If you teach three university courses a day, you need something to turn your mind off.
Coleman BarksIf you think there's an important difference between being a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or a Muslim or a Buddhist, then you're making a division between your heart, what you love with, and the way you act in the world.
Coleman BarksI had been a kind of natural mystic my whole life, growing up there in Tennessee next to the river. Somehow, that was important for my consciousness. I still don't study [mysticism]. I just wait for experiences.
Coleman BarksLonging becomes more poignant if in the distance you can't tell whether your friend is going away or coming back. The pushing away pulls you in.
Coleman BarksWhat I deeply want... is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers, part of what John Keats called our soul-making, that process that is both collective and uniquely individual, that happens outside time and space and inside, that is the ocean we all inhabit and each singular droplet-self.
Coleman Barks