Longing becomes more poignant if in the distance you can't tell whether your friend is going away or coming back. The pushing away pulls you in.

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

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.

The 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."

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.

Longing becomes more poignant if in the distance you can't tell whether your friend is going away or coming back. The pushing away pulls you in.