Day three: Ten Days of Persian Influence

Source

 SOLITUDE

Spiritual joys come only from solitude,
So the wise choose the bottom of the well,
For the darkness down there beats
The darkness up here.
He who follows at the heels of the world
Never saves his head.

Rumi
Tr. Phillip Dunn

This poem reminded me of Haruki Murakami's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and the way the main character, Toru Okada needed time spent in the bottom of a dry well to restore to him what was lost.

In the begining of the story his cat goes missing, then his wife fails to return home from work and he begins to get phone calls from  a mysterious woman.  He is kind of going no-where, has no goals and little motivation for anything until, like Alice, he falls down a hole.  It is here, buried in the dry well beneath the earth that he begins to find places within himself that transcends the everyday world.  It is in this place of death that he begins to come alive: to feel, to grieve, to know what he cares about and to 'get outside of himself'.  Acknowledging that passivity is not an appropriate response to the shattered world, Okada is forced into a series of very definitive actions that bring his wife (and his cat) back.