The woman sat down and fear was in her eyes.

He was thinking about a cup of tea.

He said, “Oh my child! Don’t be sad!”

Love is your destiny.

Allow me to distinguish between concepts that have no clear boundaries: fortune-telling, palmistry, divination, and astrology. Each claims to have a connection with another world and reveals truths that are not visible to us. Through the use of a dervish or sand, reciting the poetry of Hafez, seeing shapes in a cup of coffee, sitting with celestial bodies, or even through the natural order of arranging cards. Sometimes we get stuck. It has happened to each of us that the choice becomes difficult or the pressures of life are so great that it seems we cannot solve our problems without resorting to these things, the random order of objects that we attribute to a higher world. Some of us pick up the book of Hafez, while others give money to a fortune-teller or a diviner. What distinguishes these two is whether we deceive ourselves or someone else deceives us. When we read Hafez, the rhythmic order of words calms us

In Nizar Qabbani’s poetry, the fortune-teller accompanies himself on a long journey with a “boy” and at the end, he says that he will not find his love. He portrays a difficult path that has no false hope, cannot be solved with letters, and does not involve spirits. It is the pain of love and has a bittersweet heartache: the boy will go everywhere, looking for the woman with grape-like lips, and with her laughter, her rose and song, her wild tangled hair will spin around the world. The boy will search everywhere for her, asking for her sign from the waves of the sea and the turquoise rivers, but he will not find her. The fortune-teller, like a storyteller in the poetry of the brothers, “tells him how and does not tell him how much.”

How can we spend the long night? The long night can be real, like Yalda or any winter night, it can be a metaphor for personal sorrow, such as separation from a loved one, or it can be a metaphor for a collective crisis. What we have learned from the past is that we should spend the long night together, chat and give each other hope, and read Hafez’s fortune. It’s as if what we seek in our own world must come from another world. Is hope in vain? Maybe. But despair is death. This is where I know fortune-telling is a means of survival. The fireplace is what makes the long night, whether personal or collective, bearable for us.

“Fortune usually comes with companionship and companionship. The fortune teller wants to deceive and take money, but the Hafez reader does not take money. Someone who gets coffee or card readings for their friend does not want money either. Fortune is a means of sharing in the sorrow or difficulty of another. There are moments of sorrow when connecting with the material world, seeing your suffering and interacting with you. The problem will eventually be solved in three other turns, three days, three months, or three years. You also have someone by your side who has shared in your suffering. I don’t know if the problem will really be solved or not, if Joseph will really return or not, if what is in the cup is a sign of happiness or a bad omen, but just having someone by your side and sharing moments with them is a blessing for us.”

What has been left for us from long ago is neither necessarily good nor bad. We give it meaning and expect from it. A fortune is neither good nor bad; it can be either. In my opinion, it tends towards goodness. There was a story by Saadi in our Persian textbook about a father who promised his children a treasure if they plowed a piece of land, and the children came face to face with the treasure of that land. Good fortune is like this, not in fortune-telling itself, but in its proximity: interacting with others and sharing their sorrows, hoping for a better day and patiently waiting together for the end of Yalda. Yalda is approaching and we are gathered together, shining brightly. Fortune is just a means.

Note:

A part of the reader of the cup, Nizar Qabbani.