Don't Surrender Your Loneliness
The following is one of my favorite poems by Hafez (I’ve seen and heard his name as either Hafez or Hafiz, but a close friend of mine opts for Hafez so I’ll go with that here). To me, he is speaking to our conditioned urge to look away from what’s inside us, and to the possibility that, if we wait and look… just look… long enough, we will find the answers to what we keep searching for externally. This may include pain, which leads us to catch a glimpse of it and then again look away like a child taking a peek under the bed at night and then diving back under the covers. But maybe we can keep looking and not surrender or distract ourselves so quickly next time. What is under the bed is simply there whether we look or not, so why not look? When I journal in the mornings I’ll often write out this poem to help encode it in my long-term memory and move it ahead in place of other less useful mental ear worms.
Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly
Let it cut more deep
Let it ferment and season you
As few human or even divine ingredients can
- Hafez
