In this allegory from Attar's Mosibat Nameh, a barefoot and bareheaded madman, tormented by a cold and muddy path, pleads with God. He asks the Creator to either return his 'heart'—allowing him to transcend worldly suffering through spiritual intoxication and oblivion to physical reality—or to provide him with a worn-out shoe to endure the physical elements. This illustrates the Sufi seeker's tension between the painful awareness of the material world and the desire for complete spiritual absorption that renders physical afflictions meaningless.