- Rumi

Dance when you're broken open.
Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you're perfectly free.

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Rumi (1207-1273) was born in the Persian Empire in what is now Afghanistan. He was a mystic in the Sufi tradition. The poem is a reference to "the turn." The great Rumi scholar Coleman Barks writes, "The 'turn,' the moving meditation done by Mevlevi dervishes, originated with Rumi. The story goes that he was walking in the goldsmithing section of Konya when he hears a beautiful music in their hammering. He began turning in harmony with it, an ecstatic dance of surrender and yet with great centered discipline. He arrived at a place were ego dissolves and a resonance with universal soul comes in. Dervish literally means "doorway."