Nafas

Nafas is for me the moment when the path first becomes entirely bodily. Until then I could speak of the road and the light as images that stand before me. Breath can no longer be carried outside. It happens now, inside the body, without permission and almost without the participation of the will. That is why the opening is so dear to me: inhale and exhale, and between them - Your melody. I hear here not a pretty metaphor of air, but a sense that life itself is given as a rhythm that I do not create out of nothing.

There is one line in this song that has become more and more important to me over time: “in my breath is my homeland.” The word vatan usually calls up geography, land, belonging. But here the homeland fits inside the breath. For me this is strikingly in tune with safar dar watan - “journey in the homeland”, one of the principles of Ghijduwani. I do not claim that the text consciously quotes this principle. What interests me more is something else: the inner logic of the album itself leads to the homeland ceasing to be a point on a map and becoming a state of presence.

Another principle of Khwajagan sounds especially natural next to Nafas - hush dar dam, “awareness in the breath.” What draws me in it is its almost anti-heroic character. Spiritual life does not necessarily begin with an exceptional experience. It can begin with my ceasing to skip my own inhalation as something too simple and insignificant. As long as I am alive, the breath returns me to the present moment again and again, without demanding any complicated philosophy from me.

That is why the line “breath is dhikr” does not mean to me that any automatic breathing is already prayer. It is rather a possibility: every inhalation can become remembrance. Iranica defines dhikr first of all as remembrance - the recollecting, the invoking of God. The word “memory” is very close to me in this context. Spiritual forgetfulness often does not look like denial. I simply live, think, hurry, grow irritated, and forget the most important thing. Breath is able to become a quiet return.

Then the song joins life and death: “to live is this moment; to die is also this moment.” I do not hear gloom in this. I wanted rather to remove the safe distance. Usually life seems like something that goes on, and death like something that will one day interrupt the going on. Here both enter a single dam, a single moment. This makes the present not more anxious but more precious. Nothing can be postponed beyond this breath.

The formula “there is no before, no after” also does not mean a denial of time. For me it is an experience of attention in which the past and the future for a moment stop taking from the present all its density. And then “one moment is eternity” from Yo‘l receives a bodily confirmation. Eternity ceases to be an idea; it touches me through the rhythm of the chest.

Another important line is “my lungs filled with light, my soul found the path again.” Light now passes literally through the breath. Yo‘ldagi Nur was a light ahead; Nafas makes it inner. And it is right after this that the album enters Tun. It seems to me this is essential: before finding myself in a night without a moon and without inner light, I already know one thing that darkness cannot take away - the breath goes on. It becomes the first invisible support.

There is in breathing one more paradox that matters to me. I can change its rhythm for a few seconds, hold the inhalation, make the exhalation longer, but I am not the absolute master of the very fact of breathing. In sleep I stop controlling it consciously, and life continues this work without my instruction. For me this very gently dissolves the illusion of complete control. What is closest to me - what happens literally inside me - at the same time does not fully belong to my will.

So “in my breath is my homeland” I also hear as a return home from an endless inner exile. I can be anywhere, scattered between yesterday and tomorrow, between other people’s expectations and my own anxieties, but the breath brings me back to where I really am. Not to an abstract “here and now” as a psychological formula, but to a very concrete bodily truth: this inhalation has already been given, this exhalation is already leaving.

I am close to the thought that dhikr in such a context is not added to life as one more duty. It changes the quality of attention to what is already happening. I do not want to say that breath automatically becomes prayer. But it can become a door into remembrance. And perhaps this is exactly why Nafas sounds so calm to me: I do not need to create presence. I need to notice that life is already happening and that every moment of it can be turned toward.