Excerpt from a small blue diary I kept when I was in fifth grade: It’s weird but when you walk into a room of people you can feel the air. The air is a color and a texture that you can see and feel and it’s how people are feeling. But what’s really weird is you can change how they feel if you concentrate really hard.

I believed this at ten, and I still believe it. In our early twenties my sister and I used to go to parties and some of the parties were flat and dull. We would look at each other and murmur social overdrive, social overdrive, and then throw ourselves into the scene and try to put everyone at ease and make everyone feel connected and happy.

Social overdrive social overdrive is a mantra for me in these vicious times. How to lift up another human being, or a roomful of them, or a nation. How to change the energy in the room, how to channel not anger and bitterness but love and kindness and acceptance. Something that Hafiz, who lived and died 700 years ago, knew well.

With That Moon Language, by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them,
“Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud;
otherwise, someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,
this great pull in us
to connect.
Why not become the one
who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world
is dying to hear?​

Click here for more information about this poem, attributed to the Persian poet Hafiz/Hafez. Please note also that reputable sources say that most of the beloved poems attributed to Hafiz were actually written by his purported translator Daniel Ladinsky.
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