This book is beautifully bookended by an almost similar illusion of a friendship like that Shems and Rumi in that of the lost Sebastian with the author. 15 years or more now since I've lived in Turkey, and I still long to find those of that Mevlana Hane that I was not allowed to enter, and community with that love for the divine, which is the love for the universal in all of us: the " better than we are " in all of us.