Here are some images from our annual Rumi Celebration, featuring the Wild Moon Bhaktas, Hakim Bushnell of Light Upon Light Sufi Center and the Rev. Ted Tollefson. We begin the program with an invocation, chanting with the Wild Moon Bhaktas, and then the band provides back-up music for the poetry recitation. Audience members share their often deeply moving, sometimes humorous and always rich, favorite Rumi poems. Pictured is our friend, Tom Esch, reciting Rumi’s highly regarded “Chick Pea” poem, which magically turns our common suffering into something inspiring and meaningful. In the second portion of the program, Hakim Bushnell leads us in sacred dance inspired by the Sufi Zikr. It is a marvel that Rumi’s astonishing poetry – now some 800 years old – still speaks to us so strongly. Thanks to poet-translator Coleman Barks and Robert Bly for giving us these lively English versions of the Sufi mystic’s work.
![image012[1]](https://www.wildmoonbhaktas.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/image01211.jpg)
photos: stevepetersonphotography.net
Wild Moon Bhaktas at Spirit United Church
On March 2, 2014, the Wild Moon Bhaktas were honored to be the guests of Spirit United Church in Minneapolis for their Sunday morning service. With our good friend, the talented Barbara Meyer performing with us, we led the congregation in some chants, and then told the story of “Fatima, the Spinner and the Tent” in the Wild Moon Bhaktas style – with musical accompaniment. It is a moving Sufi story about a young woman who loses everything – over and over again – only to find that her eventual happiness comes by synthesizing the learning of her disparate ‘lost’ lives’ into a whole.