If you put on shoes that are too tight and walk out
across an empty plain, you will not feel the freedom
of the place unless you take off your shoes.
Your shoe-constriction has you confined.
At night before sleeping you take off the right shoes,
and your soul releases into a place it knows.
Dream and glide deeper.

Physical existence is so cramped. We grow old and bentover
like embryos. Nine months passes; it is time to be born.
The lamb wants to graze green daylight.
There are ways of being born twice, of coming
to where you fly, not individually like birds,
but as the sun moves with its bride, sincerity.

Loaves of bread remind us of sunlight,
but when we are inside that orb, we lose interest
in building ovens, in millwork and the preparation
of fields before the planting.

Fish love the ocean. Snakes move like earth-fish
inside a mountain, well away from seawater.
Certain sunfish, though, turn snakes
into ocean-lovers.

~ From Coleman Barks' A Year with Rumi