The Reed Flute Seller
Short story about the hole that makes the music.
A young man came to the flute seller wanting the one with the most beautiful sound.
"For whom?"
He hesitated. The honest answer was: for a woman who had married someone else.
The old man took down a flute. "It grew two years in the water where it was born. Then it was cut from it, and it will never go back." He turned it over. "Then it's hollowed out. Then it's burned — here, and here — until there is a hole where each burn was."
The young man looked at the row of small black-rimmed holes.
"And that is what sings," said the old man. "Not the wood. A reed with no holes in it is a stick. Watertight, undamaged, silent."
The young man played four notes, badly. Something in the fourth made the back of his neck cold.
The old man named a price that was too low, and gave the only advice he offered anyone that year: "Don't spend this winter trying to become watertight again."
Don't spend the winter trying to become watertight again. The openings are what sing.
Ohananda.com
Rumi, Masnavi, Book I, opening lines (the song of the reed)
The Masnavi opens with the reed's lament for the reed bed it was cut from — one of the most famous passages in Persian literature. The market, the flute seller and the young man are Ohananda's own; no wording here is presented as Rumi's.
Rumi begins his great poem with a reed flute crying for the bed it was cut from, and says plainly that this cry is the whole subject of the book.
The Sufi claim is not that suffering is good. It is that separation creates longing, and longing moves a person toward what they love. Hence the strange consolation: the holes are not the damage that ruined the instrument. Mechanically, they are the reason there is any music.
What has been hollowed out in you — and what sound has come through since?
