Five times a day, across Morocco, life pauses. None of the women on our trip were Muslim, but the adhan — the Muslin call to prayer — moved all of us.
I had conversations with travelers trying to put it into words — how beautiful it sounded, how unexpectedly present it made us feel. There's something profound about being reminded, several times a day, that all around you people are pausing to give thanks and pray. It has a way of pulling you out of your own head and into the moment — and into something larger.
Whatever name we each give the divine, whatever tradition we come from, that impulse to pause and give thanks is deeply human. Standing in the middle of it, surrounded by an entire country practicing it together, you feel the thread that runs through all of us.
In Chefchaouen, where our riad was tucked inside the medina, the call came in loud and clear. It felt mystical. Otherworldly. A reminder that we were somewhere truly different from home.
I don't think any of us came home unchanged by it.
