“Perfect. You came here just as I did when I left Tarbes—a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere in France with a single mosque—in search of knowledge and wisdom.
“What do you want?” he asked with a French accent.
What could Paulo say? The truth. Dancing dervishes.
The man laughed.
“Perfect. You came here just as I did when I left Tarbes—a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere in France with a single mosque—in search of knowledge and wisdom. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Do what I did when I found one of them. Spend a thousand and one days studying a poet, memorizing everything he wrote, answering any questions anyone ever has with the wisdom of his poems, and then you can begin your training. Because your voice will have begun to mix with that of the Enlightened One and the verses he wrote eight hundred years ago.”
“Rumi?”
The man bowed upon hearing the name. Paulo sat on the floor. “And how can I learn? I’ve already read much of his poetry, but I don’t understand how he put it into practice.”
