Welcome

I grew up in Mashhad, a city in the Khorasan region on the eastern edge of the Iranian Plateau, a name whose meaning I learned before I understood its weight. Khorasan, from khor, sun, and asan, rising, names a place by an event rather than a boundary. As a child, it was simply where I was from. Over time, it has come to feel less like a location and more like a vector, something oriented toward becoming. The older I get, the more the word gathers meanings around it, geographical, historical, and something more elusive, the sense that home is not a fixed point in space but a continuing alignment, a way of being turned. The places that shape us do not remain behind us; they persist as a kind of internal grammar, structuring how we move, how we remember, how we begin again. I now live in eastern Pennsylvania with my wife, which is east in name but not in origin. And yet I find that I am still oriented toward that earlier east, still shaped by its pull.