To be engaged by a true teacher like Hafiz is to have lasting ingredients put into your mind, that when cooked through contemplation help us lead a better life. Inherent in engaging someone's interest is to make them present. And with so many suffering the tyranny of some past event or anxieties about the future, what a gift being in the moment can be, especially then if a jewel can be slipped into your pocket by some magi'sbrush stroke, writings, sculpture, instrument, or ballet step. Hafiz helps us inherit a treasure that is already ours, decreed at birth; and he speaks directly about that in some of his poems – how to file your claim!

‘Wine-tasting of the sky’

I have published around 700 Hafiz rendering-poems in six books. And the impetus behind every single line of Hafiz I ever wrote is to help light a candle in your heart, to assist our perennial need to have fun, laugh and dance, "to lift the corners of your mouth." The weight that can be on us in an hour or a day, Hafiz is there to lighten. His love for us is time tested and keeps encouraging and can inspire. He helps us to forgive those we have yet to forgive. And honour those we have yet to honour. And his herculean strength, his enlightenment, will rub off on you so that you too wish (and discover yourself more able) never to harm another via sound or movement. Hafiz became incapable of an unkind act, it is said.