Spotify is a mystical DJ sometimes and one day a little while ago it played this song for me. I had to stop everything I was doing, completely overcome by its beauty. Then I listened to it many times in a row, with no idea what language it is sung in or what he is saying. Tears flowed. When I closed my eyes, I wandered in a desert and came upon a man in white spinning in the sand, spirals forming and spreading across dunes, filling with water. His singing took pain—mine, those I love, places the world is burning—and with his beautiful hands, he lifted it to the sky for the sun to fill it with light and then it rained down on us in diamonds.
I decided not to try to find a translation of the song and instead let it take me places for weeks.
I have learned it is a poem by Hafiz from the 1300s. And in the probably inadequate English translation, it speaks of things I felt. How wild is that. Music and language are magic, even when we cannot understand the words—magic beyond words.
And now every time I close my eyes and listen to it, I go to that desert and feel that love as strong as when I stand in our own desert sun.
"Where are you, wild gazelle, my beloved?
I have known you for a while, here.
We are wanderers, both lost, both forsaken
...
It is time to cultivate love
Decreed from one above
Thus I remember the wise old man
Forgetting such a one, I never can
That one day, a seeker in a land”