Yo‘l

Yo‘l opens the album almost ascetically: path, step, movement, a few repeating words. The longer I return to this text, the more strongly I feel that its simplicity is deceptive. In the usual understanding a road exists for the sake of a destination. I set out from here in order to be there. But in the song the destination disappears: “there is no destination - there is only movement.” For me this line changes everything at once. If there is no future place that will justify today’s step, then the meaning must already be inside the step itself.

I do not hear in it a call to meaningless endless motion. Quite the opposite. “The path itself is my goal” means to me a refusal to postpone real life until the moment when everything becomes clear, correct and complete. This is a very personal thought. I know well the human desire to arrive one day at a point where doubts end and one can say: now I know for certain who I am and where I am going. Yo‘l does not promise such a point. It offers another form of support - fidelity to movement.

It is here that the language of the early Central Asian tradition of Khwajagan is especially close to me. Abd al-Khaliq Ghijduwani, who lived in Ghijduwan near Bukhara, formulated principles that would later become the foundation of Naqshbandiyya. Among them are nazar bar qadam - attention to one’s own step - and safar dar watan - the inner journey, “journeying in the homeland”. I like that these expressions do not call a person into an exotic distance. A step remains an ordinary step, but the quality of attention to it changes. The path runs at once across the earth and through an inner state.

When I reread the line “I am not - there is only the journey”, I do not want to understand it as romantic self-annihilation. For me it is rather the moment when the habitual, motionless “I” ceases to be the owner of the road. In everyday life it is easy for me to say: my path, my goal, my choice, my success. In this song the word “my” gradually weakens. What remains is the process itself - to walk, to see, to leave a trace and at the same time to allow the wind to erase that trace in the following compositions.

The repetition of “The path is me. The path is you” is important to me for the same reason. I do not put a formula of identity into it. It is rather an acknowledgment that the path does not belong to one person. It passes through each one in their own way, but its deep structure is recognizable: to set out, to lose one’s former stability, to learn to listen, to meet the darkness, to see the light again, to discover the heart, to endure silence.

The densest line of the song for me is “a step is a moment; the path is a moment; one moment - eternity”. Here space suddenly joins time. The path is no longer measured in kilometers, and eternity is no longer endless duration. Eternity turns out to be the depth of a single present moment. This is very close to what will unfold later in Nafas: breath too will bring me back not to a “someday” but to this dam, this moment.

That is why Yo‘l is for me not an introduction before the “real” spiritual themes. The whole album is already hidden in it. If there is no destination, then the finale cannot consist in my simply having reached the right place. The very way of walking must change. And this is exactly what happens next: the path begins to move from outside to inside, until at the end it turns out that even the sky, which I might have walked toward, is no longer only above.

The longer I think about the word “path”, the less it resembles for me a romantic wandering. A path is tested not by distance but by what I become in each next step. One can travel half the world and remain inside the old immobility; one can go almost nowhere and cover an enormous distance in one’s own heart. That is why I hear nazar bar qadam not only as mystical concentration. It is also a very earthly attentiveness to where exactly the foot is placed: how I speak, how I choose, what I do to another person, what I pay for my own movement.

I like that in Yo‘l there is no solemn voice of a person who already knows the route. The repetition “walk, walk, walk” is for me not a command from above. It is rather a rhythm I say to myself when clarity is not enough. There is insistence in it, but there is also tenderness: not a demand to become perfect at once, but a request not to stop merely because there is no complete map ahead. Sometimes the only fidelity available is to take one more honest step.

In this sense the path is for me also connected with humility before my own incompleteness. I do not have to possess a final version of myself in order to walk. Moreover, if the album really speaks of an inner journey, then any final version of myself would become an obstacle. The traveler changes precisely because he cannot fix forever the answer to the question “who am I”. Perhaps that is why already in the first song the “I” begins to dissolve in the journey - not disappearing as a person, but ceasing to be an immovable center.