"What Jesus Runs Away From"

The son of Mary, Jesus, hurries up a slope
as though a wild animal were chasing him.
Someone following him asks, "Where are you going?
No one is after you." Jesus keeps on,
saying nothing, across two more fields. "Are you
the one who says words over a dead person,
so that he wakes up?" "I am." "Did you not make
the clay birds fly?" "Yes." "Who then
could possibly cause you to run like this?"
Jesus slows his pace.

"I say the Great Name over the deaf and the blind,
they are healed. Over a stony mountainside,
and it tears its mantle down to the navel.
Over non-existence, it comes into existence.
But when I speak lovingly for hours, for days,
with those who take human warmth
and mock it, when I say the Name to them, nothing
happens. They remain rock, or turn to sand,
where no plants can grow. Other diseases are ways
for mercy to enter, but this non-responding
breeds violence and coldness toward God.
I am fleeing from that.

"As little by little air steals water, so praise
dries up and evaporates with foolish people
who refuse to change Like cold stone you sit on
a cynic steals body heat. He doesn't actually feel
the sun." Jesus wasn't running from actual people.
He was teaching in a new way.

-- Version by Coleman Barks
"The Essential Rumi"
HarperSanFrancisco, 1995

My horse fights with me and fasts with me,
because if he is to carry me in battle
he must know my heart and I must know his
or we shall never become brothers
I have been told that the white man,
who is almost a god,
and yet a great fool,
does not believe that the horse has a soul.
This cannot be true.
I have many times seen
my horses soul in his eyes.
And this day on that knoll
I knew my horse understood.
I saw his soul in his eyes.
Plenty-Coups, Chief of the Absarokees (Crows)

Plenty-Coups, Chief of the Crows
by Plenty-Coups & Frank Bird Linderman
Bison Books
University of Nebraska Press; New edition (November 2002)

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam or Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

Rumi