Borrow the beloved's eyes.
Look through them and you'll see the beloved's face everywhere.
No tiredness, no jaded boredom.
"I shall be your eye and your hand and your loving."
Let that happen,
and things you have hated will become helpers.
A certain preacher always prays long and with enthusiasm for thieves and muggers that attack him on the street.
"Let you mercy, O Lord,
cover their insolence."
He doesn't pray for the good,
but only for the blatantly cruel.
Why is this? his congregation asks.
"Because they have done me such wondrous favors.
Every time I turn back towards the things they want.
I run into them, they beat me, and leave me nearly dead in the road,
and I understand, again, that what they want is not what I want.
They keep me on the spiritual path.
That's why I honor them and pray for them."
Those that make you return, for whatever reason,
to God's solitude,
be grateful to them.
Worry about the others,
who give you delicious comforts that keep you from prayer.
Friends are enemies sometimes,
and enemies friends.
Consider a porcupine,
if you hit it with a stick, it extends its quills and gets bigger.
The soul is a porcupine,
made strong by stick-beating.
So a prophet's soul is especially afflicted,
because it has to become so powerful.
A hide is soaked in tanning liquor and becomes leather.
If the tanner did not rub the acid,
the hide would get foul-smelling and rotten.
The soul is a newly skinned hide, bloody and gross.
Work on it with manual discipline,
and the bitter tanning acid of grief and you'll become lovely
and very strong.
If you can't do this work yourself,
don't worry.
You don't even have to make a decision,
one way or the other.
The Friend, who knows a lot more than you do,
will bring difficulties, and grief, and sickness,
as medicine, as happiness,
as the essence of the moment when you're beaten,
when you hear Checkmate, and you can finally say,
with Hallaj's voice,
I trust you to kill me.
-Rumi
