In Córdoba again. I’ve been here so many times now that the city is starting to seem more than familiar. Every time I come back it’s like visiting an old friend, a friend who shares memories past. The long journey here gives way to the streets and squares, festooned with orange trees, for whom the springtime is becoming evident. The white orange flowers are about to open to the world, bombarding the senses with their fragrant aroma. Life gives us so many wonderful gifts. I walk slowly as if by doing so somehow the passage of time itself will slow to my pace, to enjoy this place that little bit longer. But in the great order of things, my wishes are not to be obeyed by nature.
The Iglesia de la Magdalena will be opened briefly for our concert. The long wooden benches inside quickly fill up for this 23rd edition of the Three Cultures Festival. There seated and listening to the performance, a man begins to cry, clutching a handkerchief. Who knows what grief has brought him here to lose himself in the music as his eyes well with tears. I imagine that maybe he’s crying for what we should all cry and have cried for; perhaps he feels the sins of humanity. I feel his pain certainly as I sing the line, ‘una gota de alegría puede disolver un océano de pena’ – ‘but a drop of joy can wash away an ocean of grief’.
Wrapping up the concert, having closed our hearts to the music and locked our cases shut, we find ourselves before a table of the most exquisite dishes: foods seasoned with basil, peppermint, cumin, corriander, ginger, and awash with sesame oil, pistachios and almonds.
We chat the night away and exchange opinions and impressions of this latest performance in the heart of once Moorish Córdoba. Through the glass of the window I stare at the Moon, and she stares back at me. She seems so enormous hanging there in the sky tonight; though I doubt we’d be able to reach her even with the longest ladder! To my mind come the words spoken by a citizen of this town a thousand years ago as he reflected on the true essence of love, words immortalised in the work ‘El Collar de la Paloma’ – ‘The Ring of the Dove’:
Do you not see the candle? Just lit
When it begins to burn bright there comes a breath of wind and it dies.
But when fire is given to the same flame,
That same breath of wind can bring it alive for it to spread forth.
-Ibn Hazm
