Are you who you pretend to be? 🤔

A question and a poem for the reflective and the hopeful

Between subway lines and apartment buildings, look up.

Allow your answer to “Who are you?” to change. 🌟

Allow yourself to become someone different.

---

Only Breath

by Rumi, a 13th-century Islamic Scholar, and Sufi Mystic

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu

Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen. Not any religion


or cultural system. I am not from the East

or the West, not out of the ocean or up


from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not

composed of elements at all. I do not exist,


am not an entity in this world or in the next,

did not descend from Adam and Eve or any


origin story. My place is placeless, a trace

of the traceless. Neither body nor soul.

I am from the soul of souls.


I belong to the beloved,

have seen the two worlds as one

One I seek, one I know, one I see, one I call.


the first, the last, the outer, the inner,


Beyond "He" and "He is" I know no other.


If one day I am given a moment in solitude with you

I will trample the two worlds underfoot and dance forever.