Whoever is loved...

Whoever is loved is beautiful, but the opposite is not true, that whoever
is beautiful is loved. Real beauty is part of loved-ness, and that
loved-ness is primary. If a being is loved, he or she has beauty, because
a part cannot be separate from the whole. Many girls were more beautiful
than Laila, but Majnun did not love them. "Let us bring some of them to
meet you," they used to say to Majnun, and he would reply, "it is not the
form of Laila that I love. Laila is not the form. You're looking at the
cup, whereas I think only of the wine that I will drink from that cup. If
you gave me a chalice studded with gemstones, but filled it with vinegar or
something other than wine, what use would that be? An old, broken
dipper-gourd with Laila-wine in it is better than a hundred precious
goblets full of other liquid."
Passion is present when a man can distinguish between the wine and the
container. Two men see a loaf of bread. One hasn't eaten anything for ten
days. The other has eaten five times a day, every day. He sees the shape
of the loaf. The other man with his urgent need sees *inside* into the
taste, and into the nourishment the bread could give. Be that hungry, to
see within all beings the Friend.
Creatures are cups. The sciences and the arts and all branches of
knowledge are inscriptions around the edges of the cups. When a cup
shatters, the writing can no longer be read. The wine's the thing! The
wine that's held in the mold of these physical cups. Drink the wine and
know what lasts and what to love. The man who truly asks must be sure of
two things: One, that he's mistaken in what he is doing or thinking
now. And two, that there is a wisdom he doesn't even know yet. Asking is
half of knowing.
Everyone turns toward someone. Look for one scarred by the King's
polo stick.
A man or a woman is said to be absorbed when the water has total
control of him, and he no control of the water. A swimmer moves around
willfully. An absorbed being has no will but the water's going. Any word
or act is not really personal, but the way the water has of speaking or
doing. As when you hear a voice coming out of a wall, and you know it's
not the wall talking, but someone inside, or perhaps someone outside
echoing off the wall. Saints are like that. They've achieved the
condition of a wall, or a door.

rumi