Tear Down This House
Rumi as translated by Coleman Barks
A hundred thousand new houses can be built from the transparent yellow carnelian* buried beneath and the only way to get to that is to do the work of demolishing and then digging under the foundation.
With that value in hand, all the new construction will be done without effort. And anyway, sooner or later this house will fall on its own. The jewel treasure will be uncovered, but it won’t be yours then.
The buried wealth is your pay for doing the demolition, the pick and the shovel work. If you wait and just let it happen, you’ll bite your hand and say, “I didn’t do as I knew I should have.”
This is a rented house. You don’t own the deed. You have a lease, and you’ve set up a little shop, where you barely make a living sewing patches on torn clothing.
Yet only a few feet underneath are two veins, pure red and bright gold carnelian. Take the pickaxe and pry the foundation. You’ve got to quit this seamstress work.
What does the patch-sewing mean you ask? Eating and drinking. The heavy cloak of the body is always getting torn. You patch it with food and other restless ego satisfactions.
Rip up one board from the shop floor and look into the basement. You’ll see two glints in the dirt.
*carnelian- a pale to deep red or reddish brown variety of quartz with distinctive crystals arranged in slender fibers in parallel bands used in jewelry, a mystical stone.