Take a music-bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what a water-bath is to the body.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness.  Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit!  Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy!  O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
(Ode to the West Wind, Canto V)

Today like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened.  Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading.  Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

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

Since I am coming to that holy room,
     Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy music; as I come
     I tune the instrument here at the door,
     And what I must do then, think here before.

-- John Donne

Last night this body was a stringed instrument
playing love songs.

There is a kind of accounting going on with you and me.
But all I want from this exchange is your peace.


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