POETRY

Be Occupied with  

What You Really Value

No matter what plans you make,  

no matter what you acquire,  

the thief will enter where you least expect.  

Be occupied, then, with what you really value  

and let the thief take something less.  

When a trader's bales fall into the water,  

he'll try to grab the most valuable things. 

Some things will certainly be lost  

as the water of life flows away.  

Let go of the cheap stuff   

and work to save what's really important. 

  

[Rumi, Mathnawi II, 1505-9] tr. Kabir and Camille Helminski, from the  

forthcoming book, A Rumi Daybook, Shambala Publications

Commentary

It is possible to live our lives in such a way that we are both in the world 
and connected to a timeless, eternal dimension. If we focus only on 
transient things we will surely be in loss. What we have within ourselves 
we project outward onto things, thinking that the things themselves are 
responsible for the states we experience. Yet every state that is triggered 
within us is nevertheless within us.
The paradox is that as we discover what is within, the outer things will 
increasingly awaken these qualities within us. All things receive their 
qualities and their existence from this source of Life and are reflectors of 
that one Essence. What attracts us in the outer world is only putting us in 
touch with the Hidden Treasure within ourselves. 

—Shaikh Kabir Helminski and Camille Helminski are the Founders and 

Directors of the Threshold Society. www.Sufism.org

Parthenia M. Hicks, M. Div., Enlightenment Journal‘s poetry editor, is the  
Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA and a graduate of CSE’s Meru Seminary. She has 
received the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Poetry Prize, the Villa Montalvo Poetry 
prize, and the Silicon Valley Arts Council Fellowship for Literature as well as  
several Pushcart nominations. Her most recent publications include The Call: An 
Anthology of Women’s Writing and Remembering: An Anthology of Poems.