Where They Are Not

"The night before Leonard Bernstein died he asked that several poems from the Like This volume of Rumi’s Divan be read to him over and over. His friend Aaron Stern wrote to me about that night. The poems seemed very fresh and familiar to Bernstein. This poetry is from the thirteenth century, of course, and yet it does seem to be a new kind of love poetry. It’s been seven centuries, but maybe we are just now beginning to assimilate the essence of the friendship that Rumi and Shams brought to the mystical life of the planet. Body and soul terminology here dissolve. Even the word love may be wrong for what Rumi and Shams share. Their friendship widens to include the sun, the fields, and “anything anyone says”. It is a kind of atmosphere that they inhabit. The place they reach is where, in some way, they are not, where absence, or a vastness, is. Perhaps love isn’t the word for it. Something greater than the personal opens, burns, and rises through. It cannot be understood or described, but it can be lived."

~ Coleman Barks

"The Academy for the Love of Learning was birthed from an intense ten-year collaboration between Academy President, Aaron Stern and his mentor, Leonard Bernstein. Stern, then Dean of the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, was committed to using aesthetic experience as a pathway into the kind of self-knowing and discovery that motivates and guides the natural human desire to learn. Stern’s commitment to this approach to learning found its counterpart in Bernstein’s belief that the arts, and particularly music, could play a crucial role in cultural transformation. Their shared aspiration led them to explore how to awaken, nurture and fuel a lifelong love of learning as a means to becoming more fully human...

The mission of the Academy for the Love of Learning is to awaken, enliven, nurture and sustain the natural love of learning in people of all ages. We seek to encourage and cultivate the powers of critical thought, imagination, curiosity, innate sense of purpose, wonder and inspiration, and an ongoing awakening of the heart.

Today, Stern conducts programming in Santa Fe, consultancies and seminars throughout the United States and other parts of the world, and serves as a member of the Board and Fellow of the Mind & Life Institute, co-founded by His Holiness the Dalai Lama." ~ aloveolearning.org