Half-Awake in the Citadel

There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen. [Rumi]

I move through my days half-awake, drifting with the ripple of habits. The world watches with patient eyes—wide, silent, unblinking—even through the dark. Each small motion, each weary effort, plants the seed of who I become; too often, I forget this. What should I be doing instead? The question burns, for I already know too well what I should not be doing—a list absurdly long, a pall I dare not confront. Perhaps it will fade if I look away long enough—an idea I confuse for mercy but closer to delusion.

Many faiths speak of a day when only truth will stand, when excuses fall away like ash and denial no longer holds. That reckoning unsettles me, for I have worn my disguise too long—not hidden by truth, but hollowed of it.

In Sufism,  reality holds both an inner and an outer dimension—zahir and batin: the outer, visible face of things, and the inner, veiled heartbeat beneath. They are not rivals, but two mirrors curved toward the same light. The batin feels before the mind can speak. Even the Qur’an is said to carry both outer and inner meanings—neither is whole without the other. Yet we go on through life cut off from this inward realm, hosting it like an uninvited guest, unseen until its silence grows unbearable. The mind, hungry for certainty, builds its citadel of logic to guard the body against the unknown. The batin does not contest—it waits. It lingers in the stillness between thoughts, a whisper tugging softly at the edge of awareness. To dwell only in the zahir is to function; to awaken to the batin is to feel life from within.

We like to think the brain rules alone—its reason is sovereign, enthroned at the center of the self. Yet experience betrays this belief. An inner strain demands that every feeling speak and justify in logic. The mind, dissecting beauty, drains the sacred from it—reducing a sunset to wavelengths, to refraction, a sorrow to numbers. The heart resists this dissection. It refuses the role of spectator; it insists on touch, on wonder, on grief. It insists on participation. It reminds us we are not mechanisms, but vessels of presence. So, I am always at war—not between enemies, but between dialects, between languages of knowing. Often, what we anoint conflict is only the dissonance between a quiet refusal in the heart and a thunderous consent in the mind.

The heart, fragile yet steadfast, holds an intelligence of its own. Science calls it the “little brain”—a web of nerves that remembers, that learns, that listens before thought germinates. It does not reason as the mind, yet it shapes what we perceive before we understand. When Sufis speak of the qalb (the heart) as a window to the unseen, they do not refer to anatomy, but miracle—the arrival of meaning before the birth of words, meaning before explanation. While the mind toils in language and measure—the landscape of the zahir—the heart moves in silence, sensing the truth of a moment before thought can measure it. To listen to it is not to abandon reason, but to bring it home—to let understanding rise not only from the mind, but from the deep, living presence of the heart.