Have a Rumi Day

Four soulful Rumi verses to breathe into, soften, and simply be

May 30, 2025

Hi all,

I don’t know about you but I’m thinking we could all use a breather right now — something that doesn’t require any doing, or effort, and can help us…

exhale, settle in,

and simply be.

So I went back into the Archives to look for something that could give us that quiet respite and found some words of wisdom by the brilliant 13th century Sufi mystic, Rumi.

Nothing cuts through the noise faster and turns up the light quicker than one of his inspiring verses.

Rumi’s words are not just a balm for the soul, they offer beautiful directives for how to live a spacious life.

…

I settled on the four verses below — with some visual enhancements from my travels — to get into the spirit of what it means to cultivate beauty, presence, silence, and flow…

(… a perfect way to kick off the 10-week journey on awakening the senses that began this week, I might add).

Read them slowly and you might experience openings; worlds within worlds.

Have a roomy day!

Ahhh 😌

Spacious inspirations to live by

Four poems by Rumi…

Photos by Stephanie Bennett Vogt

1. Inviting beauty and gratitude

“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” 1

2. Inviting presence

“Keep walking
Though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings.
Move within
but don’t move
The way that fear makes you move.” 2

3. Inviting silence

“There is a channel between voice and presence,
A way where information flows.
In disciplined silence the channel opens.
With wandering talk, it closes.” 3

4. Inviting flow

“…Your hand opens and closes, and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence
is in every small contraction and expansion,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as bird wings.” 4

Ahhh….“Your deepest presence is in every small contraction and expansion.”

Still breathing into this one.