The Purity of Desire Quotes

“Good poetry, like music or a sweet touch, can doctor us up, be an antidote for an hour or longer, help us to get dressed for another day--combat the blues enough to mount the horse again; and maybe even aid in laying down the insidious weight of some old grudge or deep-rooted anxiety. Herein enters Rumi.”
― Daniel Ladinsky, The Purity of Desire: 100 Poems Inspired by Rumi

“It is for that moment when I might steady you so you don’t fall, I have added my blood to an inkwell. Indelible now will be my mark on history’s canvas and upon any sincere debate of God where reason finally prevails. And when you have the strength, you too may find another to hold up. They lean against each other in a storm, those cypresses grown tall together…through the years. If they had not trusted and protected one another the way they do, they would not have survived and given us their grace and shade—a place for our eyes to meet. Our friendship can be like this: a needed lift, a sail, a pillar, a springboard to taste the unfathomable. It is to tend you as you come into being, like a new world, that causes me to stay, gives me a purpose. Of course I thank you for that…for letting me help.”
― Rumi, The Purity of Desire: 100 Poems Inspired by Rumi

“Be like the cat, so alive after the mouse, never wondering or questioning why,

when there is really only God, only God...
touching our

paws.”
― Rumi, The Purity of Desire: 100 Poems Inspired by Rumi

“The Body is Like Mary

The body is like Mary, and each of us has a Jesus inside.
Who is not in labour, holy labour? Every creature is.

See the value of true art, when the earth or a soul
is in the mood to create beauty;

for the witness might then for a moment know,
beyond any doubt, God is really there within,

so innocently drawing life from us with Her umbilical universe – infinite existence …

though also needing to be born. Yes, God also
needs to be born!

Birth from a hand’s loving touch. Birth from a song,
from a dance, breathing life into this world.

The body is like Mary, and each of us, each of us has a Christ within.”
― Daniel Ladinsky, The Purity of Desire: 100 Poems Inspired by Rumi