Poems are rough notations for the music we are.

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

My life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a progression from stage to stage; I wanted it to pass through one area after the next, leaving each behind, as music moves on from theme to theme, from tempo to tempo, playing each out to the end, completing each and leaving it behind, never tiring, never sleeping, forever wakeful, forever in the present.

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

Do not worry about saving these songs.
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it does not matter.

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,

and even if the whole world's harp should burn up,
there will still be hidden instruments playing.

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

Moon and evening star
do their slow tambourine dance to praise this universe.

The purpose of every gathering is discovered:
To recognize beauty and to love what is beautiful.

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