and is rooted in a deep psychology I could expound upon. Like this little Rumi poem that appears in my Penguin book: The Purity of Desire, 100 Poems of Rumi. The poem is titled: Things Are Such, and it goes:

Things are such that someone lifting a cup,

or watching the rain, petting a dog,

or singing, just singing -- could be doing as

much for this universe as anyone.

--Rumi

From, The Purity of Desire, 100 Poems of Rumi, page 27.

And a little rap about that poem, expounding as it were, could be: That we often can get caught in thinking and feeling something like: I should be doing more with my life than I am. What human being does not live in an almost constant state of comparison, and thus then determine how they are doing, and what they might be accomplishing?

To me this Rumi poem very much says in part: Hey baby, you are really such a f...ing knockout. You and really all you can do is such a crazy wonderful miracle. Kick back and say Ahhhh more, and click a glass with me and Buddha and the whole universe.

***

And then maybe come to say, feel, as it does in this little Hafiz haiku-mutant:

sweet when i

can fly off

with the birds

***

find those wings,

that freedom, needed

to taste the sun