Crying Out of the Depths

Nothing captures cries of the soul quite like poetry.

Cries of longing, cries of ecstasy, cries of agony, cries of love, cries of despair, cries from the depths.

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.

Poetry is the language of love and lovers—and the God who is love, whose very essence and being is love, the one from whom all love issues. Because of this, in the best of poetry it is difficult to discern whether the lover being lavishly loved in verse is human or divine—and in the very best, it’s impossible.

This is nowhere more evident than in the work of Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, a 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, who 800 years after his death is the bestselling poet in America and Afghanistan.

Rumi’s ecstatic utterances are spiritual and sensual, earthen and eternal—effervescent with eroticism. He exhorts us to . . .

Be foolishly in love,
because love is all there is.
There is no way into presence
except through a love exchange.
If someone asks, But what is love?
answer, Dissolving the will.

He insists we . . .

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
absentminded. Someone sober
will worry about things going badly.
Let the lover be.

We should do this because . . .

Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make transactions
with beauty.

And reminds us that . . .

*Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity.
The seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death.
Tomorrow, when resurrection comes,
The heart that is not in love will fail the test.


Are the above lines about a human or divine lover? Is there a difference? If we perceive them properly, don’t all loves and lovers ultimately become sacraments, vessels through which the divine loves us, through which we love the divine?

Love opens us, causes us to bloom into our best selves, not only dissolving our wills but all illusions of separation, leading us into oneness. When lovers become one, they are not just one with one another, but will all things.

*With the Beloved's water of life, no illness remains
In the Beloved's rose garden of union, no thorn remains.
They say there is a window from one heart to another
How can there be a window where no wall remains?

Of all the people translating Rumi into English, I most highly recommend the poet Coleman Barks. A wonderful poet in his own right, Mr. Barks translations of Rumi’s work burn with a fire that scorches the soul. Recently, I have been reading and rereading “Rumi: Bridge to the Soul,” but I also recommend, “The Essential Rumi,” “The Soul of Rumi,” and “Rumi: The Book of Love”—all beautifully rendered by Coleman Barks.

So the next time you find your soul crying out of the depths in ecstatic agony, I suggest you invite Rumi and Coleman to join you.



all verse translated by Coleman Barks except
* translated by Shahram Shiva

Lincoln Lawyer Rolls into Theaters

Ten years ago, Michael Connelly sat beside an attorney at a baseball game who told him he operated out of his car—that with forty-plus courthouses in LA, mobility was more important than anything else.

That was all it took for Michael’s mind.

I used to think Michael Connelly had the mind of a reporter and the soul of a novelist, but the more I think about it, I’d say he has the mind and the carefully honed craft of a professional reporter and the soul of a lonely jazz sax player in a small out-of-the-way bar in the middle of the night. The former shows in his excellent plotting and satisfying stories, the latter, in flourishes—riffs if you will—scattered throughout his books, observations and insights about the city of angels and demons and the angles and demons who inhabit it. This is most true of his Harry Bosch series, but also shines through in his first Mickey Haller book, “The Lincoln Lawyer”—now a film starring Matthew McConaughey.

Mickey Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense attorney who operates out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung courthouses of Los Angeles to defend clients of every kind. For him, the law is rarely about guilt or innocence — it's about negotiation and manipulation.

A Beverly Hills playboy arrested for attacking a woman he picked up in a bar chooses Haller to defend him, and Mickey has his first high-paying client in years. It is a defense attorney's dream, what they call a franchise case. And as the evidence stacks up, Haller comes to believe this may be the easiest case of his career.

Then someone close to him is murdered and Haller discovers that his search for innocence has brought him face-to-face with evil as pure as a flame. To escape without being burned, he must deploy every tactic, feint, and instinct in his arsenal — this time to save his own life.

The movie is good—always entertaining, often engrossing—and I highly recommend it. It’s best where it’s most faithful to Connelly’s excellent novel, weakest where it strays—particularly in the ending, where a riveting climax in the book is inexplicably made more pedestrian in the movie. Still, all and all the movie is one of the best things at your local movie house at the moment, faithfully capturing the gritty city—the sprawling slum where pretty people do ugly things.

The film also provides McConaughey with his best role in a long time—to which he responds with his best performance since maybe he played another defense attorney in John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill.”

See the film, but more importantly, read the book it was based on—and for other entertaining legal thrillers with more twists and turns than Mulholland Drive, check out all of Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller books: “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “The Brass Verdict,” “The Reversal,” and “The Fifth Witness.”

Each of these, like every Michael Connelly book, is like a trip led by a brilliant, trusty old tour guide whose night job is jazz musician.

Arise My Love

“The Adjustment Bureau,” which has moments reminiscent of “The Matrix” and “Dark City,” is at heart a romance far more than sci-fi flick. In fact, its use science fiction and fantasy elements only serve as obstacles for its lovers and as catalysts for philosophical explorations of fate and free will, ambition and amorousness.

As I sat in the theater watching the lovers fight for their fate, battle forces beyond them, passages from The Song kept echoing through my mind—as did “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” another film that brought to mind The Song.

The Song (or Song of Songs) is a book of Egyptian love poetry found in the heart of the Hebrew Bible. It’s provocative and profound, sensual and sexual, powerfully capturing both the desires of lovers and the hostility of others to them and their love.

The world is hostile to love and lovers. It has been ever thus.
In The Song, the lover calls to her beloved saying:

Arise, my love,
my fair one, and come away;
for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

She has been searching the city for her lover and experienced firsthand just how cruel the heartless townsmen can be:

I run out after him, calling,
but he is gone.
The men who roam the streets,
Guarding the walls,
Beat me and tear away my robe.

The lovers only hope is to flee to the countryside, to find a garden so they can be alone—away from the callous, commerce-driven city, away from those who find love, superfluous, frivolous, worthless.

Lovers retreat into one another—not only because each is the other’s first best sanctuary but because there is often no other safe place.

As Rumi puts it:

Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make transactions
with beauty.

This is some of what I was thinking as David Norris chased Elise Sellas and agents of the adjustment bureau chased them both through the city.

On the brink of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, ambitious politician David Norris (Matt Damon) meets beautiful contemporary ballet dancer Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt)—a woman like none he's ever known. But just as he realizes he's falling for her, mysterious men conspire to keep the two apart.

David learns he is up against the agents of fate itself—the men of the adjustment bureau—who will do everything in their considerable power to prevent David and Elise from being together. In the face of overwhelming odds, he must either let her go and accept a predetermined path…or risk everything to defy fate and be with her.

Lovers facing obstacles to be together may be the oldest plot in the history of story—or at least second behind adventure tales of the hunt around cave fires. But the obstacles—whether agents from the adjustment bureau or mundane things far less dramatic—aren’t just conflict-producing plot points but examples of art imitating life. Most lovers know only too well just how difficult it is to make love stay.

And what of choosing a lover, choosing to love or not? Or any number of other decisions we make, or think we do, every day? Do we have free will? Are we truly free? In the world of the movie, we’re not. Unseen forces influence and adjust. It’s an interesting notion. Even a nonconformist iconoclast like me often questions how free I really am. And you don’t have to believe in fate or full blown determinism to see how way leads to way, how every choice limits subsequent choices, how our paradigms and worldviews and cultures and educations and families and religions, like the agents of the adjustment bureau, exert enormous, often unseen influence on us.

One of the more intriguing questions raised by the film concerns coupling and accomplishment, happiness and ambition. Does being in a fulfilling relationship cause us to be less driven, to do less with our lives? Does love makes us lose our edge? Fill a crevice without which we fill with other often obsessive pursuits and passions? David is told that if he and Elise become each other’s neither will live up to their considerable potential, that to become her lover means forfeiting the white house and the opportunity to change the world.

This is something I’ve wondered about nearly as long as I can recall—am I limited as an artist by my happy childhood and love-filled life?

Perhaps a better question is so what? So what if David and Elise do less in the world? So what if the mundane aspects of life together make them more mundane as people? I’m not convinced it does—or has to—but so what if it does? What of love? What of what it produces in our souls, the mark is leaves on us that is anything but mundane? Isn’t that worth the white house and any number of accomplishments? And what if love is all there is? What if love and lover are all—everything and anything else a distraction, an illusion, a poor substitute?

Again, Rumi:

Be foolishly in love
for love is all there is.

There is no way into presence
except through a love exchange.

Love and lover live in eternity.
other desires are substitutes
for that way of being.

In and Out

As I write this, I’m watching the 83rd Annual Academy Awards, searching for inspiration, hoping something said in an acceptance speech or a scene played from last year’s most honored films will spark an idea for this week’s column.

And it worked.

But not like I imagined (imagine that).

Several ideas came. And went. Like falling flakes in too-warm weather, nothing stuck.

At one point, a friend IM’d me on Facebook and asked what I was doing. When I told her, she began to offer suggestions for what I might write about—most of them far better than my own thoughts. But, again, not one of the many wonderful seeds she was sowing took root.

And so, with a deadline looming, which of course they always do, I had many, many ideas, but not one that felt right for this column.

Until . . .

I began to muse about the differences between ideas and inspiration.

I have ideas all the time—lots and lots of them; many before I ever started watching the Oscars—ideas for columns, novels, movies, short stories and a host of other random and unrelated things. But in the way only one of the thousands of acorns that rain down from an enormous oak becomes itself an oak, few ideas are ever more than that—ideas.

Ideas are easy. Execution is the thing.

From the moment my first novel came out in the fall of 1997, I’ve had countless people want to give me their ideas for books—and my response is always the same. I can’t get to all of my own ideas. And if it’s your idea, it’s probably your book to write.

An idea is defined as “a thought or conception, that potentially or actually exists in the mind as a product of mental activity; an opinion, conviction, or principle; a plan, scheme, or method; a notion; a fancy.”

This isn’t entirely unrelated to inspiration, but, in my experience, it’s different enough to make all the difference in the world.

Inspiration is defined as “stimulation of the mind or emotions to a high level of feeling or activity; an agency that moves the intellect or emotions or prompts action or invention; a sudden creative act or idea, that is inspired; divine guidance or influence exerted directly on the mind and soul of humankind; the act of drawing in, especially the inhalation of air into the lungs.”

These definitions get at part of what I think is the biggest difference between an idea and inspiration.

An idea remains a thought or concept in the mind, while inspiration stimulates us beyond thought and feeling into activity.

Ideas are involved, of course.

Everything begins with an image, a thought, an idea—but, if inspiration, this is truly just the beginning. An idea can be a seed for inspiration, but inspiration moves us beyond the idea—the seed sprouts.

There’s an alchemical process involving passion, maybe even obsession , that transforms an idea into an action or causes some ideas to be inspired, while others aren’t (or aren’t yet), and I no more understand it than any of the great, thrilling, humbling, inspiring mysteries of existence. But it is inspiring—inspiration itself inspires.

We can ponder ideas, but inspiration propels.

And though inspiration is a mystery—utterly beyond us and out of our control, we can court it.

I pursue and woo my muse with an earnest relentlessness akin to madness of a sort only certain types of obsessed lovers can fathom—spending my mornings and midnights trying to seduce her.

I fill my life with people and things I find inspirational—art and artists; books and writers; music, fun, friends, soulful sinners and saints, lovers, thinkers, characters, and kind, compassionate people.

My writing room, the space I spend more time in than any other, is filled with thousands and thousands of books, with photographs and paintings, with images and icons, with gifts and mementos. Often, particularly when I’m writing, the room flickers in candlelight, as incense and instrumental music floats around.

But none of this guarantees inspiration. It’s just preparation and invitation—invocation of a type not unlike religious devotion.

I never know what will inspire a column. Sometimes something in a mediocre movie will provoke a thought that blossoms, while a fine film or book, though inspiring in itself, offers me no way in, no tunnels, no hooks, nothing that sticks to grey cells, nothing that penetrates the soil of soul.

The same applies to all my creative endeavors—from novels to nature photography—and to nearly all of life.

If I don’t know when or from where inspiration will come, I can but be ready at all times. I’m not, of course, but I attempt to be prepared, to be open, to look and listen, to seek and woo.

In this way, the writing life, like the creative life, like the soulful life, is like the best and wisest life any of us can lead. Hone our sensitivity and receptivity, be diligent in our preparation and searching, learn to listen, learn to live the Buddha’s awakened life, for we never know when the still small voice inside us will speak, when our muse will tickle our ear with soft whispers, when the wind or a wren might have a message for us.

As Frederick Buechner so extraordinarily and eloquently puts it, “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

Ultimately, inspiration is a mystery, but it’s as basic to our nature as breathing (the very act the word comes from)—drawing in and letting out. In and out. In and out. Just breathe. Breathe in the universe in each inspiring inhalation. This is meditation. This is inspiration. This is love. This is life. In and out. In and out. Removing any obstruction, all impediments, we open our hearts and minds, our souls and spirits, to the Mystery. In and out. In and out.