We watch a sunlight dust dance,
but nobody knows what music those particles hear.

Each of us has a secret companion musician to dance to.
Unique rhythmic play, a motion in the street
that we alone know and hear.

-- Rumi
(in Rumi: The Big Red Book,
translated by Coleman Barks)

     We must not be led by the mind, but by a spontaneity in the heart-center, the soul, which is always starting out, beginning again.  It cannot be said with words.  Music and song do better.

-- Coleman Barks
(in Rumi:  The Big Red Book)

     It was as if by becoming a musician and Music Master he had chosen music as one of the ways toward man's highest goal, inner freedom, purity, perfection, and as though ever since making that choice he had done nothing but let himself be more and more permeated, transformed, purified by music . . . so that he was now only a symbol, or rather a manifestation, a personification of music.

-- Hermann Hesse
(from The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi),
translated by Richard and Clara Winston)

What is praised is one, so the praise is one too,
many jugs being poured into a huge basin.
All religions, all this singing, one song.

-- Rumi
(in A Year with Rumi,
translated by Coleman Barks)