An Empty Black Box

The mystical heart of Islam.

It is the mystical heart which is the pilgrim's destination. The events and accidents occurring along the way give each individual's pilgrimage its distinctive color and hue, but they ought not to be conflated with the pilgrim's destination. They may impede her progress or facilitate it; they affect her velocity and raise her hopes or disappoint them. But the destination remains the same.

Mood and attunement wax and wane with velocity and distance. The horizon recedes. Even so, in rare moments, we can encounter that to which we have attuned ourselves: the foretaste of the end which has been present with us from the very beginning.

We, all of us, are the evolving characters of our individual pilgrimages to our unscripted ends. Unscripted, that is, so far as we know...