Broadly speaking, we can be devoted to something or someone and true devotion happens when we voluntarily put the well-being of our object of devotion above our own well-being. In other words, you care about the person you are devoted to more than you care about yourself. It is important to emphasise that a true act of devotion is carried out freely and voluntarily.

More than five hundred years ago, the Spanish saint Teresa of Ávila reminded her fellow sisters that the divine is not confined to cloisters, silence, or sacred rituals. God, she insisted, is present everywhere—also in the kitchen, also in the midst of ordinary labor. Her message is simple yet radical: the spiritual is not separate from life. Life itself is spiritual.

Love, wine, loss of reputation, sincerity, and risk: The figure of the “outsider” in Farid al-Din 'Attar’s (d. 1221) poetry appears in a web of associations between these five themes. The core idea in such poetry—which 'Attar inherited from a much longer tradition of Sufi outsiders that goes as far back as Husayn ebn Mansur al-Hallaj (d. 922)—is that there is something redeeming in the outcast, something illuminating in the nonconformist. It is as if the outcast offers the truest perspective available in his or her particular lived situation. We can imagine how salient these themes would have been in societies where reputation mattered greatly and often hinged on public displays of piety.

As a boy, I ran around the 

fence of a construction site 

with my little buddies.

‍

But I was stopped by a small 

hole in the fence. I moved a 

stone to stand on, to squint

and look on through. The ex-

cavation looked like a desert. 

‍

Landing in college, I looked 

through the hole in the fence 

of all I was being taught, and 

saw the vastness that told me

I am a poet.