Quotes from Coleman Barks

Rumi tells of Solomon's practice of building each dawn a place made of intention and compassion and sohbet (mystical conversation). He calls it the "far mosque." Solomon goes there to listen to the plants, the new ones that come up each morning. They tell him of their medicinal qualities, their potential for health, and also the dangers of poisoning.

THE HUSK AND CORE OF MASCULINITY Masculinity has a core of clarity, which does not act from anger or greed or sensuality, and a husk, which does. The virile center that listens within takes pleasure in obeying that truth. Nobility of spirit, the true spontaneous energy of your life, comes as you abandon other motives and move only when you feel the majesty that commands and is the delight of the self. Remember Ayaz crushing the king's pearl!

I offer no proof other than my whole life and your whole life as they dissolve in each other as we read or speak, as we watch or dance, as we play or sing, as we walk from being indoors to being out.

I like to hope that Rumi's poems, even in translation, carry the essence of the transforming friendship of Rumi and Shams, that the sun can reappear, whole and radiant in any one of us at any moment.

The world's longest, as far as I know, ghazal ("Bowls of Food") in its wandering wonders what's hidden in language, in the talk of plants, and in the moment, which, it says, is an embryo inside an eggshell that shatters into birth to become birdsong, and God! Such an astonishing image for the transformative edge of the present.

There was also more practical inquiry. How should I make a living? How do I get my relatives out of my house? Could you help me postpone payment of this loan? The dervishes had jobs in the workday world: mason, weaver, bookbinder, grocer, hatmaker, tailor, carpenter. They were craftsmen and -women, not renunciates of everyday life, but affirmative makers and ecstatics. Some people call them sufis, or mystics. I say they're on the way of the heart.