Page 182 - The Book of Rumi

Cow on a Green Island

here is a green island that never dries up, forever spreading lush and
Tbountiful. On this island lives a cow who feeds sumptuously on the
grasses and grows fatter and healthier each day. All day long, he roams the
abundant meadows and feeds without a moment’s respite until dusk. Once
darkness descends and the green can no longer be seen, the cow begins to fret.
“What am I going to eat tomorrow?” he agonizes. “Will there ever be any
food to eat again?”
He worries himself literally thin! Every night, he loses all the weight he
had put on during the previous day as he worries about the next day’s provi-
sions. In the morning, he’s a mere shell of the cow he was the night before,
looking lanky and unkempt. He can hardly walk straight from lack of strength
and feels that it’s his last day alive.
As the sun begins to shine and the greenery again becomes apparent,
the cow cannot contain his joy. Without losing another moment, he pounces
on the grasses, which have grown through the night until they now reach the
underside of his belly, and eats as though he’d been famished for years. As
he eats, he puts back on the weight that he’d lost during the night and soon
becomes as fat and as strong as the day before. This cycle is repeated regularly;
the cow frets all night and loses weight, and the next day, when he sees the
grasses, he feeds on them and puts the weight back on.
“I spend my days grazing on this grass, but I lose all the goodness I gain
from it in the nighttime, when I worry about not fi nding any grass to eat the
next day,” the cow occasionally ponders. “But every day there’s plenty of fresh
grass again for me to consume, and I do so happily. The supply never vanishes,
but I don’t seem to have any faith in it. I wonder why I behave this way—what
kind of diseased thinking is this? What I gain during the day, I myself destroy
in the night! Why can’t I change? This has become my ingrained behavior, and
there’s nothing I can do about it.”
While he’s aware that he’s taking the wrong approach to life, nevertheless
the cow is unable to change. Habit has become so deeply implanted in his
mind that there’s no place for trust.

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