Birdwings
Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
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
contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.
Rumi
A note from Rulik
Birdwings by Rumi is a good medicine for many conditions.
First, it is so perfectly and beautifully balanced. That already helps to relax and let go of perfection.
It is helpful for stuckness of the OCD kind. Repeating… repeating… and not letting go. Rumi tells you: contract, then expand, and balance as you move from one to the other. I said: “perfectly balanced,” but Rumi uses “Beautifully.” It is not about perfection, yet the beauty emerges from the balance between the grief and the joy, the courage to expand and contract, the beautiful movement that gradually releases the frozen part of the soul. Try making the movements he suggests as you read – a tight fist, then stretched open, and again, and again…until you feel life starting to flow again, like birdwings.
