Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.

This gentle line about shedding what no longer serves us is near-universally credited to the 13th-century Persian mystic Jalal ad-Din Rumi, and its sentiment sits comfortably within his poetry of surrender and renewal. Yet no primary source bears it out: we searched beyond the canonical poems into his lesser prose — the Discourses (Fihi ma fihi) and the sermon collection Majales-e sab'a — and his surviving correspondence (the Maktubat), and found no original. The wording itself is unstable, circulating as "Be like a tree..." and "Be like the trees...," a pattern typical of modern English aphorisms that acquire a famous name rather than descend from a translated text. Rumi is especially prone to this, as popular "versions" by later interpreters often drift far from anything he actually wrote in Persian. We found no rival author and nothing to disprove the attribution, so we leave it as attributed — beloved and widely repeated, but not traceable to Rumi's own hand.