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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.