"Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness"
About this Quote
Rumi doesn’t argue you into transcendence; he smuggles you there through sensation. The line moves like a conversion experience rendered in domestic objects: wings, boredom, hurt, a cup. The genius is in the vagueness of “something” and “someone.” He withholds the name (God, beloved, wine-bearer, teacher) to keep the door open for multiple readings while still insisting on an external agency that arrives, unannounced, to undo the self. That grammatical passivity is the point: the ego isn’t the pilot. It’s the thing being lifted.
“Something opens our wings” treats spiritual awakening as an anatomical fact, not a metaphorical mood. Then the poem goes after the most unromantic enemies of the soul: boredom and hurt. Rumi pairs them because they’re twins in practice; both collapse time into a dull, claustrophobic now. His promise isn’t that pain never happened, but that it can be metabolized into a different register of attention.
The cup is classic Sufi code: wine as divine intoxication, the tavern as the world, the cupbearer as the Beloved. Yet “in front of us” makes it intimate and immediate, like grace set on the table. “We taste only sacredness” isn’t pious decoration; it’s the radical claim that perception itself can be purified, that the same life that tasted bitter can suddenly read as holy.
Context matters: Rumi writes out of a 13th-century Sufi milieu shaped by ecstatic devotion and the shock of loss, including the transformative friendship with Shams. The poem’s subtext is that longing is not a defect; it’s the hinge that lets the ordinary swing open into the infinite.
“Something opens our wings” treats spiritual awakening as an anatomical fact, not a metaphorical mood. Then the poem goes after the most unromantic enemies of the soul: boredom and hurt. Rumi pairs them because they’re twins in practice; both collapse time into a dull, claustrophobic now. His promise isn’t that pain never happened, but that it can be metabolized into a different register of attention.
The cup is classic Sufi code: wine as divine intoxication, the tavern as the world, the cupbearer as the Beloved. Yet “in front of us” makes it intimate and immediate, like grace set on the table. “We taste only sacredness” isn’t pious decoration; it’s the radical claim that perception itself can be purified, that the same life that tasted bitter can suddenly read as holy.
Context matters: Rumi writes out of a 13th-century Sufi milieu shaped by ecstatic devotion and the shock of loss, including the transformative friendship with Shams. The poem’s subtext is that longing is not a defect; it’s the hinge that lets the ordinary swing open into the infinite.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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