When you meet a new friend, the world has more light in it, doesn't it? Things become more spontaneous, and more full of laughing and freedom and novelty.

What 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.

I had never heard of Rumi until Robert Bly handed me this book and he said, ah, “These poems need to be released from their cages.”

Anything you grab hold of on the bank breaks with the river's pressure. When you do things from your soul, the river itself moves through you. Freshness and a deep joy are signs of the current.

It's such a foolish thing to argue about names, when what we're doing is all one thing.

Just being sentient and in a body with the sun coming up is a state of rapture.

If you teach three university courses a day, you need something to turn your mind off.