Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, sometimes known as Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi or just Rumi was a 13th century poet, theologian, jurist and Sufi mystic from from Persia. His spiritual importance has lasted seven centuries and transcends religious, ethnic, cultural and national boundaries. He’s one of the most popular and best-selling poets in the US, even though he lived 700 years ago. Even today, his words are powerful and clear. I’m sure you’ll find yourself enjoying him, even centuries after he lived.

• Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
• The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
• Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
• The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind I was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
• If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?
• Dance when you’re broken open. Dance if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.
• Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes around in another form.
• You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?
• When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
• Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.
• In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no one sees you, but sometimes, I do, and that sight becomes art.
• My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.
• Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.
• Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
• There’s a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled. You feel it, don’t you?
• This being human is a guest house. Each morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.