Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Who Knew?

I always joke with friends that I was born on a very insignificant day. No one worth knowing shares my birthday. Sorry Mila Jovavich and Giovanni Riabissi that you don’t count. If I was born a day earlier or a day later well then I would have the honour of sharing my birth day with the likes of Brad Pitt, Katie Holmes, Beethoven. But alas it was not to be. Or so I thought…

I have been reading this book, titled “The Red Book”. It had a bit on Rumi, who I have come to appreciate ALOT now that I can read his poetry in english. I know I know. I should really be reading it in farsi, but lets face it my farsi is crap. I’d never ever have the fortune of learning anything about persian literature if I relied on my broken farsi.

Anyhoo, I have been reading alot of Rumi as well as Hafez. Let just say I am looking for some answers, and well they are both very wise men, whose wisdom is still relevant given the passage of time. So imagine my delight in finding out that my birthday is the day that the turkish dervishes celebrate “sema”. My birthday is the day Rumi died, and dervishes chose that day to do their riutual of sema, twirling in ecstasy and connecting to the divine, just like Rumi did 100s of years ago in longing for his beloved Shams, God, and the divine. My birthday is the day that Rumi finally re-united with his beloved. Wow!! Now that’s significant ....

So come Dec, on my birthday, I will be celebrating with my own sema. Twirling like dervish and lighting up my own divine spark.

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