Jalal al-Din Rumi

A sober professor of law in Konya until, at thirty-seven, the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz walked into his life and burned it down. What survived the fire was poetry — some seventy thousand verses — and the turning: Rumi circled a pillar in his grief and found the cosmos circling with him. His Masnavi opens with a reed flute crying because it was cut from the reed-bed: every soul's lament at separation from its source, and the whole doctrine of return in eighteen lines. The Mevlevi order he left behind made the turning a ceremony; the Kabbalah made its own circling — the hakafot — and its own poetry of exile and return, and called the reed's cry teshuvah.