"Looking for love in all the wrong places is something we have all done at one time or another. Many of us spend our entire lives doing it. Many relationships are doomed because of it. Even so,

Of course you do not do this out loud. . .

says Hafiz. I take this to mean that we don't acknowledge openly to the people in our lives that we want them to love us — in the sense of filling us up somehow, making us happy, giving our lives meaning — and that we don't even say the truth out loud to ourselves. In fact, we are likely to deny to our family and friends, and also to ourselves, that any such thing is happening, that we would ever dream of expecting someone else to make us happy. We are perfectly capable of doing that ourselves, thank you very much. Except, it seems, we are not. And, either in words or in action, we can even blame those around us for not giving us what we secretly expect is our due from them!

"Hafiz, being a Sufi, is always singing about love. But he does not mean the kind of 'love' the 'wanting creature' inside of us is looking for. That kind of love is a need, the kind that cries out, 'Love me.' The kind of love that interests Hafiz is that which can only begin when the wanting ceases.

"Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.

"It is the most natural thing in the world to want to love and be loved, Hafiz acknowledges. In our natural, healthy state, we like to touch and be touched, to feel the warmth of another's body, to roll in the grass. We want to connect to others. But not only in that simple, warm, and affectionate way of the body, which in itself can be so nourishing. We also want to connect beneath words, beneath our skin, through the eyes of the heart. We want to know the taste of loving and being loved in our essence, for who we are.

"Here, though, is the rub. How do we go about it? How do we invite the experience of a love that is not merely a need? All spiritual traditions have urged us to love one another. We tend to assume that this is the message of only the New rather than the Old Testament, but there it is in Leviticus 19:18: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Here it is in a poem by Hafiz the Sufi. Loving-kindness is central to the teaching of Mahayana Buddhism, too. These teachings have been around for a few thousand years, and yet is the world a more loving place now than it ever was? There is not a great deal of evidence to suggest there has been much improvement. And if improvement there be, it is mostly due to the teachings of the European and American Enlightenment, with its ideas of universal suffrage, equality, freedom, and a gradually developing respect for those human beings and also forms of life that are different from ourselves.

"In this poem, Hafiz is urging us to express our love to those around us rather than to expect to receive it from them. Give the very thing you are looking for."