Some friendships burn brightly and nothing else can ever match that burst of light and renewal. We are drawn together and share a camaraderie that cannot be understood by others. We are like identical twins finishing each other's sentences. Or we are primal opposites, carried on crashing waves of differences. As soul mates, we weather the storms and savor whatever comes our way.

In this era of social media, many who have tasted the delights and joys of connecting with others via Facebook now yearn for a deeper and richer friendship. This kind of spiritual friendship is described by the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Rumi in one of his quatrains:

"There is a life where you have
your longed-for companion
day and night, night and day.

There is a way beyond time,
a being who gives us
the purest clear to drink,
and is a once cup, wine,
water, grace, eternity."

Such a friendship is described repeatedly in Soul Fury, a new book of mystical poetry and sayings by Coleman Barks. The first part presents an introduction on Rumi's life and 217 quatrains. The second part introduces Shams Tabriz and includes 72 excerpts from his Sayings. Barks explains in an afterword that these short free-verse poems are "versions" — his way of "entering, and praising, and bringing Rumi's insights into my own life. . . . a form of interpretation and, hopefully, a way of transmission."

The mystical and soul-stirring friendship between Rumi and Shams Tabriz was built upon mutual exploration of crazy wisdom and dangerous truth that those who surrounded these men could not understand or appreciate. Alongside this soul fury was the alchemy of love. Both Rumi and Shams challenge us to reach out in the darkness and to experience the many different shades of love. In Barks' introduction to The Sayings of Shams Tabriz, we read:

"Sufis say that every person is capable of becoming a True Human Being, an insan kamil in Arabic, and that to speak and act from that place is wildly provocative to all conventional notions. It is also charismatic, transformative, and necessary for human evolution. How does one know when that is happening in oneself or in someone else? That is one of the secrets. It is different in every person. Comparisons are of no use. I feel I have been on the lookout, on the prowl, for these people since I was twelve. Someone truly and wildly alive, free. I feel that I can recognize it, in people, in paintings, in writing, as a kind of originality, an authenticity of self. Maybe it is so elusive and undefinable because it truly must be lived. It is each person's own soul, the ternal self, the friend we long for, long to meet, to become."