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.

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 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.

I think my life is tremendously interesting, and surely, other people do too.

If 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.

[Rumi] is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity... like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral.