I was emerging from the beach around 6 p.m., out into the busy road and among the tall buildings, when I heard the voice. The sounds of vehicles passing around, the loud music playing from a distant shop, and the chattering of pedestrians were all suddenly shadowed by it. An expansive stillness filled the air. It stood as the only thing to be noticed, commanding silence upon its listeners; the silence not of the tongue, but of the mind. It called onto the mind a sudden awakening, a realization of sorts, as it exclaimed, “Stop!” At that moment, any attentive listener would not have been confused about where to look, what to do, nor about where the voice was coming from. Those did not matter anyway. The only thing that mattered was the voice itself. It was beyond words, beyond sounds, and beyond any perception, although it indeed were all the three. Its tones reached the deepest valleys of my mind, valleys that seemed to have longed for the sea of melodies for quite some time and were eventually filled with great tranquility. All of a sudden, all the memories I had of experiencing the voice stood before me, from the time I was a ten-year-old in Ethiopia until then, a young adult standing in the middle of the city of Abu Dhabi.

I first experienced the voice in a church back in my hometown. The words were not Arabic, as the ones that sound the voice across the streets of Abu Dhabi; they were Geʽez, one of Arabic’s ancient close relatives. It did not take long for me to develop a passion for it. I not only desired to listen to its beautiful melodies, but also to sound them myself. Within a few years, I found myself learning them from one of the church’s priests. If there was anything in the universe that words failed to capture, it was the experience of the voice. For me, the voice was not merely sounds and experience, it was also a call for “recognition,” a pause, as if it says, “here is the Cosmos presented before you, revealing the hidden Eternity!” Not in the metaphysical sense of the words Cosmos and Eternity, but in the experiential one. At times, the voice also served me, although unknowingly, as a subtle reminder of the inherent weirdness of sense experience: the philosophical dilemma behind the nature of consciousness. It is as if it spoke, “look at everything … isn’t all of this weird!? The very fact that you are experiencing the world!? The very essence of your existence!? Take a pause and appreciate that fact!” The most interesting thing is that appreciating that fact is not any mere appreciation, it is itself an experience: an experience of being present, taking in all what is to be perceived and nothing at all simultaneously. And this I realized through the voice.

The voice is almost ubiquitous. It is the beautiful Adhan of Abu Dhabi that sounds from the mosques. It is the melodic prayer of the churches that fills the early mornings of Ethiopia, towns and countrysides alike. It is all the voices around the world that call for the recognition of the “now.”

And as quickly as I descended to my memories, I returned back to notice the inexplicable beauty of a typical early evening in Abu Dhabi, when Adhan was heard across the streets.