Passion burns down every branch of exhaustion.
Passion is the supreme alchemical elixir and renews all things.
No-one can grow exhausted when passion is born,
so don’t sigh heavily, your brows bleak with boredom and cynicism and despair—
look for passion! passion! passion! passion!
Run far away, my friends, from all false solutions.
Let divine passion triumph and rebirth you in yourself.
Rumi as translated by Andrew Harvey
“This absolutely favorite quote comes from my great beloved, Rumi. This is for me the essential poem for our time. We need to find that divine passion within us, we need to align ourselves with it. We need to let it take us over, possess us, and drive us into being joyful servants of love in action because that’s the way we can get through this crisis and transform this terrible, terrible darkness into a garden of radiant opportunity. Rumi is showing us exactly how to do it.”
Andrew Harvey is Founder & Director of
the Institute for Sacred Activism
and coauthor of Radical Regeneration:
Birthing the New Human in the Age of Extinction