Rumi, "Wanting," & Mars

The rooster was Rumi's favorite symbol for "wanting."

“You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.” (Rumi, "A Great Wagon")

Rumi doesn't shy away from desire. Many of his poems are erotic, some are disturbing. (“The Importance of Gourd-Crafting" almost put me permanently off his poetry.)

For Rumi, wanting is what puts us in the river of life. As the commentators in The Essential Rumi write, “Let the beauty we love keep turning into action, transmuting to another, another. What have I ever lost by dying? Rumi asks, exchanging one set of nafs [wantings] for the next?... Anything you grab hold of on the bank, breaks with the river’s pressure. When you do things from your soul, the river itself moves through you. Freshness and a deep joy are signs of the current.” (Essential Rumi 54)

We think of wanting as potentially egotistical — and vulnerable. It’s a declaration of lack and of hope. As soon as you make that declaration, fear arises. The fear that the shortage, which now feels gaping, will not be satisfied, the slip between the cup and lip could leave you forever unfulfilled. There can be an ugliness in wanting. 

But Ann Marie Chiasson, in her book Energy Healing, distinguishes between desire/longing and "I want." The latter is ego or identity based and comes from the 3rd chakra. It can tend toward grasping, clutching the bank of the river. Desire and longing, on the other hand, are primary urges coming from the lower dan tien or sacral chakra. This primary desire puts us in the flow of the river Rumi writes about, or in the great wagon.

“You breathe, new shapes appear

And the music of desire as widespread

As spring begins to move like a great wagon.”

Being in that state without clutching is magic. The true gifts appear and move through you. Without grasping, you’re moving with the current of life.

The gorilla is my preferred symbol of Marsian potency.

This is current of life in Eudora Welty’s “Livvie,” where the arrival of spring heats up desire. Livvie knows burning with desire is better than feeling blank.

With the blank, you end up like Clarice Lispector’s ox. Writing to her sister, Lispecter says, “From the moment I resigned myself, I lost all my vivacity and all my interest in things. Have you seen the way a castrated bull turns into an ox? That is what happened to me… despite the hard comparison… To adapt to something I can’t adapt to, to get over my dislikes and my dreams… I cut off inside me the way I could hurt others and myself. And at the same time, I cut off my strength.” 

Astrologers might say Lispector cut off Mars. In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore writes, "Mars when he is honored, gives a deep red hue to everything we do, quickening our lives with intensity, passion, forcefulness, courage." We honor Mars when we let our wanting quicken us, when we make declarations of desire. As Rumi writes, "God created the child that is your wanting so that it might cry out, so that milk might come."

Sources:

Cynthia Bourgeaoult, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening

Ann Marie Chiasson, Energy Healing: The Essentials of Self-Care.

John Margolies' Photos of Roadside America, Public Domain Review

Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul.

Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks