"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." Rumi There is a country inside you that has no borders. The Sufis call it eshq — the love that is not separate from the Beloved, the breath that knows it is breathing itself. Pilgrim of the Heart — A Returning is a small book of poems written from that country. It is for the one who has crossed many thresholds — a homeland, a name, a god, a self — and is beginning to sense that what was lost was never lost. Only forgotten. And what was forgotten is, even now, remembering itself. Across three quiet movements — Leaving · The Path · Coming Home — these poems hold a single luminous thread: That the One you have been searching for is the One who is searching. That the heart you have been seeking is the heart that is seeking. That you, beloved, have never once left the house of the Beloved. Drawing from the contemplative wells of Rumi, Kabir, Ramana Maharshi, and her own non-dual teacher and friend Rupert Spira, and woven with the diasporic memory of an Afghan-American writer, this is a book to keep beside your tea, your prayer mat, your morning. A book for the threshold seasons. A book for the pilgrim who is just beginning to suspect that the road, all along, has been inside. Open it slowly. Read it as you would breathe — without hurry. The pilgrim arrives only by realizing they were never elsewhere.
