How do you fact-check a Rumi quote?
Do you Google it? Or ask Alexa?
Even if “they say” he said it, how would they really know?
Maybe you don’t bother
Maybe you just eat/meat/leave/bones
Because 800 years is a very long game of Telephone
Here’s why I ask.
Rumi is said to have said this thing:
“Sell your cleverness, buy bewilderment”
And assuming this is not a monetary transaction
And assuming sell just means shed
And assuming buy just means acquire
And assuming clever means worldliness, sophistication, polish: layers
Cleverness is having learned the rules and laws and lies
And assuming bewilderment means to just be wilder
And to be wilder is to peel back layer after layer
Of the domestication all we humans are put through
When someone tells us we’re good if we do X
And bad if we do Y
Good if we have money and status and thinness
And bad if we don’t
Be wilder is a shortcut to return to the worthy perfection with which we came
In God’s image
Assuming all of these things, I’m into it
And when I break bewilder into be wilder
I can’t help but wonder about breaking apart
Beloved into be loved
Because the wilder, undomesticated me
The cracked open, broken apart, set apart me
The original me
Is the me that was able to let love in
That finally let love in.
