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.”

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

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.

Just being sentient and in a body with the sun coming up is a state of rapture.

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.

The religions of the world are luminous in their individuality, and they have valuable social and soulmaking functions. Surely someday we will quit killing each other over their different strategies.

If you teach three university courses a day, you need something to turn your mind off.