I am reading this right now. I purchased it for Rebecca a couple years ago for her birthday, and now I totally wish I had it for myself. I swear I want to quote every poem in this book and fill my Tumblr with Rumi. I can’t even handle it.

Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours,
but I couldn’t.

I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?

A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That’s how I hold your voice.

I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.

I saw you and became empty.
This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence!

The sky is blue. The world is a blind man
squatting on the road.

But whoever sees your emptiness
sees beyond blue and beyond the blind man.

A great soul hides like Muhammad, or Jesus,
moving through a crowd in a city
where no one knows him.

To praise is to praise
how one surrenders
to the emptiness.

To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.

So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where!
Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck
we could have. It’s a total waking up!

Why should we grieve that we’ve been sleeping?
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been unconscious.

We’re groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.

LOVE RESIDES not in learning*
    not in knowledge
    not in pages and pamphlets
Wherever the debates of men may lead
    that is not the lovers’ path

Love’s branches arch over pre-eternity
    and yes, its roots delve down forever
A tree resting not on soil
    nor trunk
    nor even Heaven’s throne

We deposed reason,
    punished passion with the lash —
    this reason and these morals
    were degrading to such glory

It’s like this:
    So long as you long
    you idolize longing.
Become the beloved
and put an end to longing
    The incessant hopes and fears
    of the sea-faring man
    float upon planks;
    but obliterate
    both planks and seaman
    and only submersion remains