Adventure!
Here’s to travel, expanding one’s horizons, and taking on new challenges!
My friend Barbara Romaine recently published a series of poems here, including the following celebration of roaming (Arabic here).
Wanderlust
by al-Imam al-Shafiʿi (d. 820), translated by Barbara Romaine
To a mind wise and cultured, what ease in a place?
Pull up stakes, leave your country, and roam!
Those you meet on your travels will make up the loss
Of those left behind you at home.
Water by its own stillness made foul have I seen;
It can only stay sweet when it flows.
There’s no prey for the lion that ventures not forth;
No mark for arrows stuck in bows.
Should the sun in its heavenly orbit stop short,
One and all we would tire of its blaze;
If the moon never set but stood still in the sky,
It would draw not the eye’s eager gaze.
Much like scattered dust lie the earth’s lodes of ore;
Reeds to burn grow in numbers untold.
The latter remove, and you’ll want it; the former,
When rare, is no less than pure gold.
