Sacred days and nights imbue everything and everyone with their own color, their own distinctive taste, and their own accent; they soften everything within their embrace, add to them a dream-like quality, and enable them to attain an unfathomable profundity. In those times, there is a deep charm sensed almost everywhere, from the streets and marketplaces, homes and places of worship, schools and barracks—a celestial gleaming on the countenances of the believers, and a holiness trickling from their gaze. The multicolored lights beaming into our eyes during the hours of the night, in particular, ceaselessly whisper to us the songs of residence in another dimension. Every countenance we encounter in homes, places of work, places of worship, sometimes ripple with sorrow, but they also occasionally surge with hope and expectation, as though perpetually experiencing a journey to union and becoming a cascade of emotion. Then we flow forth to eternity.

As the fervor for worship and devotion increases in our hearts, our ability to sense and experience everything in a different way bubbles over, so to speak, and draws us into its own ocean. At such times, our material connections weaken, our spirits are freed from mundane attachments, and we suppose ourselves to have ascended to a point from which we can wholly observe all creation. From now on, we embrace and love the plains and prairies, mountains and foothills, the houses in which we were raised, the places of worship in whose climate we prepared for the life Hereafter – in short, we love everything animate and inanimate as favors which have come forth from His hand. We breathe them into our lungs like oxygen and release a sigh of relief.

During these luminous days and nights, which rise forever like a flood of light, an enchanting belief, an intimate knowledge of the divine, love, and otherworldliness glisten in the comportment and general manner of believers. These spiritual delights surpass all material delights and pleasures, and everybody sets out towards the sacred horizon of their own unique axis. On this path, every believer attains a small union as they pass one more level each day, and thus crown, as it were, their blessed journey. As they experience reunion on a daily basis, they are reminded of the “great reunion” the dreams of which they nourish their souls with. They beam with the beauties filling their emotions, with the hopes burgeoning in the bosom of worship, and the meanings cascading in the eyes and hearts of all believers. Then, they descend into an otherworldly silence as if swimming in a magical stream which channels out to timelessness.

These fortunate ones have now reached the sea of pleasure sought by their spirits. Now, the eye of their hearts witnesses eternal beauties in the form of flowers blossoming in the gaze of the Beloved, or beams of light projecting from His beauty. They find themselves in a garden abounding with diverse fruits, roses, and flowers, entranced with the warmth of the welcome and reception of the One to Whom they devoted themselves for a lifetime. In their inner world they even sense the winds of promise in another dimension, of some of the bounties they are unable to reach in this realm, the flowing forth of reward. They sense being embraced by the profound and eternal mercy of the Owner of Infinite Mercy. With this state of mind, they experience life anew; they love everything more deeply, embrace others with tenderness, and they smell everything that reminds God like a rose.

During sacred days and nights, everyone—women and men, young and old, those who know and those who do not know, common people and the learned—takes on the spiritual beauties of this blessed time with their utmost elegance and refined manner in a more resplendent way than those existing in fables. They drape upon their faces, like a veil, the awe and splendor of having believed. They open and shut their eyes with the lights of the realms beyond, imbue their own scent and color to everyplace they visit. They become celestial, so to speak, in the depths of their feelings, and each believer becomes angelic. One cannot help but imagine the lamps of the minarets and in the streets to be emanating from their refined looks, pearls and feelings scattered all around – they are nothing but angelic beings in the eyes of others.

Indeed, these pure countenances ripple with belief, love, yearning, dreams, hope, pleasure, and reunion. Robust, enamored, blissful, and silent. The attitudes, behaviors, and looks which express the meaning in their spirits forever become manifest in their surroundings like the unreachable dimension of otherworldliness within the human being, and this enthralls all those who sense and perceive it.

During sacred days, some of us release ourselves by shedding our usual restrictive logic, and we give in to joy, elation, thrill, and tears, as though we have been invited to a heavenly realm. Some of us imagine ourselves to have embarked on a journey among the stars and come head to head with the sun and moon, and are overtaken by the impression that our breaths have blended into the breaths of the angels. Our hearts soften, our eyes water, the knots we have frequently felt within us loosen, and the nodes of the self are untied to be freed from carnality. Thus, our tears sweep before them all the problems pervading our spirits, and our consciences breathe a great sigh of relief, exclaiming, “All praise be to God.”

Everyone begins to sense, to the extent of the meaning filling their own heart, certain profundities they were hitherto unable to see, due to the carnal constraints: the young awaken with a sense of doing justice to their strength, power, and vitality; the middle-aged strive to be more productive in accordance with the self-possession procured by their experience and knowledge; and the elderly overflow with the joy of preparation for eternal bliss and the realms to which their spirits flutter. Everyone opens the eye of their heart, as though feeling their own destiny, which they were unable to sense completely before this time. They are exuberant or sorrowful with their own lot and turn to their own future; their eyes smile with the promises of their time, and their countenance deepens with meaning.

The sounds of public proclamations rising from mosques and minarets add a unique flavor and richness to this general state, such that everything—from the blowing wind to the pouring rain—brushes past our faces with His perfume and permeates our hearts with the elixir of immortality. The morning breeze makes itself felt like a breath from eternity and thrills our hearts like tidings and favors coming from Him. These enchanting minutes in which we thus turn to Him appear, by virtue of our belief, love, and hopes, as drops of the truth of eternity. They pour forth into our souls, stimulate the seeds of the tree of paradise in the depths of our spirit to yield fruit, and allow us to travel incessantly on the heavenly slopes in our hearts.

God is always beautiful and gracious, but we feel this meaning more deeply during particular periods of time. During such periods, which are considered to be the springtime of our spirits, He draws the entire rhapsody of our heart to Himself, makes His beauty and attraction felt to an irresistible degree, and revitalizes us each moment with a separate bounty and new favor. I do not think these blessed hearts have another pleasure greater than this one, for this spiritual pleasure springs from the Divine love innately found in humans and the Infinitely Merciful’s honoring them with His grace. His regard and favors are infinite and endless to the degree of the person’s love and connection being both from the heart and eternal.

For us to be able to fully perceive the holy days, it is first necessary that our spirits and consciences are ready to feel such music and poetry from the heavens and beyond. Those whose inner depths, outward experiences, and colors of life are only skin-deep seek truth not in their souls but elsewhere, and for them the holy days are nothing but days on a calendar determined by changing crescents in the sky.

The general atmosphere of our day has become so gravely polluted: the noise coming out of radios, televisions, car horns, airplanes, trains, ferries, trams, the unseemly and irritating sirens, and the shrieks and screams of advertising and propaganda. All of this makes it very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to sense the celestial nature of the holy days and to hear the captivating music of the realms beyond unless we undergo a comprehensive surgery of spirit and thought, and even become entirely otherworldly all over again.

Souls purged of spiritual impurities and open to heavenliness savor, as it were, such blessed slices of time that culminate with the sacred nights contained within them. Those souls smell holy days like a rose, listen to it like a musical composition, and sip it like a river of Paradise. If we could even pay slight heed, virtually all of us could perceive the rising of these months on our horizon, feel in the most enchanting manner as though we were entering a heavenly grove or celestial cove, effervesce with our entire being as though we were journeying in the realms beyond, and be unbounded from our mortality.

In actual fact, this was once our most natural state and climate: the otherworldly pleasures and celestial delights that we erstwhile sipped and savored throughout all the seasons of the year, delights most of us are now utterly deprived of. In order to experience those pleasures and delights with their retrospective grandeur we must be purified of mundane feelings, be freed from the pollution engulfing our thoughts, and deepen even more in our hopes and expectations. So long as we can accomplish this, we will be able to perceive a great many realities which are forever hidden within creation; realities that are enchanting, delicate, and moving. Then we can surpass our finite nature, especially during the blessed days and nights when the human being is enabled to travel across otherworldly horizons.

Indeed, for those who are able to listen to creation with the ear of their heart each of the sacred days and nights become, so to speak, a poet and composer murmuring something through the tongue of the worlds beyond. What wonders they whisper to us! Pushing aside other images and clamor enveloping our carnality, the breezes we feel and experience enable us to reach the unknown and magical slopes of the Hereafter through the special doorways and corridors in the depths of our heart, which open to the other realm and intoxicate us with the pleasure of beholding them. In such a world of reflections, mornings bring the intoxication of taking the first step into Paradise, afternoons are adorned with the delight of throwing off the day’s weariness with a vision of the Beloved, evenings with the joy of walking in twilight towards ultimate reunion, nights with the unfathomable beauties of austerity, and each passes by our heart’s horizon with a different pleasure and jubilation.

This is especially true on the specially designated sacred dates which are the coronets of the night realm, the pinnacles of time closest to God that serve like a quay, harbor, or a launching platform leading to the Divine. On such days and nights, hearts shine with a special sensibility; as the spirit flutters towards eternity in an extraordinary manner, everything accompanies the eternal ode of the realms beyond, a complete celestial charm surrounds everyplace, and a melody of prayer that is impossible to describe envelops every bosom.

By presenting to us hills lush with belief and hope, peaks open to visions of the Divine like the sacred Fridays of Paradise, and by offering our parched hearts such elixirs as the water of life, windows opening to the realms beyond with certain special manifestations, time that crystallizes with the transformation of hopes and expectations into entreaties, and the Book of God, which purls with the promise of a new life as though it was only just revealed with each of its chapters – each section, every verse and sentence. All these gifts present the inconceivable bounties of being a believer to our spirits. They appear with inexpressible meanings and manifestations in hearts which turn to their Lord, imbuing everything we see with its own color; this boundlessness and spiritual richness takes us to realms beyond. We thus find ourselves sipping in reverent awe in a circle remembering celestial beings. Or, it’s as if we were in the spacious and soothing climate of Paradise, listening to the melodies of a chorus of heavenly servants therein.

In particular, this abundant spirituality that sometimes envelops the spirits of some among us draws us beyond the constricted temporal dimensions in which we find ourselves and pulls us all the way up to the gates of Paradise, such that we would imagine ourselves to be on the shores of an enchanting realm, exceedingly intimate, never before sensed or seen, and impossible to be expressed in words.

Even if we do not ponder or speak in such an inward state, the worlds beyond offer us melodies without words from their own voices and proclaim, “We are forever within you as a vibration in your ear, a light in your eye, and a delight in your heart. We are within you, in the ports, harbors, and platforms open to your sensibility, and if you so desired, you could take us within your palm and take possession of us.” We can almost sense the distinct existence, spirit, meaning, pleasure, and charm of all of these: the celestial lights that we believe to rain upon our hearts within these effervescing feelings extend beyond the realms afar and even further. We can nearly touch the prevalent atmosphere forever glowing with feeling and entreaty, the lamps adorning the purple, pink, white, and yellow streets as well as the minarets. Then there are the places of worship to which we rush several times each day to gaze upon eternity with our spirits, and the pure people who share with us the same feelings and who voice our sentiments. When our spirits that are filled with precisely this meaning and substance return to their own essence, they delve into beholding their inner worlds, more profound than everything else, and begin to sense anew the things and objects in their surrounds.

Indeed, these sacred days, wherein the human being and the realms beyond are sensed and perceived with a heightened perfection, kindle the most forceful thoughts in our minds, nourish the most delightful poems in our spirits, unveil to our hearts the most mysterious doors of Divine gifts, and prepare us to express our most intimate feelings.

On occasion, some of us immediately fall silent with the reverent fear of this blessed slice of time and begin conversing, so to speak, with our own inner world. Who knows, perhaps such a silence in the way of trust, love, and esteem has a more meaningful impact than the most eloquent speech. Indeed, sometimes such a solemn silence, expressing self-reflection, feeling, and the notion of experiential knowledge of the Divine (ma’rifa), can be more effective than the most profound words. This silent eloquence is in all likelihood that for which we most yearn.

Sacred days and nights, through incessant exposure, have permeated our spirits to such an extent that from the moment they first appear on the horizon we begin to sense their sweetness on the lips of our hearts, feel their profound meanings pour forth deep in our spirits in the form of melodious speech, and witness firsthand grand thoughts streaming from pens in a richly embroidered fashion onto paper. Alongside our current existence, we long for the days blossoming like buds in our beliefs and hopes for what we yearn to become and suppose ourselves to be taking flight towards brand new worlds with respect to our aspirations and deeds.

In our believing hearts, we have all seen and loved these sacred times and their lofty days and nights in the form of incessantly reflecting rays of light. Many years may pass and people’s thoughts and points of view may change, but these sacred days and nights will forever allow us to travel upon the slopes of these same feelings and thoughts and pour forth the same inspirations into our hearts.