Sections of Rumi's "Feeling the Shoulder of the Lion"

"The Lion's Shoulder" by Rumi the Sufi Poet
Don't worry so much about livelihood.
Your livelihood will turn out as it should.
Be constantly occupied instead
with listening to God.

How is it that you ask for physical comfort,
and not for true existence?

Why are you so blind to what the soul needs?
Weep for yourself as when a cloud weeps,
and then the branch freshens. As when a candle
releases tears and gets brighter.

You have been imitating spirituality.

Imitation is a lock on your chest.
Dissolve it with tears.

Imitation is a blind man describing a landscape
with beautiful words. There's no heart knowledge.

The blind man gets excited with the words,
but you feel the distance between him and the beauty.
The words burn but there's no warmth, and no broken-open-ness.

Had those words been written inside him,
his body would have shivered into particles.

You have been doing such things with the name of
GOD.
So the imitator doesn't know what he's fooling with. God thinks,
"You fake. Sinai crumbled and split with jets of blood streaming from it
for the sake of the name that you say so thoughtlessly.

You learned it from your mother and father,
not from your own experience."

"The LORD says, 'These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men."
Isaiah 29:13