The Tavern

Rumi's "Tavern" and Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" both impress with profound insight. While Rumi regards Earth as a tavern in which our souls can neither arrive or leave of our own accord, but instead must wait for whoever brought us here to take us home, Wordsworth regards our births as a sleep and a (partial) forgetting... Both Rumi and Wordsworth consider our souls return home (to God, or whoever/whatever), but Wordsworth also eludes to reincarnation with the line "...the soul that rises with us, our life’s star, hath had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar..." And much, much more besides. Rumi's Tavern is brief while Wordsworth's Ode is much longer and deeper and well worth checking out if, like Rumi, you think about it all day, say it at night, and ponder where we come from. What's the expression: We are not human beings having spiritual experiences, but are instead spiritual beings having human experiences?

Just a note on the Rumi poem. One of the central mysteries of Sufism is: if Allah/God is one, and we participate in that intimately, where does this experience of self as separate being come from? Rumi is always talking about the Wine of Love. By this, he is referring to zikr, the Sufi ceremony of remembrance. He is forced to refer to it metaphorically because it is an experience beyond the mind, of a greater order of magnitude than mind. This is the glowing he refers to, zikr done morning and evening.