The mystics always say that the experience they're talking about is ineffable, that you can't say it. Rumi was asked one time why he talked so much about silence. He said, "The radiant one inside me has never said a word."
Coleman BarksI had never heard of Rumi until Robert Bly handed me this book and he said, ah, โThese poems need to be released from their cages.โ
Coleman BarksWhen 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.
Coleman BarksI like to walk around my neighborhood, late in the afternoon. I sometimes wind up at the wonderful, old Shell station that's been changed into a coffee shop. Right where Johnny used to change my oil, I have a latte and take out my little book bag. It doesn't sound very austere.
Coleman BarksIt's such a foolish thing to argue about names, when what we're doing is all one thing.
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