Coleman Barks > Quotes

“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.”
― Coleman Barks

“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.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“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.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“A story has come down about Rumi: a woman asks if he would say something to her young boy about his eating too much of a particular kind of white-sugar candy. Rumi tells her to come back in two weeks. She does, and he tells her again to come in two weeks. She does, and he advises the child to cut down on sweets.

"Why did you not say this a month ago?"
"Because I had to see if I could resist having that candy for two weeks. I couldn't. Then I tried again and was successful. Only now can I tell him to try not to have so much.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“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”
― Coleman Barks, Bridge to the Soul: Journeys Into the Music and Silence of the Heart

“If you want what visible reality
can give, you're an employee.
If you want the unseen world,
you're not living your truth.
Both wishes are foolish,
but you'll be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want is
love's confusing joy.”
― Coleman Barks Essential Rumi

“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!”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“…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.”
― Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi

“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.”
― Coleman Barks

“I have no name for what circles so perfectly.”
― Coleman Barks, The Essential 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”
― Coleman Barks

“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.”
― Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi

“Fold within fold, the beloved
drowns in its own being. This world
is drenched with that drowning.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“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”
― Coleman Barks, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“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.”
― Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi

“Nothing can save us. All this sweetness dies and rots.”
― Coleman Barks

“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.”
― Coleman Barks

“I have no name for what circles so perfectly”
― Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi

“The great human questions arose. What is the purpose of desire? What is a dream? A song? How do we know the depth of silence in another human being? What is the heart? What is it to be a true human being? What is the source of the universe and how do these individual awarenesses connect to that? They asked the Faustian question in many guises: What is it at bottom that holds the world together? How do we balance surrender and discipline? This high level of continuous question-and-answer permeated the poetry and music, the movement, and each activity of the community. They knew that answers might not come in discursive form, but rather in music, in image, in dream, and in the events of life as they occur.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“Fana is what opens our wings, what makes boredom and hurt disappear. We break to pieces inside it, dancing and perfectly free. We are the dreamer streaming into the loving nowhere of night. Rapt, we are the devouring worm who, through grace, becomes an entire orchard, the wholeness of the trunks, the leaves, the fruit, and the growing. Fana is the dissolution just before our commotion and mad night prayers become silence. Rumi often associates surrender with the joy of falling into the freedom of sleep.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“Love is the religion and the universe is the book.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“Build a far mosque where you can read your soul-book and listen to the dreams that grew in the night.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“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.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“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.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“The work of the dervish community was to open the heart, to explore the mystery of union, to fiercely search for and try to say truth, and to celebrate the glory and difficulty of being in a human incarnation. To these ends, they used silence and song, poetry, meditation, stories, discourse, and jokes. They fasted and feasted. They walked together and watched the animals. Animal behavior was a kind of scripture they studied. They cooked, and they worked in the garden. They tended orchards and vineyards.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“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.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“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.”
― Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi

“No one can say what the inner life is, but poetry tries to, and no one can say what poetry is, but let's be bold and claim that there are two major streamings in consciousness, particularly in the ecstatic life, and in Rumi's poetry: call them fana and baqa, Arabic words that refer to the play and intersection of human with divine.

Rumi's poetry occurs in that opening, a dervish doorway these energies move through in either direction. A movement out, a movement in. Fana is the streaming that moves from the human out into mystery-the annihilation, the orgasmic expansion, the dissolving swoon into the all. The gnat becomes buttermilk; a chickpea disappears into the flavor of the soup; a dead mule decays into salt flat; the infant turns to the breast. These wild and boundaryless absorptions are the images and the kind of poem Rumi is most well known for, a drunken clairvoyant tavern voice that announces, "Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“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!”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“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.”
― Coleman Barks