By Nadia Yassine, Feb 2, 2007

I came back, yet a thousand circumvolutions still dwell in my soul and make my heart dizzy. Revolving around your house, Lord, was a cosmic experience that taught me humility and grandeur at once. I was part of a whole and I was no one. I was but that stardust dragged along the whirl of the galaxy of hearts magnetized by Your light, and I was yet a planet gravitating around Your silence. I could feel immensity rending my heart, and light flooding my twilight. You are here my Lord, in Your House, and when have You not been, and where are You not? …except that our materiality needs symbols.Revolving around Your House until mystic vertigo… to witness our paltriness and Your Will. You chose stonework and said “Be My abode!”, and it filled with honor and it filled with magnitude. You are life – and death is the lot of those whom Your sight averts. As you glorified a brick and graciously made it your house, you granted us a soul and made our bodies home for Your secret, or else a tomb for it when hearts refuse to acknowledge You and rebel against the intensity of Your Light.Revolving around Your house, Ô Lord, in the inconsequence of the self and in consecration of Your presence and nothing else. Present You were, present You are, and present You will be, and Your presence goes beyond Your abode, but our eyes need to see and our senses need to perceive. You are there, but what is “there”, what is “here”? What do longitude and latitude mean? …Platitudes of senses and reason. We are prisoners, Lord, of our humanness, of our sacred smallness. Who can really return from that proximity that the Hajj procures to the hearts that believe in You?!  We would have liked to turn faster and higher, slip off those flesh bodies and ascend, pure spirits, towards the pure light that the blackness of the Kâ’ba protects but suggests.The kâ’ba! A black sun around which orbit the planets of our hearts, in want and anticipation, in hope and joy of being so close yet so far away. Bodies incessantly spinning as if to give shape to the magnificence of the Presence. Doesn’t space-time vanish at the speed of light? And what is the speed of light if not the drifting of those loving magnetized souls, which dissolve in the much physical yet purely mystical effort. Yours we are my Lord, and to You we shall… untiringly return even when we think we are drifting away. Charm of the Kâ’ba, charm of Your indispensable power… thus we will return to You when the dissolved bodies come to life by Your Grace. Thus we will walk in Your other world, each in their own worlds, each with their expectations, each with their hopes, each without each other amidst the throng of hearts that will go to Your encounter.