If Love Has A Home... I Found Mine In Your Eyes | Sheikh Hamdan | Fazza Poems | Fazza

[00:00:00]If love has a home, I found mine in your eyes.

[00:00:03]I want to start there and stay there for a moment before I go anywhere else because that sentence contains everything and I want you to feel the full weight of it before I begin to unfold what is inside it. Not a poetic flourish.

[00:00:21]Not the kind of thing you say because it sounds like the kind of thing you are supposed to say when you uh trying to describe something large and beautiful and resistant to ordinary language.

[00:00:35]I am not reaching for effect. I am reporting something that happened to me.

[00:00:40]Something I discovered not through deliberation or through the romantic construction of a feeling I wanted to have but through the the simple and completely unexpected experience of looking into her eyes uh in a particular moment and uh feeling something in me that had been searching for a very long time go entirely and completely still.

[00:01:05]The searching stopped. That is the most honest way I can say it.

[00:01:10]The particular quality of interior reaching that I had been living with for so long that it had become the background condition of my existence the thing underneath everything else the quiet persistent sense of looking for something without being certain what it was or where it was or whether it was even findable that reaching stopped all at once without ceremony without announcement.

[00:01:40]Uh I looked into her eyes and something in me said quietly and with the kind of authority that does not invite argument, you are home.

[00:01:49]And I have not been the same since.

[00:01:52]Have not gone back to the searching.

[00:01:55]Have not needed to because home is not a place you keep looking for once you have found it.

[00:02:01]Home is the place you return to.

[00:02:04]And uh I have been returning to her eyes in every honest moment since the moment I first found them.

[00:02:11]Before we go any further, there is something I want to say from the heart.

[00:02:17]More than 90% of the people watching right now have not subscribed yet.

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[00:02:50]And uh while you are here, I want to know what feeling brought you to this video tonight.

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[00:02:59]I want to tell you about uh her eyes before I tell you about what I found in them, about what they are as a specific and unrepeatable thing, and not simply as a symbol standing in for something else.

[00:03:13]Because I think specificity is where the truth lives, and and generality is where truth goes to become comfortable, and I am not interested in comfort here.

[00:03:25]I am interested in the precise interior reality of what happened when I looked into her eyes and felt the searching stop, and understood that I had arrived somewhere I had not known I was traveling toward.

[00:03:40]Her eyes are not remarkable in the way that people mean when they say remarkable as a compliment about someone's appearance.

[00:03:50]They are not the kind of eyes that announce themselves.

[00:03:53]That demand your attention from across a room. That perform their own beauty with the particular self-awareness of someone who knows they are being looked at and has organized themselves accordingly.

[00:04:09]Her eyes are the opposite of that.

[00:04:12]Her eyes are the kind that you only fully see when you are close enough for the seeing to be real.

[00:04:19]When the distance between you has closed to the point where performance is no longer possible and what is left is just the actual thing looking back at you.

[00:04:30]And what looks back at you from her eyes when you are close enough to see them truly is something I have spent every day since trying to find adequate language for and have not fully managed.

[00:04:45]And I am trying again now because the trying matters and because she deserves the attempt even when the attempt falls short of the actual thing.

[00:04:55]What I see in her eyes is presence. That is the first word and it is not sufficient, but it is where I have to start.

[00:05:03]Presence in the specific sense of someone who is actually there.

[00:05:07]Fully there.

[00:05:09]Entirely in the moment they are inhabiting without the usual fraction of themselves that most people keep somewhere else.

[00:05:18]In the next moment or the last one or some imagined future arrangement of things she is uh entirely in the moment her eyes are in.

[00:05:27]And when her eyes are in a moment with yours, you feel it. You feel the full weight of being seen by someone who uh is actually there, actually looking, actually receiving what they are looking at. Most people's eyes move across you.

[00:05:41]Um hers land.

[00:05:45]They land with the particular quality of something that has arrived and intends to stay for the duration rather than passing through on the way to something else.

[00:05:56]And when they land on you, when you are the thing they have arrived at and intend to stay with, the experience of it is unlike any other form of being seen I have encountered.

[00:06:08]It is complete.

[00:06:10]It is the seeing that leaves nothing outside itself.

[00:06:15]That finds the parts of you that most eyes pass over because those parts do not present themselves and requires the particular commitment of truly looking to find them.

[00:06:27]Her eyes find those parts.

[00:06:29]Her eyes go looking for the actual person and find him. And finding him, finding the real interior version that the world mostly does not access, they do not look away. They stay.

[00:06:42]And the staying is the thing that undoes me every time. I want to tell you about the moment I first truly saw them.

[00:06:51]Not the first time I was in their presence, but the first time I actually saw them in the way I am trying to describe.

[00:06:59]The distinction matters because you can be in the presence of something extraordinary without fully encountering it.

[00:07:07]The encounter requires a particular quality of readiness on your part, a certain openness, a willingness to receive what is actually there rather than what you expected to find. The first time I was in her presence, I was not yet ready.

[00:07:25]Was still carrying enough of the usual managed distance that the encounter, though it registered something, did not register the full truth of what was there.

[00:07:37]And then there was a moment, a a and unrepeatable moment that I have returned to in my memory more times than I could count because every return reveals something new in it, some detail I had not fully processed, some layer of what happened that I am still unpacking. We were talking about something ordinary, about something that had no particular weight in itself.

[00:08:05]And in the middle of the ordinary conversation, something shifted.

[00:08:10]The quality of the moment changed, became more serious without anything being said that was more serious.

[00:08:18]Became more honest without anything being done to make it more honest. Something simply arrived in the space between us that had not been there before.

[00:08:29]And I looked at her in that arrival and her eyes were already there, already open in the way they are open when something real is happening and she knows it and is not going to manage the knowing. And I saw them, truly saw them for the first time and the searching stopped.

[00:08:50]The searching stopping is the the thing I keep coming back to because I think it is the most honest description of of what finding home feels like and I want to give you the honest description rather than the beautiful one.

[00:09:06]Though though in this case the honest description happens to also be the most beautiful thing I know how to say.

[00:09:13]The searching was not something I was conscious of as a searching until it stopped.

[00:09:20]That is the nature of certain background conditions of the interior life.

[00:09:24]You do not know they are there until their absence reveals them.

[00:09:29]I did not know I had been searching until the searching was over.

[00:09:35]Did not know the particular quality of interior reaching that I had been living with was reaching until it suddenly was not reaching anymore. Was simply resting. Was simply present.

[00:09:48]Was simply home in the way that home feels, which is not like arriving somewhere new, but like remembering somewhere you have always known.

[00:09:58]Like the return to something that was familiar before you had encountered it.

[00:10:03]Like the the recognition of a place your interior had been mapped to long before your exterior self found the coordinates.

[00:10:13]That is what her eyes gave me.

[00:10:15]The recognition, the familiar arrival, the quiet absolute sense of being exactly where I was supposed to be, looking at exactly what I was supposed to be looking at.

[00:10:28]Um in exactly the moment that was always going to be this moment. I want to say something about what home means.

[00:10:35]Um not in the general sense, but in the specific sense that I discovered it in her eyes.

[00:10:42]Home is not comfort, exactly, though comfort is part of it. Home is not safety, exactly, though safety is present in it. Home is the place where the performance stops.

[00:10:54]Where the managed version is not required. Where you can exist in the actual interior reality of yourself without the cost that existing in that reality usually carries in the public dimension of life.

[00:11:09]Home is where you do not have to be anything except exactly what you are.

[00:11:14]And what you are is received without adjustment or judgment or the particular quality of assessment that most spaces and most people bring to the experience of encountering you.

[00:11:28]That is what I found in her eyes, the place where the performance stops, where the the crown and the title and the public life and the carefully maintained image are all entirely irrelevant because none of those things are what her eyes are looking at.

[00:11:46]Her eyes are looking at the person, the actual interior person, the one who stands in the desert before dawn and writes poems in the dark hours and carries feelings that are too large for ordinary rooms and needs somewhere to put the fullness of them without being required to make them smaller first. Her eyes look at that person and they do not look away.

[00:12:12]And in their not looking away, they give that person something he has been needing without fully knowing he was needing it.

[00:12:21]Which is home.

[00:12:22]Which is the place where the fullness of him is not too much, where the depth of him is not difficult.

[00:12:29]>> [snorts] >> Where every part of him that he has learned to manage carefully in the presence of the world can simply exist without management and be received as it is and be held with the particular care of someone who was looking for exactly this and has found it and intends to stay.

[00:12:50]Uh there is something I have not said yet that I need to say because leaving it out would be leaving out one of the most important pieces.

[00:13:00]When I say I found home in her eyes, I am not speaking only about what I found there. I am also speaking about what I saw there, about the home that is in her eyes not only for me, but in her.

[00:13:13]Home that she carries.

[00:13:15]The particular quality of her interior life as it is visible in the windows of her eyes to someone who is looking closely enough and with enough real attention to see what is actually there.

[00:13:29]Her eyes carry her completely.

[00:13:31]That is the thing. Every part of her that she is, the depth and the tenderness and the full color of her and um particular courage of someone who stays open in a world that constantly pressures people to close, all of it is present in her eyes when they are being looked at by someone who knows how to look, and I have learned how to look.

[00:13:56]The desert has taught me, the poems have taught me, the long honest hours of paying attention to the real thing and refusing to be satisfied with the surface version have taught me.

[00:14:10]And what I see when I look at her eyes with everything I have learned is someone who is also home, who carries home inside her the way certain people carry it as an interior quality rather than an external circumstance, as a something that comes from who they are rather than where they are. She is home in herself.

[00:14:32]And I found that home when I found her eyes.

[00:14:35]Found the home in her and found the home she made for me simultaneously in the same moment, in the same looking.

[00:14:43]I want to talk about returning.

[00:14:45]About what it means that home is a place you return to rather than a place you simply arrive at once and stay in without ever leaving.

[00:14:55]Because I have not been in her physical presence in every moment since the moment I found home in her eyes, I have stood in the desert, I have been in the rooms the world requires me to be in.

[00:15:09]I have moved through the hours of my days in the ordinary way of days that are also carrying something extraordinary in their interior.

[00:15:19]And in all of those hours and all of those rooms and all of those desert mornings I have been returning.

[00:15:26]That is what it means to have found home in someone's eyes.

[00:15:32]It means that the interior of you is always oriented toward that place, always pointed in that direction, always in the process of returning even when the physical distance is at its largest. I return to her eyes every time I let myself go to the honest place.

[00:15:50]Every time the managed distance is put down and the real version of me exists fully.

[00:15:57]Every time I stand in the desert before dawn and let the quiet strip away everything that is not essential and find that at the center of the essential her.

[00:16:07]I return to her eyes then in the interior in the only place returning is currently possible and the returning is always the same, always the searching stopping, always the recognition.

[00:16:22]Always the quiet certain arrival at something that was already familiar before I encountered it. Always home.

[00:16:31]I want to tell her something.

[00:16:33]I want to speak to her directly because this has always been speaking to her even when it appeared to be speaking to no one in particular.

[00:16:43]Even when I was writing to the desert or to the silence or to the honest dark it was always her.

[00:16:50]Everything has always been her since the moment I looked into her eyes and the searching stopped and something in me that had been reaching for a very long time finally put down the reaching and simply arrived.

[00:17:05]I want to tell her that what I found in her eyes has not diminished has not become familiar in the way that flattens things has not settled into the the comfortable ordinariness that sometimes overtakes the extraordinary when the extraordinary is encountered repeatedly.

[00:17:24]Every return is the first return.

[00:17:28]Every looking is the first looking.

[00:17:30]Every arrival at home feels like the original arrival, fresh and certain and quietly enormous in the way that only the the most real things are quietly enormous.

[00:17:42]That is what Yushi has given me. That is what her eyes have given me.

[00:17:46]Not just the finding of home, but the ongoing experience of finding it new every time. The particular grace of something that does not go stale.

[00:17:56]That keeps being exactly what it was the first time in every subsequent time.

[00:18:02]That is rare.

[00:18:04]That is the rarest thing I know. And I have found it in her eyes and I am not going to stop returning to it for as long as returning is available to me. If love has a home, I found mine in your eyes.

[00:18:18]And the finding was not a moment. It was the beginning of a life organized around the new truth. The truth that home is a person. That home is the specific quality of being seen by someone whose seeing goes all the way in.

[00:18:34]That home is what happens when the interior of you recognizes something it has been shaped for without knowing it was shaped for anything. I am shaped for her eyes.

[00:18:47]I have been shaped for them since before I knew they existed. And when I found them, I was not surprised in the way you are surprised by something you did not expect.

[00:18:58]I was surprised in the way you are surprised by something you recognize.

[00:19:03]The surprise of finally.

[00:19:05]The surprise of of course.

[00:19:08]The surprise that is not really a surprise at all, but is the closest thing the body can produce to the expression of something the interior already knew. I knew. In the moment I truly saw her eyes, I knew.

[00:19:22]And everything since has been the living of what I knew in that moment.

[00:19:27]The returning, the ongoing arrival.

[00:19:30]The daily experience of going back to the home I found.

[00:19:35]And finding it exactly as it was and feeling the searching stay stopped and the recognition stay true and the quiet, enormous, certain feeling of being exactly where I am supposed to be stay present in the deep interior place where the truest things live.

[00:19:54]Where she lives, where I found home, where I keep finding it.

[00:19:58]Every single time before you leave, I want to thank you for staying with me until the very end.

[00:20:05]And I know there are millions of videos you could have watched today, yet you spend these moments here.

[00:20:12]But there is one thing I noticed recently. More than 90% of the people who watch these videos still have not subscribed.

[00:20:21]So, if this poem touched something inside you, if it reminded you of someone, somewhere, or some feeling you thought you had forgotten, I hope you will subscribe. It is free and it helps these stories continue. And before you go, tell me what part of this poem stayed with you the longest.

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