Dil ichra

There is a closeness you take many years to reach, although all that time it was right beside you. Homes, cities and views change. We leave and come back, we look for answers in others. And one day the familiar opens up with a depth you had never noticed before. “Ey Haq. Ey nur. Dil ichra” - “O Truth. O Light. Within the heart”.

“Ko‘nglim sahro, sen shamol” - “My heart is a desert, You are the wind”. A desert seems empty until you have spent enough time in it. Then you notice how the air moves, how the light changes, how great the distance is. There were years in my life when outwardly everything went on as usual, while inside there remained a question I could not turn away from. And the wind came into this desert. Not on command, and not when I thought I was ready.

A tradition says: your Lord has breaths of mercy, so expose yourselves to them. The wind cannot be summoned, but you can go out to meet it. For a desert this is the only form of asking: to stay open.

Human love has explained much to me about the language of this song. The name of someone close is never just a set of sounds: it holds a voice, a face, shared memory, the expectation of meeting. I know how another person’s pain becomes your own anxiety, and how calm breathing beside you becomes relief. That is why the line “Dil meniki emas endi. Senga qaytdi, ey Haq” - “My heart is no longer mine. It has returned to You, O Truth” is not, for me, about losing freedom. It is about a love that pushes back the borders of the familiar “mine”.

The Qur’an says: “We are closer to him than his jugular vein” and “I am near”. Sufi poetry turns this into the language of the heart, into an address to “You” that needs no proof. I do not confuse love for a person with the Divine presence. But it was through living closeness that I began to understand how much a single “You” can hold. And why returning is sometimes more important than endless movement forward.

“Sen doim ichimda eding” - “You were always within me”. This does not mean that the roads I have travelled were in vain. Everything I have lived through - meetings, losses, mistakes - remains part of me. It is just that one day a connection appears among them that I had not known how to see before. The desert stays open. I cannot hold on to the wind, but I recognise it.