In Search of Whirled Peace

As someone who’s been pegged a whirling dervish on numerous occasions by friends and foes alike, it was no surprise my announcement of an assignment to go cover the real-life spinning mystics was met with chuckles, chortles and knowing winks all around. Not that anybody ever meant to imply I was a Turkish dancing mystic and follower of a charismatic philosopher-poet born in 1207…


Many of us who came of age in the sixties have at least a passing acquaintance with Rumi, aka Mevlana, via his aphorisms that adorned so many inspirational posters of the Hippie era: “Reason is powerless in the expression of love” and so forth. I was lucky enough to have witnessed the dervishes in action at the LaMama Theater, an experimental company in Manhattan’s East Village where I worked in the eighties. Their music was hypnotic and evocative, the precise symmetry of their movements captivating as they spun in tight circles under tall felt hats, their white weighted skirts forming undulating cones and the entire spectacle instantly converting our dusty little auditorium into some exotic middle eastern bazaar.


Later, I learned Rumi was a respected Islamic scholar and theologian who proclaimed the way to enlightenment was through a meditative trance-like induced by spinning. His teachings evolved into what Turks call the Mevlana Sect. Beyond that, I knew nothing. So when a choreographer friend mentioned he had received a grant to travel with his company to the interior of Turkey to dance with the dervishes, I jumped in with both feet and soon found myself boarding a plane bound for Istanbul en route to Konya to continue my education about this sect of whirling seekers.


Konya, the site of the 13th century mosque and mausoleum of the Mevlana Rumi himself, is described in my guidebook as one of the most religiously conservative cities in Turkey. We arrived there mid-morning, and the site’s turquoise minaret, gleaming against the gray of an early spring sky, beckoned from blocks away. The call to prayer was just subsiding and the courtyard of the shrine was filled with pilgrims of all ages, each patiently donning plastic over-shoes in order to enter the mosque where Rumi and his disciples are entombed. (It became a museum in 1927, four years after the establishment of the Turkish Republic.)


Rumi’s faith held Muslim, Jew and Christian in equal regard. He advocated tolerance, positive reasoning and charity, and did not ascribe to an orthodox Muslim doctrine, which has garnered him followers among many sects and creeds.


Inside, the tombs were topped not with gravestones, but rather enormous stone turbans. Candles hung from the ceiling, inside large hand-blown glass lamps. Elaborate carpets covered the floors, and the murmur of praying filled me with a numinous sensation. Pausing for several minutes at Rumi’s place of honor, I began to sense an aura of contentment settling down on me.


The walk from the mosque to the conference center on the outskirts of Konya, where our whirling workshop would take place, revealed the city to be a jumble of modern industrial buildings; ancient architecture, including numerous religious monuments; and small shops. Carpet stores abutted barbershops where men wrapped in hot towels peered out, their faces slathered with cream. Turkish children whooped in schoolyards surrounded by fences with rusting bicycles tethered to them. Tiny businesses sold figs, walnuts and olives; kiosks plied delicious warm pide bread. Doner kebab stands offered sliced lamb or chicken stuffed into the bread’s pockets along with onions and tomatoes.



At the conference center, Ahmet Calisir, the leader of Konya’s semazen—their dance is called the sema, hence they are the semazen—began to enlighten us. Through a translator, he spoke of the pressing need, especially in these times, to connect to the earth and to our own immortality, and to recognize that we are not the center of the universe. He began to unfold the deep symbolism of the sema, how it hearkens to a mystical journey, our spiritual ascent toward perfection, and how the spinning represents a turning toward truth and away from the dangers of egotism. It also honors the commonality of all beings, reaffirming a fundamental condition and scientific truth of our existence: Whether we are planets in a solar system or electrons in a single atom or flighty journalists in between jobs (as I was), we all rotate.



irst, we would watch the dervishes perform then they would assist our efforts to replicate their swirling dance. I was champing at the bit for the active part, even in the face of such a patient teacher as Calisir. We sat cross-legged as the ancient music of the ney, a reed flute, and the kudu drum invaded our thrumming modern psyches. The dancers began at a markedly slow pace, arms crossed. As the crescendo built, they released their arms to heaven and earth, their eyes rolled up into their brows and they spun faster and faster, slipping magically past each other, never colliding. I was in rapture, with whirling skirts flying just inches past my nose and nimble feet, tightly laced in thin black leather boots, crisply pivoting at barely arm’s length. The dervishes’ sikke, those tall felt hats, somehow remained fixed. By now, I knew they represented the tombstone of the ego, a renunciation of worldly attachments.



The dance lasted perhaps thirty minutes. When the music subsided, the semazen calmly took their places against the back wall, hands crossed to opposite shoulders, sweat rolling down their cheeks yet breathing sedately.



Rising with my friend’s troupe, I was self-conscious about my age and lack of a dancer’s physique. My unquiet brain taunted me with self-doubt. We assumed the stance and the music began. Omar, a baker by day, and Hassan, a plumber, adjusted our arms and feet as we attempted to find the orbit and singular thread evinced by these practicing mystics. Many of us faltered or tipped; some clung to a wall for spatial solace. I wobbled, plopped onto my backside, and took a moment to revel in the spin of the room.



We were privileged to witness another miraculously calming performance by the semazen and were then asked for our reactions to the entire experience. Sensing no need for a clever response, no impulse to swoop in and deconstruct the scenario or come up with a definitive string of witticisms, I remained uncharacteristically silent. I realized that with real whirling comes focus, balance and the connection to a greater sensibility than anything my left brain could parse.



The next day, I was awakened at dawn by a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. As I lay in bed in my little room at the Hotel Rumi, across from the mosque, I felt myself still spinning. It was not the residual rocking of a seasick ship passenger but a constant, steadying, internal movement, like the ticking of a well-oiled clock. I could pause again to acknowledge my newfound connection to all things that revolve and spin and find their centers.

Fragility: Look it up

You can see a word endlessly and never notice it, until you look it up. Then as if by magic, it is ubiquitous and it seems as if there is numinous haze surrounding it, the equivalent of highlighting. Every book, every New Yorker article has the word: limn, palimpsest or numinous. And you say AHHHHHHH I know that word.


I feel that way about fragility. I know the word, I know how to recognize and note it in a few languages, as it is an important concept for packages, fruit, hearts and emotions. But until my recent close brush with death and the fragility of the human head and mind I didn’t take it in as a concept for my life, my family my tiny circle.


I had been blessed with little or no hospital time; my parents died very old, I am still (knock on wood) unbroken and although somewhat bowed I have not spent time with in the medical system or the realm of the fragile. I wrote last about the accident I witnessed where my daughter’s boy friend had a massive skateboard crash right under my nose. And since he is French and without his parents, we took to tending him. It is now a month and I have been unseated by all of this uncertainty.


I cringe when the car brakes, swerves or honks. I wept when I unearthed and cut up a snake with my weed-whacker and today there was another tumult of my fragile psyche. My husband found an upturned nest of baby birds in the barn. The nest was a badly made cup of mud and moss, it feel from the barn rafters and lay overturned on the workbench. I flipped it over and there were hatchlings, four of them mushed together in the cup.


I thought they were all dead and I looked at their featherless wings and wide translucent eyes and then they began to breath and chirp. They were still alive and I had to save them. But how? I could hear the mother outside frantic. Of course. It was her fault. She had built a bad nest, she had left them for food, she was too big for the nest, she had been idle and grown fat and lazy. She was a mother and she berated herself the way we all do. Even if she didn’t I could scold her and myself at the same time.


I picked up the crumbly cup of a nest and thought to put the babies in a shady clump of peonies, but then I recalled seeing my cats this morning run after anything that moved, peeped or chittered. So I returned the cup to the barn and my husband devised a makeshift holder for the nest. He inverted a metal clip lamp, I laid the nest into the lamp and we replaced it on the rafters.


Then I noticed that one bird had fallen out of the nest and was on the table. He too was still breathing but all twisted and bent. I thought he would undo the fragile balance we had established for the nest and I doubted he would make it. And so I made a triage decision and relegated him to die. But I couldn’t stand to let him suffer or be taken by a mean predator so I held him beneath the tail pipe of my husband’s less than ecologically correct, 1976 MGB sports car. And there the CO2 emissions sped him to the arms of the bird angels.


I had watched my father minister this release by the side of the road when he saw a badly hit porcupine or a mangled deer. We would stop; the kids had to wait in the car and my father got out. He always talked so calmly to the “critter” as he called him. He never feared animal retribution, as he was a wild thing himself and I often felt he was in his element releasing their spirits. That was the phrase he used, he was a spirit releaser, and I must have taken on some of that countenance because today when I held the tiny bird body in a paper towel under the blast of noxious air, I felt I had done a minor kindness.


I suppose I feel that all the tiny acts of goodness will heal me from the terror and the sense that awful things will come my way because I have looked up the word fragile in the dictionary of life and I keep reading it, seeing it everywhere.

The Aftermath of Disaster

Today I went out early to try out my new light, strong weed-whacker and I wept. I didn’t cry at the efficiency of the machine or its ability to cut clean swaths through my over grown acreage. No, I cried because I had snipped a snake in two.

The temperature dropped and it rained hard last night, not ideal circumstances for a reptile, but great for a middle-aged gardener who likes to work hard when it is chilly. The snake was one of my favorites, a ribbon. He was green with light yellow ribbons running all round his small lithe body. I saw him and he was in half.

I stopped and bent over him, there was nothing I could do so I returned to clipping, perhaps a little more carefully. And then I started to tear up, then cry and before I could even identify what was wrong I was collapsed in the garden chair sobbing, with my Maine coon cat galumphing to the rescue.

My daughter and her 25-year-old French boy friend had been visiting us in the in country three weeks ago. They were cute, he is lively, silly an artist and a wild thing. One day he helped me clean the haymow in the big old barn and when we finished sweeping and carting the hold hay, he leaped form the loading door in the mow and down to the lawn. Maybe forty feet. It was thrilling and scary as so many of those stunts are. I laughed and my husband upbraided him. “Never do that again here, do you understand?’ The boyfriend quieted, as do all the boys when faced with my husband’s stentorian tines. He agreed.

The next day we went on a drive to see the local goats and the boy friend took his skateboard. He had asked my daughter to take him to a big hill earlier in the day and he had skate boarded down form the historic house Olana, built on a precipice of the Hudson River. She drove behind him and said he was going nearly 45 miles per hour. No helmet, no pads, shorts and a tee shirt.

On this trip home he hit a rock, pothole, divot and the next thing we knew he was on the street. We raced back and found him quiet with blood pooling on the pavement trickling out of his ears. He began breathing a heaving rattle. Terrie fed I took the car to the neighbor, as of course I had no cell phone reception. They called the ambulance; it came. I convinced the driver to allow my daughter to ride with as the kid speaks little English and in a crisis I know second languages go fast. They left; I followed the tortuous 30 miles to the nearest trauma hospital.

We spent days in the E.R and then the ICU. We had to call his parents in Nice. The arrived and we all translated and intervened. endlessly. We drove back and forth, we slept fitfully, we interviewed and befriended doctors, nurses and aides. He lived. The brain bleed stopped just as they were going to operate. He lost tons of weight, has a cane, is exhausted and jokes that he lost three days. His parents go home tomorrow. He follows in two weeks after the Neurosurgeon gives the OK for him to fly. And I will stay here changed.

I am terrified, and quaking at cars, roads, motorcycles, barking dogs. I made it through September 11, rescued my kids, wrote a book, volunteered and carried on. But this is the first item that someone I know, I like, I am in a way responsible for has gotten this hurt on my watch. I imagined the worst and I fantasized a jubilant return home for the cute, artist boy. I slept next to my daughter and we patted each other every night for weeks, when the nightmares came. I still find myself shaking my head like a wet dog, in an attempt to clear the images that leap in.

My friend Susan who studies the brain and alternative healing says that when an event like this accident happens the memories are logged in the limbic brain. In a way they by pass normal feeds of memory are logged right where they can crop up more easily and unpredictably. And they do.

SO today when I unwittingly sliced into the snake and sniveled, I know full well I was crying provoked by this new memory and sense of incredible fragility that it has installed in my very own reptile brain.

Travel: Vice of Choice

In my house, we say travel is our vice of choice, which means a voyage takes precedence over trinkets, gadgets, fancy dinners or fashion. Apparently we are not in the majority because in late March, the U.S. Passport office announced that the applications for passports dropped by 25% auguring that many consumers have decided to dedicate their hard earned dollars to other corners of the market.

My neighbors and I are all tightening our belts and staying up nights worrying about mortgages, groceries and college tuition. My little family is not flourishing the way we were a few years back, but still my dreams wander to travel and the huge benefits I accrue from far-flung trips.

I just returned from ten days in Tunisia. This trip was fueled, on the surface, by a writing assignment on a wonderful former fashionista who now works teaching design and business skills to artisans in the developing world. Inspirational stuff right there, but what made it mind expanding and debt worthy, were the conversations I encountered in every corner of the small Islamic country of Tunisia.

Conversation was facilitated because French is a common language. Most Tunisians possess a basic grasp, lingering as a shadow from French colonial times, and I have my exuberant, rudimentary high school Francais. I love to talk and somehow people babble back: shop keepers, taxi drivers, waiters and the artisans in the market. For me this is the miracle of travel.

Yes there are deserted Roman cities, which inspire with efficiency, and the elegance of design from over two thousand years ago. The palimpsests of central heating, non-skid streets, theatrical acoustics and gob-smacking, mosaic beauty are reason enough to travel to Tunisia, but for me it is the conversations that glue us to each other as members of a tribe that is larger than country, religion, gender or ethnicity.

We are human. We long to connect. So when a cab driver in Tunis took me back to my hotel after a day ogling mosaics at the Bardo museum, I was overjoyed when he turned off the engine and asked if we could talk. He wanted to know why Americans have such a negative image of Arab people. Did all Americans really think that all Arabs were terrorists and evil? It was heartbreaking and important.

I told him that many Americans, know that good and bad people populate all countries, all races and all genders. I told him I believed that more things connect us, rather than separate us. Maybe it is conversation in the present tense and the simple vocabulary from which I carefully parse my words, but there was a power to this conversation that doesn’t happen when we banter at a dinner party or yell back at the evening news.

When I was attending the workshops that Aid to Artisans sponsored in Tozeur, a small walled city in the south, I had another opportunity to converse. I rose early one morning and hired a caleche pulled a scrawny horse named Pamela Anderson and driven by Petit Omar.

I had read about the distinctive brickwork that faces many buildings in the medina and the newer city and I wanted to see the brickfields.


So we clomped along talking about farming, and the fancy hotels that had closed down because of the dwindling economy. I learned how dates are hand fertilized, how the lettuces are planted under the massive date trees in the oasis where 200,000 palms flourish. “Is farming like this where you live?” We talked about family farms and factory farms, and as we trotted along a dirt road, little kids and adults waved, yelling OBAMA! OBAMA! They knew I was American and I was happy to be embraced for a potentially positive administration.

When we arrived at the brick fields Pamela Anderson pulled up under a tree. I walked over to inspect the wood forms, but the barefoot worker only wanted to talk about Obama. “ Are you as hopeful as we are?” he asked, “Do you believe this will change the world?” I hedged my bets, as I am not sure what one man can do. I said that, but then I realized that the conversations, which inspired me in EL Kef, Tunis, Dougga, and Tozeur all took, place one on one.

It saddens me that travel is so expensive and often seen as an expendable luxury, because I see travel as the staff of life. For me, money spent traveling comes back ten fold. The lessons learned and the goodness spread returns and multiples back home.