“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing Light of your own Being.”                                              ~Hafez 

We were sitting at a low table during free play, the kind with rounded corners and a surface that always smelled faintly of tempera paint no matter how often it was wiped down. I was drawing with a couple of thick crayons, pushing blue wide across the paper and layering purple over it— a quiet sky closing in on itself.

Two boys at the same table were talking while they built something out of wooden blocks.

“My dad says Iran is our enemy,” one of them announced.

The other boy stacked a block carefully on top of his tower. “Yeah,” he said. “They took Americans and won’t give them back.”

I remember the strange stillness that came over me. I knew about Iran. It was not abstract to me, not just something on the news. It lived in my house, in framed photos of relatives, in a black-haired doll which I’d had since I was a baby, in the way my grandparents answered the phone: “Salām, joonam!”

I knew how to say salām. I knew a few other small words they used with me—azizam, boos, sohb bekheir. Enough to feel the warmth of the language, but not enough to speak it easily, not enough to claim it confidently in a room full of other........

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