Gold dust in my blood

The thought that they will accept me into the sufi order feels like gold flowing in my veins.. I walk differently . I walk upright, my feet touching the ground more gently.

Kulaha buyout Allah - all of them are houses of God

I , as a Christian Sufi, went to the mosque to pray on New Year's Eve, and prayed together with a Moroccan woman who told me later that she lived in Geneva and as a Muslim went to pray in the Swiss churches because she liked them better than the mosque there. Mirror images. Peace is coming.

Ten years and how being Arab is infectious...

On my way home I picked up my bicycle and then stopped in front of the Moroccan restaurant where the lights were still on. This used to belong to my very first Arab friend, Hisham... Who taught me how to smoke a sheesha with fruit tobacco at 3am one night and we talked about the Iraq war and Osama bin Ladin. It was 2005 or so I think, during the Iraq war. I spoke about how the US army said that trying to catch Bin Ladin was like looking for one particular rabbit in all of the caves of Afghanistan. We grinned at each other and he whispered:"They will never find him..."
Today, 10 and 1/2 years later, with Hisham long gone to another place in town, I looked into the windows of that restaurant and  the brown skinned head waiter came running towards the terrace from the inside, opened the windows wide, gave me a huge beaming smile and asked:" Are you a Muslim?"
I was startled , thought for a second, and then realized that I had forgotten to remove my black and golden hijab scarf after leaving the mosque tonight.
" I am a sufi", I said. "A what?" "Soufiyya" "Ah!" He replied and nodded.
"Mawlid Mobarak!"
"What?" He said, and since I don't speak a word of amazigh, the Moroccan Berber dialect, I switched to English and said:" it is the prophet's birthday!"
"Oh", he said, "really?"
"YesI was just at the mosque, they told me!"
He called his colleague who also came and looked at me, he looked vaguely familiar and had never seen me with hijab before, I wondered if he recognized me, maybe they wondered if I had married one of the Moroccans by now and converted just for that, or whether they even realized I was European and not Arab, and then I smiled, waved and drove off...

I am a Sufi

The heart’s tears are the bells of the caravan
 The heart’s tears are the traveler’s native land

 Ghazi ad-Din Khan Nizam

Bittersweet Turkey 2015

At dusk I took a walk in Sanliurfa. Slowly strolling over the cobblestones I felt enveloped by the comforting warmth of the day's sun that had been soaked up by the adobe walls and ancient stones of the houses and was now radiating from them giving this shady alley something cosy that made me feel at home.Women in head scarves and pantaloons were sitting on the ground sorting masses of red peppers and heaping them onto piles. Sometimes the spicy fragrance wafted across the street into my nostrils. I felt relaxed and on this day my legs were not tired.
I had just spent the last ten days working as a volunteer in a hospital for Syrian bomb victims. I had spent all my recent days standing next to a doctor's couch, pouring iodine and antiseptic serum into wounds, holding down ends of bandage strips, opening package after package of gauze, and most of all, hugging patients tight and holding hands of those who were screaming and crying while having their shrapnel wounds cleaned.
I had gladly and gratefully accepted the kindness of a refugee family who hosted me for all this time, letting me stay in their home, greeting me with cheerful " Ahlan wa sahlan" and glasses of sweetened mate tea every night after work. All of this satisfied my urge to do something, anything, something more than just sharing the endless stream of disastrous news coming out of Syria.
I had had visions of sitting behind my traumatized friend and wrapping my arms around his chest before I came. But I didn't know that I would be doing this, every day, for another man, painfully skinny and half delirious from constant pain and medication, who suffered so terribly during those bandage changes that he almost broke my heart and I felt rattled and shaken the first days after work. I developed a special relationship to those patients who I held and comforted and one of them told the nurse that her pain is less when I am near her. So, even though I was standing up all day and saw injuries and degrees of starvation no one ever wants to see, it was also gratifying because I was the lightening rod for some of their pain which ran through my body and left, relieving them of it to a certain degree. I was charged from Ramadan, from 30 days of prayer, and it helped.
Now it was over and I was walking down this shady alley of Urfa, one of the oldest cities on earth. I was staying in the house of a friend, another family of refugees. Her parents were sleeping on the roof while I slept on a mattress on the cleanswept stone floor.
Then she came home,very late,and told me the reason for the great delay was that her colleague had been beaten up by a Turk who hated Syrian immigrants. Tensions seem to run high, in this part of Turkey, with the growing number of Syrian refugees. We are all waiting for the end of this war. How much longer , nobody knows. And it is getting more complicated day by day.
This morning I awoke, feeling I had slept way into the day. It was hot and somewhat humid, and I could hear my friend's mother sloshing water into that inner little yard this house had which was in the middle between the windows of the two rooms, the blue door and the little tract leading to the bathroom. Her mom was scrubbing the floor and I was guiltily lazing in my bed. It was not even 9am.
But then, I had been up at 6am the day before, hoping they would take me along to Akcakale, to watch her NGO distributing food boxes to the camps. Alas, no, the Hungarian manager explained to me, that I should have applied for a permit to ride in their vehicle a week ago, as security was very high and they did not want me to get kidnapped by the Islamic state of Iraq and Sham,the terrorist group that was beheading hapless journalists whose countries weren't prepared to buy them out for millions of dollars. I knew that ISIS was known to nip across the border at Tal Abyad and grab whoever did not look sufficiently Arabic, and sometimes they would grab a Syrian NGO worker too. Disappointed though not without a touch of relief at being spared any possible encounters with islamist kidnappers/rapists/beheaders, I resigned myself to hanging around the NGO office for the day. I did not even know where I was in town, and I did not trust GPS to work as efficiently as in Iran ( where people could be under constant supervision this way, I suppose)
So I awoke to the sound of water being sloshed and scrubbed around the yard in front of my window. My friend's mom knocked on my door and brought me a tray with a glass of water and a small cup of Arabic coffee which is almost as thick as soup and leaves part of the cup filled with black- brown coffee grounds after drinking the liquid part.
This day I would cast my reservations about GPS locations aside and venture into town to explore more of the ancient sun bathed stones, and maybe eat  a bit of baklava that was famous here. Turkey has a number of very sweet, very sticky, oily pastries that grow on you, as a ritual of consuming a regular dose of comfort food.
I had now come to know some of Syrian home cooking, and this family cooked a dish exactly the same way as the family from Qaritayn in Reyhanli: molokheya braised in oil with garlic and shreds of chicken. I loved the strong tangy taste of this vegetable and was convinced that their version of the plant compared to what I knew was the equivalent of a mountain herb compared to a limp greenhouse plant that had lost all its original aroma . It had this unmistakable taste that Annia Ciezadlo whose Day of Honey I was reading compared to the taste of the earth near an old pond, and it tasted even better with a squirt of juice from a squeezed lemon.

Evening prayer

I go to the evening prayer
Like to a meeting with the Beloved
I shower, I comb my hair
I choose my clothes carefully
To please him.
And then I go
My hands carry a flower
A tulip or a rose
One fresh, delicate pink rose
Held at the level of my heart
I whisper and moan softly
And there he comes to me
Wrapping me in his arms
I feel his breath on my neck
And his cool light entering my veins
My head sinks backward
Baring my throat
Take me, I beg
Take me, use me
God, please make me your tool
I will suffer thirst, solitude and hunger
But make me your tool

We are placed on earth to remember...

Let us not forget who we are, whence we came, where we shall go;
Let us not forget that pre-eternal day when we bore witness,
Bore witness to His Lordship with a resounding yea,
Which does still echo under the vaults of the celestial realm.

Let us not forget the intimacy of the Beloved’s embrace,
The warmth of Her bosom when we in union were.
We have now fallen and forgotten who we are,
Wandering on earth with no compass in hand.

But we can remember, so let us not forget.
Let us not forget that although cast in this lowly world,
Although blinded by veils of neglect and heedlessness,
Although forgetfulness our second nature has become,
We are placed here on earth to remember and can remember.

Let us not forget then to remember our Origin and End,
To remember who we really are as we make this journey of earthly life.

Musings after watching "Rosewater"

So I am watching the movie "Rosewater" in the middle of the night.
http://youtu.be/rFl7Aex-FN4
Watching a prisoner dance in his cell, arms raised, turning, spinning, stumbling, laughing to himself, in his cell. while his interrogator watches him on the monitor, thinking, he must have gone mad. After this painful interrogation, to be dancing in his cell...
And I feel this is me. I am this prisoner, imprisoned in a strange place, not knowing why I am here, uncertain when I will get out, and yet- dancing. laughing madly, smiling to myself. The strange places life takes us while we stumble along, precariously, barely knowing where we are headed nor why we are here, and yet, trying to make the best of it. surviving, yes, but also, enjoying the small moments life gives us, unexpectedly, at the worst of times.
I travel. I travel and I seek. These moments, happiness coming when I am off guard, breathing in the fragrance of flowers, somewhere, in the middle of nowhere, where the tediousness of daily life cannot follow me. Me, the prisoner of life, me, born into nothing, floating suspended, like a butterfly, between darkness and light, ready at all times, to fade into darkness or to dance, suddenly, in a ray of light, laughing about nothing, like a madman.
I miss P., he hates me now and won't speak to me, at some twist of events that is the fault of neither of us.. He ended like this prisoner, in the movie, I met him after his release, and he was my soulmate, somehow, for almost three years. He had that same daredevil approach to life, he was not afraid, and I loved that. And like me, a prisoner of circumstance. One day I said:" I want to apologize, that I have never listened to your whole story..." And he liked that. I miss him... He helped me understand so much, about how we can be strong, by an act of will, an unbroken spirit... If I could see him, I would bring him another gift, like last time, hidden....
                         
                                     

Tears for Nimrud

What I find so absolutely maddening, in addition to the grief I feel like a physical presence, a cold magnetic fluid running through my blood, in addition to the tears I have shed today and the cries that pained my chest is that I was so close... Maybe only twenty kilometers away, and I never saw it . I never went, we drove on the highway from Erbil to Mosul, took the detour road that everyone took already in 2013 who could possibly avoid having to enter the city of Mosul because Al Qaida was in there, our taxi driver let out a long breath of relief, the guys from Baghdad on the backseat stretched and eased their tension and the whole car breathed an audible sigh once we were past Mosul and nothing had happened except having to show our IDs to the peshmerga for the umpteenth time during this trip from Sulaymaniyeh to Duhok. Iraqi Kurdistan.
I never saw Nimrud, and I never will. Nimrud is gone. Demolished by those very fighters and their friends who very keeping everyone out of Mosul in 2013.
Goodbye, world heritage, treasure of 3000 years. My heart is broken.