"Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?" Rumi

Rumi  -- someone whose poems I read all the time. I always wondered though: when did he have time to write all of his works, when his main message is: "sell your cleverness
 and buy bewilderment."?

If you look up his major works it says: 27000 lines of Persian poetry, 35000 Persian couplets, 2000 Persian quatrains, 90 ghazals, 19 quatrains in Arabic, a couple of dozen couplets in Turkish and Greek!!!!!

              When did this man have time to go crazy???

Then, I thought, maybe he had his own way of going crazy?

Most of my answers came when I read about the emergence of first ascetics/mystics in early 9th century . Apparently, the word ascetic which derives from the Greek word askesis means training, exercise/discipline. The actual word athlete comes from this term too. Being ascetic meant that you would be extremely self-disciplined and would follow a very strict regime in your life to reach whatever spiritual goal you had.

Rumi says: "In this mob of I's inside, which one is me? Hear me out. I know I am wandering, but don't start putting a lid on this racket. No telling what I'll do then. Every moment I'm thrown by your story. One moment it's happy, and I'm singing. One moment it's sad, and I am weeping. It turns bitter, and I pull away. But then you spill a little grace, and just like that, I'm all light. It's not so bad, this arrangement, actually." 

He seems to be following his path and following the wave of his inner ocean, wherever it may take him. To me he is like a surfer who loved the waves but also, as time went by, would also train himself to direct the waves of the ocean to explore the endless waters...

In his exploring he trained himself to overcome fear of pain quickly as he believed that it was pain that gave him that quality of experience. It is difficult to understand and accept this , but I love his saying:  "You can recognise a man on the path to God by the scars in his heart...

I started by his quote: "Who gets up early to discover the moment light beings?". When I first read it, I thought he just means inner light, etc. But as I discovered the endless amount of effort that he put into his work I realised, he must be getting up very early in the morning just to do that.