There's some sort of exchange that goes on between human beings that is one of the highest things we do.

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.”

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.

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.

I think we all have a core that's ecstatic, that knows and that looks up in wonder. We all know that there are marvelous moments of eternity that just happen. We know them.

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.

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