Coleman Barks Quotes

Ramana Maharshi and Rumi would agree: the joy of being human is in uncovering the core we already are, the treasure buried in the ruin.

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.

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

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

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.

But that is just half the story.
The Gospel of Thomas has what I take to be the full text.

The Kingdom of God is within you
and all around you.


Split a piece of wood. I am there.
Lift up a stone, and you will find me there.

The holiest thing then, the Kingdom, is inside,
the observing consciousness, the deep core of being,
and outside, the Brown Thrasher, the little girl skipping
over the squares of the sidewalk, the universe itself
that, so far as we know is unlimited.

It would be best here to start singing and dancing
for the spacious joy of inside and outside.

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

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

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

I like to walk around my neighborhood, late in the afternoon. I sometimes wind up at the wonderful, old Shell station that's been changed into a coffee shop. Right where Johnny used to change my oil, I have a latte and take out my little book bag. It doesn't sound very austere.

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

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.

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.

[Rumi] is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity ... like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral ...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I have no name for what circles so perfectly.

It's a beautiful lucid dream that has language that I can fiddle with.

WHAT WAS TOLD, THAT
What was said to the rose that made it open was said to me here in my chest.
What was told the cypress that made it strong and straight, what was
whispered the jasmine so it is what it is, whatever made sugarcane sweet, whatever
was said to the inhabitants of the town of Chigil in Turkestan that makes them
so handsome, whatever lets the pomegranate flower blush like a human face, that is
being said to me now. I blush. Whatever put eloquence in language, that's happening here.
The great warehouse doors open; I fill with gratitude, chewing a piece of sugarcane,
in love with the one to whom every that belongs!

It's such a foolish thing to argue about names, when what we're doing is all one thing.

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.

When you meet a new friend, the world has more light in it, doesn't it? Things become more spontaneous, and more full of laughing and freedom and novelty.

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.

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

If you think there's an important difference between being a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or a Muslim or a Buddhist, then you're making a division between your heart, what you love with, and the way you act in the world.

Everything is conversation.