Zero Circle

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.

We are all too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Besides ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.

~ Jalal al din Rumi
Coleman Barks’ version

I am a logophile, a lover of words. It’s the Irish in me on my mother’s side. For the past forty-five years or more I have collected words like I collected baseball cards when I was ten. They fascinate and enliven me the way the talent of the ballplayers on those cards once did. I like the onomatopoeic words whisper and awe. I like the words cultivate, effulgence. and extravagant. I like the dexterity of the word passion, how it can refer to desire or love or suffering. I like the no nonsense sound of box.

One word that caught my eye and tongue in my twenties and have since come to love, and at whose feet I have been reverently sitting for decades is the word susceptible. It first jumped out at me as I was reading a book by the late, great Oregon poet William Stafford. The book was about the art and craft, work and wonder of writing. It was Stafford’s routine to rise early, while his family still slept, to write a new poem every day. He describes what it felt like to be in that proverbial moment all writer’s know when they sit and face the blank page as being “susceptible to now.” I have loved that phrase ever since. It not only holds meaning for poets but also captures one of the characteristic ways the mystic or contemplative engages reality.

In Coleman Barks’ interpretive version above, Rumi begins his poem with the encouragement to “be helpless.” It is not an accusation—“You are helpless.” It is an imperative. Strong paradoxical counsel. He does not mean by that word a sniveling weakling, powerless, and incapable of being industrious. He’s talking about being susceptible on purpose like Stafford who waits to be moved from within. It’s a conscious, intentional spiritual practice of radical receptivity for both the mystic and the prophet. It’s what Jesus means by poor in spirit or meek or mourning in the beatitudes. Perhaps he states it as an imperative because it is as counter-intuitive and counter-cultural as the beatitudes. Who advises people to start much of anything these days from a place of helplessness and conscious vulnerability? One can hear the parent, teacher, coach, mentor at work, guidance counselor, head hunter advising just the opposite: act confidently, don’t show your vulnerability, be decisive, let your Yes be Yes and your No be No. Such a directive makes no sense, unless perhaps you are a poet, painter, sculptor, composer, mystic, songwriter, dancer, point guard, or contemplative.

Dan on the dribble drive

Point guard? Yes. “Don’t force the action. Let the game come to you” the coach says. “Then create.” “Listen into the silence,” the teacher advises the composer, the musician, the songwriter, “that’s where the music gestates, waiting to be born.” “Let us not be sure of anything. Let go of any agenda. Let go of your need to be in control, to know it all,” the mentor says to the seasoned contemplative who like the contemplative-in-training or the choreographer is always a beginner. “Let gravity and the wisdom of your body take you down to the still point. ‘At the still point, there the dance is.'”

Much the same sage advice from life and living is offered to the painter, sculptor, mystic, and poet. And who among us is not an artist creating a life? “Wait until you are willing to listen and learn from the vulnerability which has made your awe possible. Mute, struck dumb, only then will you be receptive to being led by the wisdom of what you do not know. Only then will the window to spirit be unstuck. Stay put, lying in a zero circle, until you are ready to surrender to the as yet uncreated beauty of your art, your work. your life. Like the man the good Samaritan rescued from the ditch, beaten and robbed and left for dead, who knows in what form the miraculous help will come to find you? Who knows the guise grace will take to come carry you where you are meant to go. Only then will you discover you are part of the mighty kindness where your beauty and eloquence lie.

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