Imagine the time the particle you are returns where it came from: the family darling comes home. Wine, without being contained in cups, is handed around. A red glint appears in the granite outcrop, and suddenly the whole cliff turns to rubies


Part of a load not rightly balanced, I spring loose in sleep from the cross of time and space, this waiting room. Knowing conscious decisions and personal memory are far too small a place to live, every human being streams at night into the loving nowhere...


Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't rush to study or read - take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.


In a mirror you see yourself, not the state of the mirror; the flute-player's breath makes music, not the flute. When you eventually see through the veil to how things really are, you'll shout: This is certainly not like we thought it was...


This world isn't a courtroom anymore. The time of judging who's drunk and who's sober, who's right or wrong, that's over. This caravan is led instead by a great delight - the simple joy that sits with us now. That is the grace.


Each being has a unique way of seeing, knowing, and saying that knowledge. What seems right to you is wrong for someone else, your poison is another's honey. Did you come here to unite or to sever, to love or to judge?


A great mutual embrace is always happening between what is eternal and what dies, between essence and accident. The rules are different for every case, but remember: The way you make love is the way god will be with you.


Lalla, you've wandered searching for your love so long, wearying yourself with efforts beyond your strength. Now at last, inside the walls of this body-house, inside the heart-shrine, you've finally discovered where it's always lived.



I didn't trust it but I drank it anyway, this wine of my own poetry. And it gave me the daring to take hold of the darkness and tear it down and cut it into little pieces. Look at this glowing day - what could be more beautiful or more sacred?



Keep walking... don't try to see through the distance - that's not for human beings. Move, but not the way fear makes you move. Turn as the earth and moon turn, circling what they love. Whatever circles comes from the centre.


Be friends with your burning. Burn up your thinking and your forms of expression. Those who pay attention to ways of behaving and talking are one sort - lovers who burn are another. The love religion has no code or doctrine - only god.


Some nights, stay up till dawn as the moon sometimes does for the sun. Be a full bucket, full of the dark way of the world, pouring yourself into light... an ecstatic seed planted anywhere on earth is proof of our loving.

- Mawlānā Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī