The Spirit of Rumi

One of the most popular and best-selling poets in America was a Muslim who lived seven centuries ago. The 13^th century Sufi theologian and poet, Jalal al-Din Mohammad Rumi, is best known simply as Rumi. His work is read at weddings, performed by artists and musicians and endlessly quoted on Instagram.

Not many people know much about Rumi’s life, a fact that led author Brad Gooch to write Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love in which he gives readers a glimpse of Rumi by studying the poet’s travels and his spiritual formation. Interestingly, as a child, he was visited once by angelic beings and it disturbed him. But his father said they had just come to provide help and guidance.

Gooch told The Huffington Post that, like many others, he was fascinated by the beautiful and sensual imagery in Rumi’s poetry. While researching the book Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America, he befriended a group of Sufi Muslims he met in New York City’s Upper West Side. It was there that he became exposed to the religious and spiritual dimension of Rumi’s work.

“I think the romance of the quest for meaning, of the spiritual quest, is what’s so special and seductive about Rumi,” Gooch told HuffPost. “He has displayed how human light and divine light reflect each other and go back and forth in this incredible romance and passion to search for meaning.”

If you go to the Huffington Post article here, you see a list of ten things you probably didn’t know about Rumi.

So this may seem like an interesting, but mundane article about Rumi, and it would’ve been except there is a synchronicity here. I found this article because I’m working with a Saudi writer on a spiritual book and I had sent her a Rumi quote: “Silence is the language of God, all else is a poor translation.” She wrote back: “This is the Rumi wisdom level I want to reach, very simple and straight to the point.”

I realized then that I didn’t really know much about Rumi’s life, so I Googled him and that led to the Huffington Post article. The synchronicity is two-fold: first, I met Brad Gooch many years ago when he joined us on one of the adventure tours to South America that Trish and I used to lead for Avianca Airlines. On this particular trip, we cruised into  the Upper Amazon on a converted rubber boat, a journey from Leticia, Colombia to Iquitos, Peru. He came with his friend, Chris Cox, who was Trish’s literary agent. The tours were for freelance travel writers.

That would not be really such a great synchro, just a curious coincidence, except for the fact that, oddly enough, I thought of Brad Gooch this morning when I was waking up. The memory that flashed briefly through my mind was that of seeing Brad at Chris Cox’s memorial service in NYC in 1990. Yes, thirty years ago, so why the hell would that memory come to mind? I guess it was a prelude, a precognition to coming across his book…and inviting him to join us as a guest on our podcast, The Mystical Underground.