September 28, 2026

You Were The Destination

There in the Simorgh's radiant face they saw themselves, the Simorgh of the world—with awe they gazed, and dared at last to comprehend they were the Simorgh and the journey's end.

Farid ud-Din Attar was a twelfth-century Persian poet and pharmacist from Nishapur who wrote The Conference of the Birds around 1177, decades before Mongol horsemen destroyed his city and killed him in his old age. In the poem, thirty birds cross seven perilous valleys under the hoopoe's guidance, searching for the Simurgh, a legendary king-bird said to hold the answer to their suffering. When the exhausted survivors finally arrive, they look into a lake and see only their own reflection staring back at them. The moment turns on a pun in Persian—si morgh means thirty birds—and it captures Attar's teaching that what we search for far from home is often bound up with who we already are together.