Nafas

The first thing a person does on coming into the world is breathe in. The last is breathe out. Everything else happens in between. We grow so used to this rhythm that we stop hearing it, just as we stop hearing our own heart. Only someone who has ever been short of air knows how much generosity there is in an ordinary breath. I have known this since childhood, and that is probably why the song turned out so quiet.

In Rumi’s “Masnavi” a human being is like the reed flute, the ney, torn from its reed bed. It sings of separation and of longing for its source, and in its voice you hear fire, not merely wind. But I also hear something else in this image: the flute is empty inside, and this emptiness lets it sound. The melody is born not in the reed, but in the one who breathes into it. “Breathing in and breathing out - between them Your melody sounds”: I invented nothing in this line. I only listened to the pause that we usually skip.

The Qur’an says that God breathed into man of His spirit. I cannot read these words without remembering my own breathing: every breath seems to me something received, not something owned by right. In the tradition of the Khwajagan - the Central Asian Sufi brotherhood from which the Naqshbandiyya later took shape - eight rules are associated with Abd al-Khaliq Ghijduvani. The first is hush dar dam: not to be forgetful in a single breath. It sounds simple, yet it is almost impossible to do: we live without noticing our own breath. In this attentiveness I find something in tune with dhikr, remembrance. The breath itself does not become a prayer, but it can remind us of the One whom we forget among everyday affairs.

That is why “Nafas, bu zikr” is not an equation but an invitation. “Nafasimda bor vatan” - “In my breath is my homeland”. This homeland knows no borders: it moves with me from city to city, from year to year, and always stands at one point, between “before” and “after”, where both can be heard.

The Qur’an says of the dawn that it begins to breathe. Morning is the world breathing in, and each of our breaths is a little morning that we managed to take with us. “Dam, bu sen. Dam, bu men. Bir dam, abadiyat” - “The moment is You. The moment is me. One moment is eternity”. I do not know whether eternity can fit into a single instant. But sometimes the pause between breathing in and breathing out feels longer than a whole life.