Love is the bridge between you and everything
This line names love as the connective medium of existence itself, not merely an emotion one has toward particular people or God.
From the Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, the claim is architectural rather than sentimental: Rumi consistently describes ishq, love, not as one experience among others but as the structural link joining the individual soul to everything else — other people, the natural world, and the Divine source. This follows from his broader cosmology, worked out across the Diwan and the Masnavi, in which love is the active force that first drew creation into being and continues to pull every part of it back toward reunion. Read this way, "everything" is not rhetorical exaggeration — Rumi's poetry to Shams repeatedly extends love's reach beyond human relationship to the whole of existence, treating separation as the illusion and connection through love as the underlying fact that illusion obscures.
Love is the bridge between you and everything.
Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi
Written about in
- What Sufism says about love
Rumi uses love for the thing that joins a person to everything else, not for a feeling aimed at chosen people. The claim is nearer to structure than to sentiment.