Rumi: Tales of the Spirit: A Journey to Healing the Heart

Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi was born in 1207 and became a famous Persian poet, Islamic dervish and a mystic. He created stories that used lives everyday events and circumstances to describe the spiritual world. He was remembered as one of the greatest spiritual masters and poetical intellects. Kamla Kapur is an award winning author, originally from India, who now resides in California. Her writings include plays, novels, essays and poetry. In her recent writings Kapur presents Rumi’s untold stories paired with her own commentary and inspirational insight in Rumi: Tales of the Spirit.

While Rumi is from a much earlier time, Kapur does a fantastic job of making his stores relative and timeless in today’s age. Readers can expect to be enlightened, encouraged, motivated and given a new sense of hope in the human experience.

Here the readers will find twelve different stories of wisdom, triumph, strength, failures and achievement. They will be inspired to find their own inner courage in lives turmoil’s. Readers will get to use their passion and connection to the divine to look at their own life circumstances in a different way and maybe mind a new approach to their lives.

The stories presented in this book can have many layers of meaning. Readers will see meanings after several readings that they never found in the first or second. The stories here are those that offer us meaning on the reasons behind our suffering, why we suffer, how we suffer and what suffering may teach us for the future.  The readers learn how our life’s path, the happiness and the sorrow, all are part of our journey to the divine. Readers will be given keys to the sustenance of life, guides to follow on the journey and things to look for and to also be weary of.

I highly recommend Rumi to readers who need to fill that connection between life and divine. It will navigate those who seek direction and purpose. It is food for the soul of those who already have a spiritual connection but have just had trouble translating it into everyday live. And it is a book that belongs on our shelves to come back to time and time again when readers feel their connection to the divine waning in the light of their life and circumstances they find themselves in.

~review by Keri Nichol

Author: Kamla K. Kapur
Mandala Publishing, 2019
p. 157, $16.99