Return As Something Strange
Eid Thoughts on The Worlds We Must Fight For
Sighting the Eid Moon, postcard by Nabi Haider Ali
Eid flowers from the Saturday market
1.
Eid Mubarak! Today I celebrate many things. First, the fact that my heart grew more spacious with knowledge and mercy this Ramadan. I celebrate that my heart is only as spacious as all that it strives to understand, work with, and make peace with.
Today I celebrate that I’m learning how to build an internal peace that can better allow me to spread peace among others. However, today, I also celebrate that I have a long ways to go in this regard! But the opportunities to learn something and the spaces that newly embodied knowledge open up are always blessings.
Today I recognize that peace is never simplistic or essentializing or without struggle. So I honor that the most noble peace depends upon a constant battle against what distorts, compromises, and deceives one’s heart and soul. When I say this out loud it seems obvious or dull, like a platitude. But simplest truths can take years (of repeating the same errors) until they are begun to be understood. The writer, poet, and philosopher, René Daumal whose writings led me to where I am today, beautifully conceptualized this paradoxical idea of peace in his influential prose poem, The Holy War:
“He who has declared this war in himself is at peace with his fellows, and although his whole being is the field of the most violent battle, in his very innermost depths there reigns a peace that is more active than any war. And the more strongly this peace reigns in his innermost depths, in that central silence and solitude, the more violently rages the war against the turmoil of lies and numberless illusions. In that vast silence obscured by battle-cries, hidden from the outside by the fleeing mirage of time, the eternal conqueror listens to the voices of other silences. Alone, having overcome the illusion of not being alone, he is no longer the only one to be alone.”
2.
Rhythms.
Of days, nights, bodies, words, sounds, earth, stars. Always, this return to the primacy of rhythm, the rippling ground of its music and patterning.
Today I recognize that even in my middle age I’m relearning rhythms that have been with me even before I was born. Today I honor the fact that I’m a slow learner privileged with an ancient wealth of resources. I must put my luck and privilege towards creatively tender and generous uses, even this late in the day. So I begin to learn Arabic (again, after failures) and I sort out my charitable donations and how to support immigrant-owned businesses here and wonder how I can better support other marginalized communities. It’s never enough, just another beginning, another dawn we have an extremely limited amount of.
Today I’m reminded of a line in a poem by Charles Olson that I keep returning to:
“I’ve had to learn the simplest last things/which made for difficulties.”
Today I turn to them, the simplest things, in gratitude, thanking them for the undying light glinting off all their facets. Today I turn to the difficulties, too, as mysterious blessings that, in time, yield knowledge and mercy.
3.
Today, like many days, I reflect on the saying by the Prophet ﷺ : “Islam began as something strange and will return as it began, so glad tidings to the strangers.”
A few months ago I joined an online discussion about this very saying and everyone present felt particularly empowered, consoled, and moved by it.
Strangeness, however it is named or perceived, seems to be one of the attributes of Mercy, which is unlimited, even as elusive it may sometimes feel.
Strangeness, in various linguistic, prophetic, philosophical connotations, can indicate outsiders, wayfarers, the poor and the indigent, the queer and gender nonconforming, the spiritually rebellious, the creatively unorthodox, the wildly heterodox, the lost, the displaced and on and on. All of whom live in the worlds I am striving to protect and nurture. No matter what happens may we all keep returning as strangers-in-kinship, as something(s) strange to disrupt and trouble and overturn the superiorities of sameness, privilege, status, and power.
To welcome and learn from what is deemed strange with quiet mind/open heart.
To comfort and understand the stranger with compassion, patience, and collaboration. To help uncover the angelic qualities in all the strangers that we are, at some point, for someone else, thereby daily fulfilling the beautiful biblical adage.
To build our worlds with strangers and thus to broaden what can be included.
To make the familiar strange again in hopes to renew it or remake it with fresh eyes.
These are the root-virtues of the worlds I keep fighting for and keep returning to.
4.
My celebration acknowledges the darkness, without knowing what to do with it. The persistent darkness of how-things-are, the darkness of how-could-we-let-things-get-to-this-dismal-place. And the darkness of our ongoing negligence and callous hyper-conformity. Then there is the refracting darkness of the chatty, conditioned mind — the mind not sure how to assess threats and challenges, fears and traps. A mind whose privileges can sometimes confound its capacities to interact with the world-as-it-is.
But working on the mind in league with the heart is the journey that Ramadan helps us re-commence. We must remember to continue and to help others continue. The minds and hearts we make and remake also make and remake our shared worlds.
5.
Eid is here and millions of people are joyful and uplifted and joined in celebration with their loved ones. The joy is especially poignant after a month that involves testing one’s capacities, depriving oneself of normal comforts, learning to resist ubiquitous temptations, and trying to embody a one month spiritual space-time opposed to the status quo of profit, pleasure, distraction, and status-fueled hustle.
The images online of thousands upon thousands of people praying as one body in mosques all over the world are themselves symbols of the potentials of unified inclusion. They are imperfect and incomplete symbols, as all are, but they can inspire us to put our love for ourselves and others into more expansive action.
Maybe these images can also teach us that our beautiful individualities are made even more so when arrayed in artful mosaics with others. The neighborhood feels like home because of the many different ideas of home that get thrown into it.
6.
Ramadan represents the most profound spiritual awakening of my life.
Thus, it is an awakening that I can always look forward to and prepare for. After 5 Ramadans, I feel like I finally know this now. It creates a curious timelessness and spaciousness in one’s life. Oddly, Ramadan is the most generous and abundant spacetime defined by apparent deprivation, lack, fragility, and yearning. There are secret places here, Ramadan tells you, and they are amazingly homelike if you but knew. So go to them and know.
Ramadan changed my life not because of all the religious ideas the month encapsulates or all the practices and rituals that are part of it. Indeed, for many reasons, I can feel alienated from a lot of those aspects. Mainstream, conservative dictates and distortions of faith and spirit are not part of my path. The older origin stories, parables, poems, and thousand year old Sufi concepts can seem more radical and merciful — and they often are. Old ways & gone worlds harbor some tender weirdnesses we all might benefit from. This Ramadan my most religious moments have often happened among my most non-religious friends.
Divinity cannot be pinned down. Thus a spiritual life contains all that is not spiritual.
So beyond dogma and ritual, I testify to Ramadan’s power because of how much the month speaks directly to hidden potentials in the soul. And how much the month encourages a bringing forth of our inward subtleties and mysteries. Perception is permitted to become expansive again in Ramadan. All of oneself is invited into dialogue with a beautifully suggestive hiddenness.
Shadow-ripples and non-actions and ripe silences and expectant emptinesses can again reveal their riches. This Ramadan I felt the surging of a visceral creativity that allows me to behold each moment as both shaping and shapeable. Eating with friends, exploring the natural world, giving to the needy, taking care of household and work, and mundane movements and rites become newly enchanting. Days and nights are reinforced within a comprehensive mystical architecture, imbuing each breath with meaning and reassurance, even when things feel heavy.
And the heaviness is what we are. For the devastations are unceasing. Like many of us, I’ve witnessed three Eids now where we keep watching entire families get obliterated, whole communities destroyed, and children butchered because of the seemingly unstoppable, endlessly-funded machines of revenge and superiority. A small consolation is that, as the prophetic belief goes: God is with the brokenhearted. Now, what to do with this consolation.
7.
The word strange may never lose its resonances for me.
Some words are like that: they become friends, reassurances, signposts.
Daily, mapping the carnival and marketplace of this earthly life, “strange” may point me in some propitious directions.
My heart-intimate worlds are the worlds of the wayfaring strangers. Our prayer spaces and gathering spaces are patchwork and improvised, underfunded and underground. My ragtag community is scattered across states and countries, fragmented, marginalized, often silenced, and struggling to be recognized and validated. Still we are gifted with powers to occasionally meet in that virtual space and to be vulnerable and empowering for each other. We are weaving networks and creating bonds and building sanctuaries, even through distance and repression. This Ramadan, especially, I am grateful for the community of tenderness and mercy I participated in through the guidance and organization of Dr. Rose Aslan. Such a gift that will continue to energize me in the days to come.
8.
Some of the small joys of Ramadan included regular listening to several Muslim scholars giving encouraging lectures. I was struck by the serenely exuberant oratory that so many of them are gifted with. There is a confidence, at once ethical, pedagogical, and aesthetic, that comes from striving to be in harmony with Reality. There is a grounding tranquility that gives their words both a solemnity and a lightness that I aspire to. For them, the act of discourse is itself a miraculous proof of divine abundance.
Even as I say this though, I know many of us struggle with the sermonizing that happens in mainstream religious spaces where tepid repetition of dogmatic dictates and odious moralizing can cause many to leave their faith and never return.
So seek out the scholars who can speak compassionately and tenderly on subjects that resonate with your heart. Seek out the Sufis and the mystics and the activists. Also seek out the wandering knowledge gatherers and medicine makers on the margins. The artists and poets and musicians whose knowledge is of a more intuitive mode and who recognize our God-given creativity is a force for expansion, inclusion, experimentation, and boundary-breaking.
But above all, telling myself this: seek out modes of discourse and conversation that involve you in ever-evolving wisdom-gathering circles. Speech acts that help re-center communication as an artistry of beautifying and preserving the mysteries of cosmos. Let communication become alchemy with others. A reminder, too, for me to return to poetry and its openings to community and its joining with spirit and education.
9.
Today I turn to the poets, again, and the wayfaring, world-bridging poets.
The poet, translator, and scholar, Pierre Joris passed away right before Ramadan began. His book of essays, A Nomad Poetics, was a constant companion for me in graduate school when I was publishing my first book.
His book is an invigorating ars poetica concerned with how the mixing of tongues, the passionate application of languages, and the wild convergences of cultures and idioms creates a dynamic nomadism of spirit and art.
This nomadic poetics is what artists and mystics and healers need to embrace as our 21st century begins to solidify into an era of domination by oligarch-authoritarians and techno-fascist regimes. In one of the central essays in the text, his enthusiasm is contagious as he sings the praises of all the poets, artists, and creators who embody this liberatory nomadic poetics. (Among them is Abdelwahab Meddeb whose works are next on my list.)
For me, too, Joris was a writer who got me to think about Sufism and Arab poetries for the first time. How the apparent otherness of these worlds might in fact be oases and refuges that I’ve known deeply for a long time. And indeed, they have become so. Now as Eid continues, and spring unfolds, I will spend time with his books and honor his world-gathering and vision-making.
10.
This Ramadan has also inspired me to learn more about the life and words of Imam Ali (PBUH) and his legacy, especially in Shi’a and Sufi traditions. Here is a spectacular image of Imam Ali (PBUH) as a Cosmic Master, also by the young artist Nabi Haider Ali whose art is inspired by his Tamil and Shi’a Muslim identity.
My cursory understanding of Imam Ali (PBUH) is that he brought together ethical excellence, noble warriorship, and mystical wisdom in ways that I can spend years learning from. And so, inshallah, I will. I am reminded, too, of the deep values of friendship and companionship during, especially, the early days of Islam. Friendship as a sacred virtue and an act of ihsan, (إحسان) that magical word that is so hard to translate. But which might be approximated in the beautiful prophetic saying: worshipping God as if you see Him and even if you can’t, knowing that He sees you.
11.
Finally some more tentative words on grief and friendship.
As I grieve with friends for the brutality and destruction in Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere, I grieve too for the loss of individual community leaders and light bearers who have personally shaped me. The more individual light bringers and wisdom protectors we have, the more worlds we can repair. I think now, quietly, sadly, of the beloved Imam Mushin Hendriks who was brutally assassinated right before Ramadan began. I will only add that a couple Ramadans ago I watched his Instagram videos both for his unique wisdom and for his humorous joy. Humor is so often missing from any kind of spiritual leaders, too. I celebrated his queerness, his openness, his laughter, campiness, and tenderness. His Quranic lectures were profound and edifying. We even messaged a few times on the app and I felt a deep connection to his work and vision of a merciful, queer-affirming, all-inclusive Islam. Last I checked his Instagram page has been taken down; I have no idea the fate of his wonderful videos and sermons. It’s heartbreaking and gut-wrenching to lose him not only as an irreplaceable wisdom-protector and light bringer that we need, but also as a potential friend. His legacy is one I can hope to honor and help preserve as another Eid ends and another month begins. Here’s a wonderful interview he did that I continue to draw strength and inspiration from.
12.
Lastly, it is a silent night on a forested mountain where I am now.
It is cold, for California, and may even snow tomorrow.
I am blessed with friendship, a fire, food, warmth, and some time to work in quiet.
My work continues to reveal itself in new ways. In a sense, I work solely for all the strangers and all that is deemed strange. I work with all the estrangements and surprises and contrasts that color my sense of being alive. My words can sometimes struggle to live up to what I expect of them. The mind can sometimes wish it was more like the heart. The heart may wish that it lived perpetually in a shower of stars.
I await the next season, and this next month, with an almost as intense an expectancy I had awaiting Ramadan. For I know that my expectancies contain the simple openings that I need. That they are acts of vigil. And what is opened is the flower of the next hour. For the Sufi, always, we must become the child of the present moment.
Now the night is colder and lanterns were automatically lit among tall pines encircling the patio; tomorrow is the first of April, an approachable mystery. There might be snow and rain and, in the morning, mist curling off the mountain like smoke.