[ENCORE EPISODE] Coleman Barks: Rumi, Grace, and Human Friendship

This encore edition is a tribute to Coleman Barks, who at 88 years of age died on February

23, 2026.

In addition to being a world-renowned poet, Coleman was a mystic, a lover of music literature

and life, and a friend.

His roomy translations, from the heart, find a home in our hearts, and his voice, warm

and resounding, stays with us.

Today, my guest is Coleman Barks.

Coleman Barks is a leading scholar and translator of the 13th century Persian mystic, Jalala

Dean Rumi.

He taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia for 30 years, and is

the author of numerous Rumi translations, and has been a student of Sufism since 1977.

His work with Rumi was the subject of an hour-long segment in Bill Moyer's Language of Life

series on PBS.

With Sounds True, Coleman Barks has released the audio programs, I Want Burning, the

ecstatic world of Rumi, Hafiz, and Lala, a CD called Rumi, Voice of Longing, and also

a brand-new, beautiful, three-CD collection, which is a collaboration between Coleman

Barks and cellist David Darling, it's called Just Being Here, Rumi and Human Friendship.

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Coleman Barks and I spoke about the relationship

between Rumi and his teacher, whom he called the friend, Shams of Tabriz, and how Coleman

received Insight into this friendship based on his own relationship with a Sufi teacher

named Uru Bawa, Bawa Muhayyadin.

We also spoke about how Coleman first began translating Rumi, and how the translation process

involves Coleman falling into a type of trance as part of the process.

Finally, Coleman and I spoke about Grace, and as part of our conversation, we listened

to some new pieces from the reporting, Just Being Here, Rumi and Human Friendship.

Here's my very heart-opening conversation with Coleman Barks.

Coleman, I want to begin just by saying that I'm so happy to be speaking with you, because

even though we've known each other for a long time, I've never had the chance to have

this kind of conversation with you about your work.

So thank you.

You're welcome.

Thank you.

To begin with, I wanted to talk a little bit about the process of translation and your

process, what you go through when you take a poem, a poem that was originally written

in Persian, and then translated into English by somebody else, and then you turn it into

a Coleman Barks translation.

Can you tell us how that process goes for you?

Well, it's a little mysterious.

I go into a kind of a trance, reading the poem in its scholarly translation, and try

to, well, it's no, nothing marvelous about it, just a kind of a trance that any reading

involves, where I try to feel what spiritual information is trying to come through Rumi's

images, and then I try to put that into an American free verse poem in the tradition of

Walt Whitman and many others.

So that is the general linaments of the process.

Do you ever have a concern, you know, how much of this is Coleman, and how much of this

is Rumi, and am I taking too much poetic license here?

I mean, how do you sort that out?

I try to, I don't make it up images, so I take his images and then try to expand on them.

This is not poetry that is word for word, of course, and it's, you wouldn't call it

even faithful, because I don't know the original language, you know.

I don't know far see, I did not hear Rumi's name until I was 39 years old, way too old to

learn the language, and besides, I'm lazy, you know.

So I just love the medium that I go into to do this work.

It feels like a different kind of something outside the mind, call it the heart of the soul,

but it's somewhere different than my ordinary mentality, and it just gives me great pleasure

to be able to enter that region of consciousness.

It feels like I'm almost being able to breathe underwater, you know, just some kind of,

it is a breathing way of a new way of sort of being in the rapture of being in a body.

You know, Rumi says it's just being sentient and in a form in a body is cause for great,

great joy, and I agree with that, you know, I somehow, that's part is in my DNA, I just

love being alive, and Rumi did too.

And I think that's why we gravitate toward him because he restores the ecstatic dimension

of consciousness, and we may have forgotten about that some.

Now when you say that you don't make up images, but you work with the images that are in

the original, I would think it would be tempting that, you know, one image leads to another

image, leads to, I mean, they can cascade.

Yeah, that's the form of his oats, his gazales.

They are just one image after another, usually, and they each are expounding them, some kind

of psychic process, like emptiness, or whatever the mouth flying into the flame means, you

know, that disappearing into one's love, and he is amazing and exfoliating the imagery

of that, that idea of surrender.

And yeah, but I don't help him, I don't make up the images with him, you know, I may

be guilty of that sometime, but I can't think of one right now.

Now, you mentioned that you didn't even hear Rumi's name till you were in your late

30s, and I'm curious when you know, when you heard his name or you read your first Rumi

poem, did you immediately go up into flames or something like that?

I mean, the karma of your life was about to be forever changed.

Hmm, that's certainly true, but not exactly the first one.

That was at a Robert Blaya conference where he thought it would be a great afternoon

writing exercise to take a Rumi poem in a scholarly translation and refaith praise it

into preverse.

And so we did that for an afternoon, and he gave me the book, he said, these poems need

to be released from their cages, meaning the cages of the scholarly language, and made

more alive and more free, and I've been trying to do that now for 34 years.

But it was after I got back to Athens, Georgia, and got to working alone with the poems that

I really felt the freedom, and something very new was happening, and also something very

old and deeply familiar to me.

I don't know how to explain that, but that's the way it felt.

And it was just like a huge form of relaxation, you know, for it felt like.

I'm curious if there was a moment when it dawned on you.

I'm going to be spending a lot of time working on these poems.

This is really going to become the focus of my life.

I worked on them just as a practice for seven years before I even thought of publishing

them.

You know, it didn't occur to me that there would be an audience for this, but maybe that's

not entirely true, but it was in the back of my mind, I guess, but I didn't publish

your book till from 1976 when I started to 1984 when Open Secret came out.

Then it became apparent that these were useful to people, and so, well, I was going to keep

doing it anyway, but it's a different thing when you have an audience for you, what you

do, and you're solid to Houdina.

And then finally, Harper Collins got hold of it in 1995, and they're about a million

and a half copies have been sold, so it's a publishing phenomenon that nobody quite

understands.

Now, I'm interested you said something that it's different when you're aware of an audience

or there's an audience for what you're doing, what changed?

What changed once it was clear that there was an audience for these translations?

Uh-huh.

Well, I got some very educated feedback and some beautiful critique by people who know

this material and these states of awareness much better than I do, you know?

So I now found a Sufi teacher too through doing this work, but what I was thinking about

was a pure voliate con gave these poems a good reading, and they said, you know, the

poems used to be more sensual and more sexual, but now they don't seem to be that way.

And I said, yeah, that was because I was more sensual and sexual when I was doing them.

So there, you know, of course, the voice of the translator does come through.

I have to use my own experience and my own voice to do these translations.

And what I try to do, of course, is to make a valid and lively point in American English.

And I'm not interested in a scholarly translation, and I'm very grateful to the scholars because

they have allowed me to do this work, but I can't continue that kind of language, you

know, I have to make it more alive, more vibrant.

Now you said, Coleman, that when you started doing these translations of the Rumi poems,

there was a sense of familiarity and a relaxation into the process.

And I'm curious in your inner world, what your relationship with Rumi and Shams feels

like?

That's good.

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Take your time.

I'm happy to wait for the truth.

Rumi and Shams in my own life.

Yeah, what your relationships like inside of you with them?

Do they feel like legends?

Do they feel like friends that you have, like actual, I mean, what's it feel like inside?

More like that.

My teacher, Bawa Muhaidin once told me, he said, you know, Rumi and Shams are to me talking

about it himself, are not literary figures, they are not people in a book.

I know them, he said, like I know you.

And so that gave me a sense of, he allowed me, I think, entrance into the vast identity

of those two and that friendship, somehow, if I hadn't met him, it wouldn't be the same.

My access to the poems would not be as intimate as it feels now, I'm glad you asked

that.

And tell me a little bit, when did you meet Bawa Muhaidin?

Well, I met him in a dream, you know, and then a year and a half later I met him in

this more solid world, but I have had several pre-cognitive dreams.

And it's just to me a mysterious fact of existence that the mind and dream consciousness

can go forward in time and see something, a scene, maybe, that will become apparent on

the retina two years afterward.

I don't know how that happens, but it has been my experience, not a lot of times, but it

has happened.

And so that's what happened with him, that he was able to come to me in dream consciousness.

And the dreams became lucid, that I woke up inside the dream and became aware that I

was dreaming, but I was still asleep.

And in the dream that I met him, I was sleeping out on a bluff above the Tennessee River where

I grew up, and where the school was that I grew up at, and my father was a headmaster.

And just five miles north of Chattanooga on the Tennessee River.

And it was night, and I woke up inside the dream and a ball of light rose from William's

island, and came over me, and clarified from the inside out.

And a man was sitting in there, and he was head bowed and white shawl over his head.

And he raised his head, and he said, I love you, and I said, I love you too.

And the whole landscape filled with dew, or the moisture, and the moisture somehow was

love.

It was just spread out through the landscape, I felt the process of the dew forming.

This is all very mysterious.

And it did, as far as I know, happen to me.

And then a year and a half to later, I met him in Philadelphia, and he said, this room

we've worked that it had to be done.

And I assume that that meant that he was going to help me with it, because I think he has

in some mysterious way been part of the process.

So.

Did you know when you had the dream that it was an important dream?

Oh, gosh, yeah.

Yeah.

I started writing my dreams down in the early 1970s, and I kept, I now have about 90 dream

notebooks.

And I was still writing down.

And yet it felt like I've never had a man appear in a ball of light before.

And never in no sense, either.

And he could visit me in the dreams, and he did.

And I would go up to Philadelphia and start telling him the dream.

And he would say, you don't need to tell me that.

I was there, you know.

So he had the ability to do that.

There are people who are on other planes of existence.

And I was got really lucky and met one of them.

After you had the dream, did you seek him out?

Did you?

No, no.

No.

So it just by chance happened that a year and a half later you met this person, and we're

like guys.

Well, it was somewhat connected to this work very much.

I sent some of these versions, translations to a friend of mine who was teaching law at

Rutgers University at Camden, the Camden division.

And he read them to his torts class.

And the man came up out of the audience, and Jonathan Granoff, and Jonathan said, who

did those poems?

And Milner Ball gave Jonathan my name, and Jonathan started writing to me.

And he said, there's this teacher in Philadelphia that I think you should meet.

And so on one poetry reading, John, up there I stopped into Philadelphia and met Jonathan

and then met this teacher, and I realized that he was the one in my dream.

And nobody would know that except myself and him, but he's such a distinctive looking

person with his magnificent, deep eyes that he's very recognizable.

So that's the way that actually the meeting actually happened.

Did you feel there was something in your relationship with Bawa Muha'yadin that was similar

to the relationship between Rumi and Choms, and that that's part of what gave you an

appreciation of that, a teacher student dynamic?

It feels very deep and still feels deep, and it like a, at least since he died in 1986,

it's just like it's become more like a friendship than a teacher student, so yeah, I do feel

that, and it's a lot to claim, but I feel that, you know.

Well it's wonderful that you bring up the friendship word you've just published through

sounds through a three CD collection along with David Darling, the cellist, called Just

Being Here, Rumi and Human Friendship, and in just a moment I want to hear a piece from

that three CD collection, but maybe you could say a few words as a way of introduction about

this central idea of friendship, Rumi and human friendship.

Well, he said that friendship can change from being a relationship.

It is that, it's very specific, and Choms of Tabrees is an actual person, and from an actual

town, and it is a specific relationship, but it can widen and broaden out to include and

become a kind of atmosphere that one walks within.

In one of his startling metaphors, he said, what was just a person is now a holiday without

limits.

You know, suddenly the person and the relationship becomes just something like a day off,

just a great sense of freedom and expansion, like a holiday.

So in another place he said that Choms had become what anybody says, just any conversation

going on is like he's overhearing his beloved, it's become part of the fabric of his life.

So maybe we should hear part of that three CD set.

Yeah, and I do think you might have some pre-cognitive abilities as well, because the track

that I've queued up, which you wouldn't know, is called holiday without limits, and this

is from the exactly, from just being here, Rumi and human friendship, let's listen.

Holiday without limits.

Going into battle, we carry no shield, playing in concert, unaware of the beat, or the

melody, we have become grains in the ground underfoot, fold on fold, layers of love, nothing

else, obliterated.

Because when the eye medicine is no longer even a powder, then it can curasite.

An accident gradually gets accepted as the thing that needed to happen, sickness melts

into health.

There is nothing worse than staying congealed.

Let your liver dissolve to blood, let your heart break into such tiny pieces that cannot

be found, the moon or wanes.

Then for three days, you could say that there is no moon.

That is the moon that has drawn so close to the sun, it is nowhere.

And everywhere, send us someone who can sing music for the soul, though we know such

longing cannot rise from a loot or a tambourine, not from the sun or Venus or any

star.

As day comes, give back the night fantasy things you stole, admit your arrogance as the

stars do at dawn.

When the sun goes down, Venus begins bragging, claiming light, arguing her loveliness

over the moons.

Jupiter lifts a gold coin from his bag, Mars shows the sharpness of his blade to Saturn.

Mercury sits on a high seat and gives himself successive titles.

That is how it goes.

In the middle of the night, then dawn, Jupiter is suddenly poor.

Stars in Saturn have no plans, Venus and the moon run away, broken and terrified.

Then the sun within the sun enters, and this night and day talk seems a meaningless

invention, the lighting business.

A true holy day for a man or a woman is the one when they bring themselves as the sacrifice.

When shams show him his light from nowhere, I felt a holiday without limits begin, where

once was just a person, a true holy day for a man or a woman.

Venus is the one when they bring themselves as the sacrifice, when shams show him his

light from nowhere, I felt a holiday without limits begin.

There once was just a person.

Colmanit seems to me that it has so many layers of meaning that you created a collection

of translations with music on Rumi and human friendship with someone who is in fact a dear

friend of yours, David Darling, musician.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that process of working together and how

it informed a record on friendship.

David Darling and I have for a long time wanted to make something with the cello and his

music and Rumi's poetry and maybe some of my own poetry that has a kind of orchestral

feel to something more vast than the single instrument.

He has created this music and he would put something on like a track and then I would

just feel what point might go with that music and it seems to work out pretty well.

Sometimes it would happen that way and sometimes I would start reading the poem and he would

put the music with it but it worked both ways for first the boards, then the music, then

the music and vice versa.

But his delight in the process and the poetry and of course in the music is apparent throughout.

That great freshness and joyfulness about him and I just really enjoy his presence and

I think he likes to be hang out with me too.

So we enjoy being in his sound studio and woods of Connecticut and putting this together

is and it was not work.

It was very much play and we love doing it.

I think part of what's underneath my question is I'd love to understand more what friendship

means to you, Coleman Barks, part of the project you're exploring Rumi and human friendship.

But I'm also interested in knowing what it means for you.

Well, I mean, what can you say?

It's the opening of the heart and then sometimes feeling a new way of being that is,

as I say in the notes, a new way of breathing by me.

That's not so fearful and not so sad.

When you meet a new friend, the world has more light in it and things become more spontaneous

and more pull of laughing and freedom and novelty somehow.

And I hope all that is apparent in this 3 CD set.

I hope it is, yeah.

One of the comments you made in the liner notes that I thought was interesting was

you were talking about how in Rumi's poetry the sun is often a central image in understanding human friendship.

Shams means the sun.

So whenever sunlight is mentioned or the dawn coming up, it's always a reference to Shams

and his friendship and his love for him and their love for each other.

It's one of the great images.

It's like a little secret, he sells, always, and his poems.

That the world is always asking you to open up and be more loving.

And the candle is a tecton, the bite's burning is telling you the moth

by going into the candles, telling you to do that.

The music is that wine is always telling you to give up the bouquet and the names

and all of you can just run wild and anonymous through the human brain.

And at the end of a poem I didn't put in this collection, he says everything begs

with the silent rocks for you to be flung out like light over this plain

the presence of Shams to breeze.

So light itself and probably seeing itself and hearing and seeing.

Just being alive is for him the presence of the friend, the friendship, the beloved.

And you can't say much about that mystery, but it's certainly central to whatever religion is in these poems.

It's a religion of deep friendship and light and music too.

Often the image of a flute comes in and the emptiness that has to happen for the flute to make music.

And then the emptiness of the flute player and those two emptiness are somehow related to love

and the merging of the emptiness are related to this new kind of love that Rumi and Shams are bringing to us.

I think it's new even though it's eight centuries old.

I don't know that we've lived it out yet.

It's a new kind of way of being and a new depth of inwardness and joy and sharing.

But when you try to start talking about it, it just disappears.

So the best way to talk about it is through poetry and with music.

So let's listen to another one.

Okay, we'll listen to a piece this is called Raggedness.

And this is also from just being here Rumi and human friendship.

Maybe you can introduce it for us.

Well, this is a lot of changes that happened in a student teacher relationship.

You will see I was dead and then alive.

So it's all about the continuous changing nature of a relationship where maybe a teacher is involved.

But nobody knows who is a student who is a teacher.

It keeps changing back and forth.

Okay, let's hear it.

I was dead.

Then alive.

Weeping.

Then laughing.

The power of love came into me.

And I became fierce like a lion.

Then tender.

Like the evening star.

He said you're not mad enough.

You don't belong in this house.

I went wild and had to be tied up.

He said still not wild enough to stay with us.

I broke through another layer into joyfulness.

He said it's not enough.

I died.

He said you're a clever little man full of fantasy and doubting.

I plucked out my feathers and became a fool.

He said now you're the candle for this assembly.

But I'm no candle.

Look.

I'm scattered smoke.

He said you are the shake, the guide.

But I'm not a teacher.

I have no power.

He said you already have wings.

I cannot give you wings.

But I wanted his wings.

I felt like some flightless chicken.

Then new events said to me don't move.

A sublime generosity is coming toward you.

And old love said,

stay with me.

I said I will.

You are the fountain of the sun's light.

I am a willow shadow on the ground.

You make my raggedness silky.

I was dead.

Then alive.

I was dead.

I was dead.

I was dead.

I was dead.

I was dead.

Then alive.

Weeping.

Then laughing.

The power of love came into me.

And I became fierce like a lion.

Then tender.

Like the evening star.

You are the fountain of the sun's light.

I am a willow shadow on the ground.

You make my raggedness silky.

I love that.

It is so beautiful, Coleman.

The image of the flowing shadow on the ground has been silky.

It is just gorgeously fresh, isn't it?

Yes.

So, so new.

One of the things I would love to hear more about if it is okay.

I have never heard you talk really about your relationship with Bawa Muayyadin.

Guru Bawa is easier to say that.

And you have told us now a little bit about the initial meeting in the dream and then

when you first saw him.

But I am wondering how that relationship progressed for you and then at the time of his death and now after his death

20 plus years, what that is all like for you.

He used to come in dreams after he died.

But he hasn't in several years now.

I don't know what that means.

But I still feel very close to him and I love to go to visit his tomb there

where he is buried outside of Philadelphia.

It feels very good to be there.

Let's see.

He came in a dream once and told me he was teaching me how to take tiny little sips out of a glass of water I think.

And so tiny is like a little bee or butterfly or something drinking.

And I said, what does this mean?

And he says, you want to be wise too quickly.

Don't just take one sip of wisdom and assimilate that.

And so that was good advice.

And don't be in a hurry with wisdom.

Just take it, don't get greedy with it.

I don't know that I've learned that yet.

And another in the same dream he was teaching me to bow all the way down.

He said, my back was a little stiff.

I needed to bow all the way down.

So I think I know what that means.

A little too much pride.

And so I need to do the full prostration, don't I?

Well, I'm sure other incidents would occur to me as well, but they're just not right now.

It gives me a feeling, thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

You mentioned Coleman in your own writing and translation of Rumi's poetry that you began as a practice.

And I'm curious if you have any suggestions for people in terms of listening to your readings or engaging with your Rumi translations, the books, how they would approach it as a type of practice.

Hmm.

I have a little practice that I have done and didn't today, but I'd like to listen to Stephen Mitchell's translations of Rilco.

You know, and have the text there of the Dueno allergies out in front of me.

So I'd listen to Stephen read his translations of them.

And I'd just wait with a blank piece of paper to see what might come to me.

Ideas of for writing or for my life or whatever.

And that seems to be to listen to poetry.

And with the text there and a blank piece of paper next to that, that, you know, just to see what you might want to put down as inspiration from the poetry being read out loud.

There's a great connection, I think, between a voice saying the poem and your eardrum and your writing ability too.

So it's a very intimate thing going on, I think, between a spoken voice and a listening ear, you know.

Well, Rumi has a point about listening. He says, you should give more of your time to the deep listening.

And there's an implied, a sort of practice there that you can go deeper into your own inwardness, your own soul and heart.

And by listening.

And I don't really have a practice of except writing the poetry, my own and these rephrasing of Rumi.

That's the only thing that I'm really faithfully attentive to every day.

I don't do meditation.

Oh, 20 minutes here and there, but not so you'd call it a practice, but I do the writing every day.

I give time to that and I would recommend anybody that wants to do writing that you just don't wait to be inspired, try to coax inspiration out of you.

And you can do that by listening to any number of sounds, true productions.

All right, Coleman.

Now, you know, I want to end actually by listening to a piece from one of my favorite CDs, Coleman.

This is from God almost 20 years ago that we recorded this 15 years ago.

It's called I Want Burning, the ecstatic world of Rumi Hafis and Lala.

In just a moment we'll hear that, but before we do, I want to say how happy I am to be speaking with you, especially some of our listeners may know that some people may not.

But you had a stroke.

I did in February.

Yeah, I mean less than a year ago and you're doing so fabulously.

Yeah, I can hear glitches and halts in my voice and I'm sorry about that, but it's just the way of the world, the way of the body.

But I'm very, very lucky to be able to speak with any fluency at all and I'm proud to be here.

I'm wondering if the experience changed you in any way. I mean, all experience changes us, but how does experience change you?

It makes me feel more fragile, more broken, open, less glial, but I say less and less proud of myself.

It ought to make things funny here, but I don't think it does.

You know, having a stroke is a strange experience because it doesn't hurt, you know.

You don't know you're having it unless you're having to be as I was talking on the phone to my sweetie Lisa Star.

And I was just talking and became unintelligible, you know.

So immediately I drove myself to the emergency room and checked myself in and got that treatment called TPA, I think, but only 2% of the stroke victims get there in time to have.

But it helps you to recuperate and recover much better than you would otherwise.

So I've been very fortunate and that's part of my sense of things to change sense of that appeal.

I'm just very lucky and I kind of get sort of quiet, a little quieter than it was before.

And I, at least I hear it in my voice and I can sure the people listening to hear the difference between the recorded voice before the stroke and my voice now.

But it's very, very minor, very minor problem.

It's very minor and I feel so happy that 6 months later.

You know, it's curious because you mentioned when Guru Bawa came to you in a dream that you felt I was so lucky.

And here you were able to drive yourself immediately and receive a treatment that only 2% of the, I feel so lucky.

And I mean, do you think, I mean, is luck just what it is on face value?

I mean, I would don't mind using the word grace.

You know, it's a gift.

I don't know what kind of presence is we're living within, but I feel the gift of that more precious to me because of this stroke.

I think the grace is just always happening. It feels like to me.

And that's certainly what Rumi's poetry is.

It's just filled with that sense of gratitude and gracefulness and sense of kind of hilarity about the whole thing.

Anyway, let's hear the whole thing.

This is a piece that's called like this.

Oh yeah.

I just love this piece and this whole actual recording.

It's a live recording where you were performing down in Santa Fe.

And I often refer to this production, I want burning the ecstatic world of Rumi Huffice and Lala as a little jewel.

The whole CD is a little jewel. Let's listen.

One thing Rumi does, it's amazing.

He talks about the terms of spirituality and he grounds them in the reality of an experience.

He says that all the terms like spirit and guide and all those things, they have their God's fragrance.

Those things have a refer to something experiential as real as a friend of yours who thought you thought was out of town,

surprising you by putting his head around the corner of your door.

Is that real?

If anyone asks you how the perfect satisfaction of all our sexual wanting will look,

lift your face and say, like this.

When someone mentions the gracefulness of the night sky, climb up on the roof and dance and say, like this,

if you want to know what spirit means or what God's fragrance is,

lean your head toward him or her.

Keep your face there close, like this.

When someone quotes the old poetic image about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,

slowly loosen not by not the strings of your world, like this.

If anyone wants to know how Jesus raised the dead, don't try to explain the miracle.

Kiss me on the lips, like this, like this.

When someone asks what it means to die for love, point here.

If someone asks how tall I am, frown, and measure with your fingers the space between the creases on your forehead,

this tall.

The soul sometimes leaves the body and then returns.

When someone doesn't believe that, walk back into my house like this.

When lovers moan, they're telling our story like this.

I am a sky where spirits live, stare into this deepening blue,

while the breeze says a secret like this.

When someone asks what there is to do, light the candle in his hand,

like this, how did Joseph's scent come to Jacob?

How did Jacob's side return?

A little wind cleans the eyes, like this.

When Charms comes back from debris, he'll put just his head around the edge of the door to surprise us, like this.

And Coleman, just like this, this moment sharing this time with you, I just want to thank you so much for being here with me,

for all of the work that you've done really to bring Rumi to so many of us.

I mean, there are no words to describe how valuable it is.

And thank you for your work.

Doing such a beautiful job on this 3CD set.

It's just this perfectly done, very lovingly done.

And so thanks for that, baby.

Thank you.

And I love you, okay.

Coleman barks in David Darling, recently releasing a 3CD collection with sounds true called Just Being Here.

Rumi and Human Friendship, a beautiful, beautiful collection.

As well with Coleman barks sounds true, has two previous releases.

We just heard from I Want Burning, the ecstatic world of Rumi Hafiz and Lala,

and also a previous release called Rumi Voice of Longing that has Marcus Wise on the Tabla and David Wetzton on Sitar.

Coleman, God bless you. Thank you so much.

I like you.

Be well.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

See you later.

Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge.

You can read a full transcript of today's interview at SoundsTrue.com forward slash podcast.

And if you're interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app.

And also, if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave insights at the Edge of Review.

I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you,

and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program.

Working together, I believe, we can create a kinder and wiser world.

SoundsTrue.com, waking up the world.