I Came to Build Some Hearts: the Life, Love, and Enduring Wisdom of Yunus Emre, Poet Forgotten

For thirty years, the story says, he carried wood to another man's fire, and nobody thought to ask his name.You know what it is to give years to something no one sees. To stand at the edge of the room while other people's lives arrive. To count the time behind you, late at night, and find that it comes to nothing.I Came to Build Some Hearts is a narrative biography of Yunus Emre, the thirteenth-century Anatolian dervish whose plain Turkish verses are still sung at funerals, in homes and in concert halls seven centuries later. It follows him from a famine village to a saint's door, where he asked for wheat instead of a blessing; up a hill with an axe for decades at a lodge above the Sakarya river; into the mountains in despair and back onto a cold threshold before dawn; and out along the roads to Tabriz, Baghdad and Damascus with a voice that, once it began, would not stop. It is told as a story, scene by scene, and it tells you plainly which parts are history, which are legend, and which are the storyteller's imagining.- Stop counting your silent years as lost, and see what they were quietly building- Find your voice at an age when you thought the time for it had gone- Learn to say the hard thing from the floor, never from a height- Carry home a few plain lines that still end quarrels and mend what was brokenInside you will hear a waterwheel groan with love for God, watch an old man sit down between two lines of angry men at a well, and stand by a stream where a scholar tried to burn every poem he had made.This is a book for anyone who has carried other people's wood, taken the wrong sack home, or waited so long at a door that they stopped expecting it to open.A blind old man once put his foot on a runaway in the dark and asked only two words: Our Yunus?Open the first page. Your years were never wasted.