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.”
Coleman BarksThe 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 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 Barks