Today I went shopping.

There is something about moving purposefully through the aisles of large stores, full of “things” we think we need: we pick them up, place them in the trolley, and move on in search of another “thing.”

I went to the fruit section and chose a few things I wanted, mostly already packed in relatively small packages so that I could get home more quickly. I went to the oranges, which were loose, picked up a bag for them, and took the first orange to put inside. But the moment I touched it, it was as if time suddenly stopped.

A door opened, and once again I saw the orange through the eyes of my childhood. I felt again how astonishing an orange had once been: its colour, its scent, the details I could see in it; peeling an orange, and how I had learned to peel one. My heart tightened. I felt how full of wonder, beauty, and freshness my childhood gaze had been; how every phenomenon in the world had been a doorway to discovering beauty in each moment of life. And with my whole being I felt how we change. All that wonder becomes one thing among other things in a shopping basket.

The taste, colour, and scent of life, and that feeling of wonder and freshness in every moment, become only a shadow of what they once were. For an instant, I suddenly stepped through that door into childhood. Once again, wholly, I could see from the perspective of the child hidden behind my middle-aged eyes. It is impossible to describe what I felt in words, because even in that moment it was like holding fresh water in the hollow of my hands and drinking every second of the experience before it slipped between my fingers and escaped me.

I do not know how long I stood motionless in the middle of the store, my eyes wet and an orange in my hands. I do not know whether anyone saw me. But I know that if, years from now, I ever see a passer-by holding a piece of fruit with tears in their eyes, I will write a poem for them, or paint an image of their memory.

When I arrived home, I saw that my mother had sent me several old photographs. Among them was the photograph below: an image of me as a child, holding a pomegranate, looking back at me from the depth of distant years. Today, once again, I saw the world through his eyes. I remembered Sohrab...

The journey took me to the gate of the garden of my childhood,
and I stood
until my heart could settle.
There came the sound of fluttering wings,
and when the door opened,
I fell to the earth beneath the onrush of truth.

And once again, beneath the sky of the “Psalms,”
on that journey when I came to myself beside the river of “Babylon,”
the sound of the harp was silent;
and when I listened carefully, there came the sound of weeping,
and several restless harps
were swinging from the wet branches of the willow.
And along the road of the journey, pure Christian monks
pointed toward the silent veil of “Jeremiah the Prophet.”
And I, aloud,
was reading “Ecclesiastes.”