On Rumi: Dancing emerges from nothingness

Dance, when you’re broken open.

Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.

Dance in the middle of the fighting.

Dance in your blood.

Dance when you’re perfectly free.

~(Rumi)

What is dance? Why is dancing such a favorite of the poets, the saints, the worshipers of freedom? Why? First of all, in the spiritual sense when one uses the word dance, then dancing does not refer to any kind of organized movement of limbs or the body. That would just be a rehearsed system of pre-scripted action, having very little to do with the heart.

So we are not talking of the kind of dance one learns in dance classes. We are not talking of organized and named dance forms. We are talking of the dance of the butterfly. We are talking of the dance of the winds. We are talking of the dance of the stars. You look at the stars, how they all have been unevenly scattered on the dark plate of the sky, that dark canopy up there. No organization, no pattern, and yet they are so beautiful. One looks at the way trees, plants grow in a jungle. They have not been planted there in an order. They have not been planted in an order. And yet there is an intrinsic beauty. Probably the absence of order itself contributes to the beauty.

The dance of the jungle, the dance of the waves, the dance of the stars, the monkey’s dance, the elephant’s dance, the dance of the toddler that is the dance that a Rumi loves.

Not the kind of dance you see on television dance shows and talent shows. Rumi is not talking about those dances. They are ugly. Actually, they cannot even be called a dance. They are something else. Now a Rumi loves the dance of the jungle, or the dance of the river because it is natural.

We will go into that word ‘Natural’. Nature refers to the self, to the truth. So whatever proceeds from truth itself is natural. Whatever comes from nature is natural. A Rumi loves the jungle or the moon or the dances because they come from his beloved. A Rumi loves the truth, and because he loves the truth he also has to love whatsoever comes from the truth. If you love…