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.
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 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