Quotes from Coleman Barks

Anything you grab hold of on the bank breaks with the river's pressure. When you do things from your soul, the river itself moves through you. Freshness and a deep joy are signs of the current.

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.

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

A hand shifts our birdcages around. Some are brought closer. Some move apart. Do not try to reason it out. Be conscious of who draws you and who not.

MARY'S HIDING Before these possessions you love slip away, say what Mary said when she was surprised by Gabriel, I'll hide inside God. Naked in her room she saw a form of beauty that could give her new life. Like the sun coming up, or a rose as it opens. She leaped, as her habit was, out of herself into the divine presence. There was fire in the channel of her breath. Light and majesty came. I am smoke from that fire and proof of its existence, more than any external form.

As long as you have not set fire to everything you call yours, you are not alive. You are not here! Your happiness is not real.

Inhale autumn, long for spring

I've got some broken ducks. I need to get them in a row.

Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other' doesn't make sense any more.

A man once asked Rumi, "Why is it you talk so much about silence?" His answer: "The radiant one inside me has never said a word.

Solitude is a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.

From 'A Bowl Fallen From the Roof' Be quiet now and wait. It may be that the ocean one, the one we desire so to move into and become, desires us out here on land a little longer, going our sundry ways to the shore. -Rumi

We were all born by accident but this wandering caravan will make camp in perfection Forget the nonsense categories of there and here, race, nation, religion, starting point and destination You are soul, and you are love,... No more questions now as to what it is we're doing here

In the front yard lives the oldest thing around, a white oak That I used to say is my love for the world, That I now would just call love as it is. Belonging to nobody, no metaphor, the very.

the work of the (Muslim Sufi) dervish community was to open the heart, explore the mystery of union, to fiercely search for and try to say the truth, and to celebrate the glory and difficulty in being in human incarnation.

Fold within fold, the beloved drowns in its own being. This world is drenched with that drowning.

Little by little a person reaches forty and fifty and sixty, and feels more complete. God could've thrown full blown prophets flying through the cosmos in an instant.

Nothing can save us. All this sweetness dies and rots.

Water the fruit trees, and don't water the thorns. Be generous to what nurtures the spirit and God's luminous reason-light. Don't honor what causes dysentry and knotted up tumors.

I have no name for what circles so perfectly

Be loyal to your daily practice. Keep working. And keep knocking on the door. As you'll remember, it is said in one of Rumi's most pithy moments that the door we're knocking on opens from the inside.

We sometimes make spiderwebs of smoke and saliva, fragile though-packets Leave thinking to the one who gave intelligence Stop weaving and watch how the pattern improve

Love is the religion and the universe is the book.

Build a far mosque where you can read your soul-book and listen to the dreams that grew in the night.