the path is many is broken is One

notes from Morocco and coming home, always/again.

This school year - my 5th teaching public school - is coming to an end in 7 school days. Last week, I told my students that the hospitality I felt in Morocco was something that felt new and different. That this surprising hospitality is an art form that arises instinctively from a community of deeply rooted human hearts. A force green and vibrant, archaic and rugged, that can grow anywhere, in whatever conditions. I added: I believe a Language Arts class can also be a place where we hone an art of hospitality. We may even call it diplomacy, conviviality, the art of shared, supportive structures.

Then we drank tea and hot chocolate. And then some milk almost caught fire in the microwave and we laughed and cleaned it up.

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This year too I completed a long-winded process of “clearing my credential” after two years of classes taken while teaching full-time. Well, I need to pay another fee too, maybe send some more emails— but then I will be “official-official,” as a teacher, per California’s requirements. It’s slightly anticlimactic but I believe that my two unforeseen San Diego adventures of discovering Islam (and Sufism), and becoming a public school English teacher have expanded my perception and heart in revelatory ways. The shapes and textures of these adventures will keep changing, of course — they must — and other ones will branch out from them. But the very fact that such surprises can intervene and change a life for the better is a blessed mystery. The unexpected must remain a source of renewal.

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Speaking of another surprise: something mysterious and unexpected happened to me in Morocco. I say this abashedly, knowing that such privileged travel, itself, isn’t enough to change me. But it can perhaps reveal what has always been in the process of shifting and deepening. Here’s what happened: Morocco and the people I met there broke me open; or rather the country and the convergence of souls there expanded, dramatically, what had already been cracked or punctured inside of me.

A raw opening made itself known that now is constantly beseeching and reminding and pouring out light. I’m realizing this now, while still not having the words to convey it or the actions to honor it. I’m lucky, at least, to have understood what is happening and why it matters.

I brought with me a lot of work stress and lingering anxieties from taking time off in the middle of teaching. I brought with me on-again, off-again healing and mending that I am struggling to follow through on. I brought with me grief and fatigue that so many of us feel from observing incessant barbaric events through our phones, all of them rooted in a logic of escalating cruelty. Above all, I brought a heart in need of yielding to a divinity-held-in-common, to a hospitality and openness that is as ancient as the earth and so deeply contrary to the farcical and malicious powers keeping this world burning.

Whatever I brought with me, too, was mirrored and refracted in the luminous hearts of the dear friends I made on the trip. A forest of gentle mirrors and tender openings filled with nourishing light. All within a country whose mystic, hospitable soul was welcoming us into unexpectedly healing configurations.

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I will recollect only some parts now. All I can bring now are pieces.

I remember the birds in the upper cool reaches of the shrine. A hesitancy and a tarrying. The holy atmosphere is a trembling throat, melodies and hungers mixed with shade and stone and wood. The holy figures at rest below handing out bread to the hungry. The inner courtyard of the shared habitation and the inner sanctum of the shrine embody the same context.

Here is where we divest from what is out there. Here is where the interiors alchemize the outside.

Generosity precedes existence, I read. Or am I misremembering the line? I like this idea though.

Greenness of muted light as the faithful huddle in supplication and remembrance by the tomb. No division between service and supplication, prayer and repose. Giving can come from the invisible or from the visible: an abundance of generosity shapes our lives.

And gives possibility to our lives.

But we must remember to go inward together to make the outward better for all. Remembering is a collaborative accumulation of medicine. Memory is a wealth-held-in-common, yet often overlooked and squandered. The memories turn us back to an unseen motherland whose root-rivers are generosity, mercy, patience, and love. Birds above are quite at home with us below. The energy between them and us is tender, emerald light. This is a good place for us to rest and commune, both, always together.

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A mosque-shrine at midday is unlike any other place of rest.

Many words for rest exist and many bear negative connotations. In the spiritual terminology of Sufism — an oceanic lexicon I’m only barely starting to explore —rest and labor often secretly, quietly converge. Inactivity, on the surface, can be a refuge for secret stirrings. This is at odds with the visual results based mechanics of daily strife. Our work is in the invisible, what we call the Real, which also feels aspirational.

But nowhere do the inner energies of a human soul seem more radiant than within a person in focused worship. In the context of Sufi practice, worship can happen through talking and learning in a sacred place. Worship comes in many forms.

Trying to be that person of focused worship is the uplifting quest for me.

Knowing this quest is a beautiful frame for a life well-lived keeps me trying and forgiving and trying and forgiving again.

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Merrakech and Fez. Two of the most fragrant places I’ve been to, because here the welcoming consumes all the senses, the known ones and the unknown. Beginning with the smells of orange blossom, over wood, across stone, at night. Continuing with clay and fire and copper and tea all through the dark. The food is procured that day for the evening supper. You can see it in the dense, clanging fuming market stalls. In the lamb, there is also fruit, cooked with the animal’s juices. The green tea is mulled with mint. What you see and taste are reminders of even more refined tastings and unveilings. Each taste a perfection, each sight a vision. Reminders create openings.

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Rooftops.

The apertures of the courtyards.

The ridges and edges of an ancient skyline.

I remember the novel Hav by travel writer Jan Morris. Years ago I assigned it to my college students. A beautifully detailed, intriguing, and subtle novel about the political and social upheavals in a fictional country. A long time ago when the novel came out some people read it and thought it was a real place and that what they read was a real travelogue. Alas, no, but Morris had honed her lifelong skills at travel writing to create a place that was so realistic and enticing that people wanted it to be real. It’s still one of my favorite novels. And now I wonder if Morris’ Hav had been influenced by Fez and Marrakech. For in Hav, the national sport is roof-racing, which can happen in a place where roofs are fused together and conjoined over a very wide area.

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Fez. I breathed deep above a low valley of fused, sun-struck buildings the color of desert, meeting at odd angles, and merging, haphazard, into the golden-green distances. The ochre tone structures rubbing against each other as birds and breezes ruffle their rippling, jagged tops. A faint bronze-green undulation of hills. And the otherworldly green of the mosque-mausoleum.

What is this silence though from the roof? No cars, yes. All these people below working and moving and making — and a presiding holy hush. I exit the roof, a favorite space, and go inside it, this carless, thronging medina, learning about the logic of shared and sacred habitation. For us, a maze; for us, a strange and dreamlike concatenation of alleys. For others who know more, who’ve lived here, who’ve learned here: a sacred design encompassing the full scope of what is human.

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An architecture of hospitality and welcoming. The way the stones lead into the hidden and open heart of the habitation. This concealed courtyard and hermetic garden. How fragrance also creates a friendly path. There were some nights in Marrakech in the courtyard of our riad where it seemed the birds in the orange tree leaves were functional aspects of the architecture. Rather, as if the rafters and frames of the building drew them inward into our circle or drew us closer to the lives of aerial beings. In the center of the fountain, a rose poised in the spigot, and our prayerful, bird-fluttering evening encircling it: some emblem of the alchemical. Every night the rose in the fountain, the birds in the rafters, the curves of the windows, the orange perfume of night, our voices held in prayerful, humble togetherness.

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Mind on the breath, eyes on the path is the refrain our tender teacher, Omid kept reminding us to embody.

Many things will seduce, beguile, excite, distract, deter — we can behold them, even enjoy them and take some detached delight in them, while remaining steadfast and committed to the path. The path is metaphor and actuality.

Thus the path is one, unified and consistent, while also a winding, often fractured/fracturing labyrinth; thus we are One and, also, many-broken, multi-ruptured. My friend, Samuel Delany always reminded me of a saying by Djuna Barnes, “There is always more surface to a broken object than a whole.” This image satisfies me, as it is both common-sounding-at-first and stranger-upon-thinking-more-about-it. It delves multiple ways into meaning.

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I got sick when I came home from Morocco. My students were glad to see me behind my mask. After I got better, we enjoyed Moroccan tea and snacks and they began working on their zines. I told few stories about my trip, except kept talking about the artistry of hospitality that is integral to the Morocco I briefly got to witness through the lens of pilgrimage and the lens of everyday hosts, guides, mentors, and ardent welcomers. So many welcomers. So much welcome, the kind that might exist in a simple, knowing smile which expands and enlivens the spaces around you. The kind of welcome I feel so often with them too. So the journeys mirror each other as they must if they are to remain real.

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I took few notes on this trip. My mind was too stretched, my heart too loud. This immersive journey overwhelmed me, as I’ve said, even if that process began before I flew across the ocean to North Africa. Even if what has amounted to my spiritual growth being a series of breakings, scarrings, rebreakings. Those of us whose cares tend to overlap the contexts of art and faith and healing and teaching tend to riff on/live with metaphors of broken/breaking. The word “broken” is powerful, it endures and is always resonating. Breakings create openings, of course. Passages. Apertures. Embrasures. Conduits.

There is pain and necessity and awe and sublimity all bound together.

The trip probably, more accurately, re-opened me, as the opening of the Fatiha expands and ventilates and makes spacious one’s heart every time it is recited throughout the day. Gazing from the expanded heart on what is happening in the world, it can seem that we’ve gone past the point of breaking into irreparable rupture, unforgivable violation. Lines crossed no returning from. What does one heart do with that—

On the trip, the people I met, the friends I was in communion with, the guides who helped me to commune, the hosts and teachers who steered me — everyone participated in sharing and caring for a common structure, in cohabiting and co-caring for a subtle and ancient foundation. If the foundation, for instance, is prayer, or remembrance, there is nothing to prevent a sincere heart from feeling safe and loved and held therein. It is inexhaustible sustenance that other sustenances are then sustained upon. The prayer might be broken and arising from a riven, wounded heart. But so much more powerful for that. Structure are the small amounts of food shared at exactly the right time. Structures are the nights we can be silent among other creatures. I keep thinking about this trip as a revelation of the foundation/the epiphany of structure and what this means now. Where this leads now. Of course, it leads back to the journeys here at home.

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At night, one of our last conversations concerns how nothing about this path promises happiness. Indeed, the promise of happiness on earth is not real. And therein is the beautiful mystery. We will reiterate the word beauty in order to indicate a subtle, guiding complexity inherent in all beings and things, if but we can see and begin to understand.

And the whole earth is a mosque, or a place of prostration, that perceives us perceiving it. I prayed one humid afternoon in Fez at the mosque with my friends, the 400 year old mosque where blessed Ibn Arabi experienced the Station of Light — the simple and humble mosque he chose for his piety. At that moment I was carrying an immense amount of heaviness. Then, the skies opened and rain fell. My friend and I held hands together, tears welling. I prayed then with my friends. The world was showing us ourselves, alight in a new context. The earth had listened. We had responded. The rain slicked our arms in half-light and then it stopped and we walked back to our riad, glad with this gift of knowledge.

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I want to practice shorter pieces here that extend or build upon each other. These notes are just parts of more to think through and try to be clearer about. For instance, I want to learn more about a kind of mystical urbanism that I felt acutely in Morocco and in some other places I’ve been to. Titus Burkhardt writes about it in this book, which I’m just now beginning.

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I want to add that this summer I will be going to the Thoreau Gathering in Concord, a place I’ve never been to. I will be presenting a paper on Thoreau and Sufism, which will be unusual, I expect, and woven together from many creative associations and analogies. Here are some of the books I will be using.

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Finally, I’m excited to document my Honors English students final creative zines, which they’ve worked on with an obsessive and painstaking ardor that I wasn’t expecting. I’m so proud of them and happy that I’ve been able to create, with them, a welcoming, creative, and inclusive space this year in ways that very much echo what I felt on my journey to Morocco. The journeys mirror and feed into each other and split off into new but related ones. And through them, we keep building and rebuilding the foundations with others. More of this to come, Inshallah.