Essays, translations, and field notes on Afghan philosophy, poetry, and rasm & rawaj — the long work of remembering, written down.
Before doctrine, before instruction, Rumi opens his epic with a sound — the reed flute crying for the bed it was cut from. We read the couplet that became the soul of our house.
Read the essayHow do you archive a thousand years of philosophy, music, and manners without flattening them? Notes on method.
Bread broken at the door, tea poured for a stranger — the grammar of Afghan hospitality, read closely.
From the courts of Herat to a living room in San Diego — how an instrument carries a homeland in its strings.
The first woman known to write poetry in the Farsi tongue — and what her brief, blazing life still asks of us.
What it means to be an institution-in-waiting — gathering in the Hall of Nations while the cottage is still a hope.
This morning, in the same Balboa Park where my family stood in 1981, the House of Afghanistan was voted in.
One letter a month — a new essay, a translated couplet, and where to find us next.
