NOTE
The Arabic word Ma Yakfi means “enough.”
The Arabic word Qafila/Kafila means “caravan,” “train of travelers,” or “large party of travelers.”
What is heaven other than where you are not yet?
With a fierce tornado of emotions that completely overwhelms all senses, you contemplate a solitary voyage to the vast ocean to find your Eden. Once you have leaped and sailed, you persistently think about getting somewhere. You think about getting to your Shangri-la and hope you get where you are going. But a repeated question that snatches your sanity is whether the ship is okay. Is everything working precisely? Could there be a leak somewhere you do not know about? You double-check, you triple-check. Day in and day out, you become obsessed to the point of paranoia. In that vast expanse, your company is the sound of your thoughts echoing in the emptiness of objects you are used to seeing from afar. Your company is only the person you have been most afraid to engage with!
A relentless howling from the kafila of waves crashing over each other surrounds you. The deafening roars engulf you; they neither listen to your plea nor can you respond to them. Your voice is no match against the strong winds and loud noise; words become mists. To start a conversation or a countermeasure to avoid your affairs fades quickly from your mind. Instead, you discover a rhythm, even a melody, and begin to hum along with the slams of waves on the ship. Your smirk betrays you! You notice wind-whipped skin that has become more wrinkled since you started your voyage, and the vast emptiness blossoms into the arresting truth in your awareness. Nowhere to hide! Still among your melancholy, the sun conceals the horizon every day, and the stars are born only for hours and then perish by the floods of the dawn light. The twinkling stars do not leave behind blemishes for their exit wounds on the blue, velvety Muslin sky; instead, they offer unspoken assurance to return if you are mindful—a testament to the beauty and harshness of the world.
In the darkness of the night, you will find the brilliant star cluster “Ath-Thuraya,” known today as the Pleiades, perhaps because of its heliacal rise just before dawn—a perennial phenomenon of a star or a planet. It happens when they finish a starry hibernation, which makes them disappear behind the sun for a season while orbiting the Earth. They remain unseen and become visible with a heliacal rise in the east. Ancient Arab navigators and nomads honored the Pleiades like the first look of a bride when she looked up from the veil of her sari. Seeing the star at sunrise for the first time in a long while gave the sailors a nod to initiate the sailing and travel seasons. In absolute awe, you wonder about the strict boundaries all celestial trajectories obey! A concession, reluctantly or not, sprouts in your heart: you and the boat are in the embrace and not quite the gentleness of this improbable world.
The ship glides as if it must! It does so under the persistent battering of waves, the unyielding slaps of winds, the bone-shattering bites of cold at night, blinding light, and the scalding heat of the sun during the day. Your pains outlive you merely by a wink, by a knot—no more, no less. Unknowingly, you devote yourself to anchoring your heart in faith and becoming vigilant to elude drowning, letting go of your vocation if there is still anything left. Without the prospect of negotiating at any instant with anything, going back to the berth or moving onward to the shore becomes interchangeable. The anatomical reflex to defy or to oppose the moments you find yourself in is not what you do to stay afloat. By then, you have uncovered that offering enough of you, from every cell to the eternal, is most beneficial for the time being, for as long as your vessel floats. Until everything evaporates without animosity, like the bubbles of the sea. An inevitability that awaits all.
Fatigue tiptoes on you, and all your muscles become a heavy burden. You drift momentarily into slumber from weariness. In your hypnagogia, the silhouette of your Eden flashes into your imagination out of nowhere. You feel nostalgic. The images seem like a familiar moniker from the places and moments you had been to already! You wish you could have been the hoarder of metiers and moments of life that seemed ordinary. A sigh escapes you while searching for clarity, leaving you unsure yet in this world’s embrace. You look at the sea and the sky; they are still the same but emerge differently now.