I Closed My Eyes To Creation

Rumi

I closed my eyes to creation when I beheld his beauty, I became

intoxicated with his beauty and bestowed my soul.

For the sake of Solomon’s seal I became wax in all my body,

and in order to become illumined I rubbed my wax.

I saw his opinion and cast away my own twisted opinion; I

became his reed pipe and likewise lamented on his lip.

He was in my hand, and blindly I groped for him with my

hand; I was in his hand, and yet I inquired of those who were

misinformed.

I must have been either a simpleton or drunk or mad that

fearfully I was stealing from my own gold.

Like a thief I crept through a crack in the wall into my own

vine, like a thief I gathered jasmine from my own garden.

Enough, do not twist my secret upon your fingertips, for I have

twisted off out of your twisted fist.

Shams-e Tabriz, from whom comes the light of moon and

stars–though I am grieving with sorrow for him, I am like the

crescent of the festival.

Some poems don't find you until you're ready to be found. Rumi's I Closed My Eyes To Creation is one of those — the kind you return to during certain moods, the way you might press a bruise just to confirm it still hurts.

The poem begins with surrender:

"I closed my eyes to creation when I beheld his beauty."

This sounds romantic at first glance — someone so consumed by another's presence that the world fades around them. But Rumi is describing something more dangerous than admiration. He is writing about the moment another person rearranges your interior world without asking. The moment your thoughts begin orbiting someone unconsciously. The moment ordinary life starts being interrupted by a single existence.

What makes connection frightening is not always its intensity, but the awareness of it. Sometimes you recognize, in real time, that a moment is mattering more than it should. And because it matters, fear enters quietly alongside it.

Rumi returns to the language of intoxication throughout:

"I became intoxicated with his beauty." "I must have been either a simpleton or drunk or mad…"

Love here is not clarity — it is disorientation. The self becomes unstable under the weight of feeling. Reason curls inward into hesitation. You begin second-guessing what would otherwise feel natural, because vulnerability has made even tenderness fragile.

That is why this line feels so honest it almost hurts:

"He was in my hand, and blindly I groped for him with my hand."

Rumi captures the specific tragedy of possessing closeness while still being unable to trust it. There are moments in life where something real exists quietly between two people — almost undeniable — and yet neither can say it aloud. Not because it isn't true, but because naming it would force it to become solid. Tangible things can be lost. What remains unspoken stays, in some way, safe.

That is what Rumi means when he calls himself a thief "stealing from my own gold."

We are capable of treating our own happiness like trespassing. We decide beautiful things are temporary before they have ended. We hold moments carefully while quietly mourning their future loss. We become so afraid of damaging something tender that we leave it untouched — even at the cost of never fully living inside it.

This is why certain memories refuse to leave.

Not because they were dramatic, or complete. But because they weren't. Some moments never become relationships or confessions or endings. They exist briefly — somewhere between possibility and silence — and then disappear. And yet those are often the ones the mind returns to longest, still searching for a resolution that never came.

Rumi's poem understands this grief without needing to announce it. Even in beauty, he speaks through sorrow. But the poem doesn't feel hopeless. The final image —

"though I am grieving with sorrow for him, I am like the crescent of the festival"

— suggests that grief and luminosity are not opposites. The crescent moon is incomplete. It is still the brightest thing in the sky.

Some people enter our lives like that. Not as permanent presences or fully realized love stories, but as small crescents of light — brief, altering, gone before we could hold them properly. They leave behind an ache not because something failed, but because it mattered enough to be mourned.

And perhaps growing older is simply learning to make peace with that.

Some things were only ever meant to soften us.

UTSC Cherry Blossoms | May 10, 2026