"Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?"
Meher Mount
Your Friday photo…
On a walk with friends on the deer trail near the old well in 2020, volunteer Margaret Magnus took this photo of a charred Coast Live Oak. “As we paused to view what remained of the tree, we began to fantasize about what the burned tree trunk represented,” she remembered.
“The right side looked like angel’s wings with the left side representing a hand reaching toward the heavens with the support and encouragement of an angel.”
In thinking about the angelic nature of this burned and dying tree, the following from the Sufi poet Rumi seemed appropriate.
“I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar
With angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,
I shall become what no mind e’er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones, ‘To Him we shall return.’”
Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, also known as Rumi, was a 13th century poet and Islamic scholar who was born in Afghanistan and wrote poetry in multiple languages, particularly Farsi. Avatar Meher Baba enjoyed listening to Rumi's poetry and praised him as one of the greatest minds of all mystical and spiritual literature.
This is a beautiful passage from Rumi's Mathnawi, one of the most celebrated pieces of mystical poetry in the Sufi tradition. The poem traces the soul's evolutionary journey through different states of being — from mineral to plant to animal to human, and ultimately beyond human form toward union with the Divine.
Possible Source
Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, The Mathnawí of Jalálu’ddín Rúmí, ed. and trans. Reynold A. Nicholson, Book III (London: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1926), vv. 3901–3906.