Walking in New York City about a month ago, now, I trekked far from Queens down into Brooklyn, on a bright, steamy day that was hot but not intolerable. After a brisk six miles or so, spinning around to find some shade, I stumbled into this mural by Molly Crabapple — a print of which hangs in my house! I remembered suddenly that it was meant to be there; for I recalled then it had been made to adorn the outside of what — must be — Quimby’s Bookstore.

The Arabic on the book in the mural is a quote from the poet Al-Mutanabbi, translated as: “The night, the horses and the desert all know me; as does the sword, the spear, the paper and the pen. I am the one who can be seen (even) by the blind...” On entering Quimby’s I realized it was an intricate, playful space that remarkably resembles my own mind. So many sudden recognitions assailed me in that moment that I forgot I also had to use the bathroom. No matter: walking in NYC also trains you in that regard, as a New Yorker once told me years ago. I spent a half-hour in Quimby’s trying to control my desires to buy everything, to explore all the smallest details, to consider anything I touched to be significant and, in a sense, sacred.

Here at home, my print of Molly Crabapple’s mural sits above a watercolor painting, “Hidden Luminescence,” by the artist Sara Mir, which I’ve written about before here. I realized the other day on my couch that I look at both of these art works a great deal throughout the day. And every time I gaze at them, it’s with a sense of pleasant relief or grounding resolution. A rather wily professional art installer suggested the two go together like that: genius! The blues rhyming across the frames, and the red of the wild New York sky (tempered maybe by the gold below?) - red, a color I can’t say I normally am drawn to- feels oddly softening instead of enflaming. These art works live in my mind now, parts of the inner chorus. And they come with me on my walks.

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My New York walking was greatly improved, too, when I reconnected with my friend B. near Washington Square Park one afternoon. This recent friend of mine, who is also a Muslim convert and lover of art and literature, has helped me newly appreciate the Islamic concept of tawhid. Essentially this concept implies the Oneness of God as the source and aim of all worship. (Be gentle with this Sufi-path-treading Muslim convert for not articulating this in whatever scholarly, etc. way I’m supposed to! All errors are beautifully mine; Allah knows best.) It’s important to understand too that worship, as such, includes a multiplicity of life-affirming deeds: study, prayer, meditation, gardening, kindness and charity, feeding others, congregational prayer, Quranic recitation, dhikr. Wherever there is One there is also the Multiplicity; and vice versa, dizzyingly so.

A beautiful way to articulate it is in the first part of the testament of faith that every Muslim utters by way of initial conversion and also as daily remembrance/invocation: lā ilāha illā Allāh. No god but God. Negation and Affirmation reconciled. The metaphysics of Ibn Arabi further attests that all that exists is an aspect or a particular disclosure of God’s infinite being. Complexities arise, nuances abound: beautiful and awe-inspiring kinds, and also the kinds that cause pedantic argumentativeness and gatekeeping. My intuitions tell me that the school of Ibn Arabi offers a vision of tawhid that my friend and I find life-affirming, vivifying, and also, true. This embodied vision of tawhid includes loving (and learning from) the subversive theory-infused writings of queer visionary, Samuel R. Delany, while also enjoying the hermetic-activist poetic works of Diane di Prima, or finding contemplative inspiration in experimental noise or ambient music or feeling eerie delight in supernatural and gothic fiction and movies, as well as rowdy enticements in the anarchist rants found in zines and small presses.

Just a few examples — and ones quite germane to the metaphysical-materialist practice of Walking in New York!

Which brings me back to Quimby’s. Here is what I saw:

If you’ve been reading Companion Moon these two plus years, you might know that one of my undying aspirations is to be a caretaker/warden/curator/organizer of some kind of hybrid artistic, multi-spiritual, educational space. I decided a couple years ago this, besides/along with writer/artist/pilgrim, is what I’m here for. In short, to run a sanctuary where people can come and find peace, inspiration, wonder, and shared inquiry. Yet accomplishing such a vision isn’t an all or nothing, entrepreneurial venture entailing tireless toil, single-mindedness, and obscene amounts of capital to reach a desired end-point (although I need to get better at those things too, ha) — for it happens in piecemeal refuges and beautiful experiments and haphazard assemblages along the way. The more these happen, the better. Indeed, the whole point maybe is to turn your life into such an evolving space.

Public school teaching offers me some glimpses of this possibility, but not nearly enough and not in any autonomous, open-ended sense; my sporadic years in bookstore work did as well. Then for awhile I tried to get work in museums and art spaces. All of these are facets and clues. Sufism/Islam, too, with its emphasis on sacred community, holistic beauty, collaborative ritual adds other layers. Some of the places where I see it happening the most vividly are in cafes and garden spaces, with some mixture of books and records for sale thrown in. The quest continues but with more layers and collaborators. Quimby’s too, I sensed, wasn’t just a bookstores and exists more as a magnetizing shrine-world for weird wayfarers.

Indeed my conversation with the owner as he was ringing me up confirmed this! He seemed to suggest, with a mischievous smile that I belonged there. Belonging! That’s what is missing in so much of what there is.

Queer attic pastiche aesthetics.

Anarch-goth-cellar assemblage.

Subcultural fandom basement hideout.

An intriguing presence of Arabic writing throughout the store beginning of course with Molly’s beautiful mural — and works and magazines partial to a Sufi and Muslim Imaginary —but also many other outlaw imaginaries too. The amount of zines and small press works and art objects in such a concentrated space was astonishing. All these particularities lead to new experiments in perception. So my bag began to expand. But not ridiculously. For New York has many places to stop at.

A few small odds and ends from Quimby’s, but also some freebies from another shop. One can cobble together a working vision of the world through a diverse array of zines and pamphlets and hand-outs. One tiny-word world offers a catalyzing contrast to another. One might ask: what does this rather provocative eros-themed magazine have to do with a cartography of Queens and learning Arabic? In proximity is community. In community is discovery. Another lingering, more practical question: will I learn Arabic? I am beginning to try.

This magazine, Kahf, jumped out at me at Qumby’s. I slightly scuffed the Kaaba on the cover during the rest of my jaunts but it is a beautifully designed celebration of a Muslim imaginary. I haven’t had the chance to read through it but it is gorgeously crafted and organized. Walking around, then, after my Quimby’s discovery, I began thinking of the Kaaba and how my desires to go either on Umrah or Hajj have vacillated over the half-decade now I’ve been Muslim. But the Kaaba never leaves my mind and indeed if you look at the very center of the Hidden Luminescence painting I mentioned above, there is a little Kaaba there, too. But emanating from that black cube (that manages to be both primordial and contemporary at the same time) are the circles of rituals of the pilgrim at their most elemental and suppliant.

I’m drawn back, always, to the poetics of inclusive vulnerability in the Meccan pilgrimage. Everyone rendered fellow kin, everyone surrendering, everyone remembering: a collective music of primal witnessing. A stripping away of pretense and criteria. Obliteration of hierarchies, false categories, while our God-given differences and diversities are still cherished. My imagination of it has been powerfully influenced by El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz’s pilgrimage there, as written in his autobiography and brought to life in the Spike Lee movie. But Hagar especially lately occupies my imagination, she who is buried by the Kaaba. I think how much can we learn from this Hagarian metaphysics of sheer privation and unprotected exposure to the cosmos; all in the self of this most oppressed, marginalized woman and her baby; then recipients of miraculous intercessions in a desert of abandonment and, mercy in the form of something watery, something green. Garden hidden by flames. Angels veiled by the obvious. I kept thinking about all this as I walked around, eventually through less appealing industrial and commercial parts of town. Where is the Zamzam well here? Where is the angelic interludes? How many incarnations of Hagar walk these streets? One day, inshallah, I’ll make it to Mecca. But its meanings and rituals are also everywhere, for those who want to listen.

This is a photo of New York I took more than a decade ago! but the magic of those early visits have created a romantic idea of NY for me.

My friend B. and I have seen each other twice in New York now — once in Woodstock, NY and now, this summer, in NYC, and once in San Diego. (The time we saw each other in San Diego is a story I’m going to tell later!) So in late June, for a couple hours, we explored the pleasures of summer city walking. While it was still warm and sticky, this was right before the very intense heat wave and, later, the onslaught of wildfire smoke. I had just come back from a heart-lifting retreat with my Sufi Inayatiyya family in the Hudson valley. My blessing and good fortune in June were immense. (Almost everything I gleaned at the retreat has been pushed down into tangled layers of “Real world stuff” but I will sift through and clarify in another post.)

After the retreat I had a momentary challenge though: on arriving in NYC from the Hudson Vally, I panicked amidst the seething, honking, sweaty cacophony. All of it felt shocking and inhumane after the spiritually rich, meditative tree-shaded days in Rhinebeck. I stopped though and said: but this is the work, isn’t it, don’t be a shit! The panic subsided when I reached my airbnb in a nondescript neighborhood, Glendale in Queens. I had been to Queens once, years ago now, after a San Francisco to New York road trip with my friend, M. This time I was determined to more deeply explore “the world’s borough” and to also let myself be guided from its base to points in Brooklyn and beyond. Mostly I wanted to do most or all this exploration on foot. Not that I don’t love the subway, (and some of my favorite New York summer memories are being in subways with my friends watching “showtime” happen), but I felt an intense desire to just keep walking, sweating, stopping at any place that called to me, or seeking out my friend’s recommendations and just letting the city’s delights find me.

Night walking from Queens to Brooklyn: all these warehouses got fancy, was a thought I had. But also how the streets and street trees become festooned with improvised charms. I found a bar that was designed for readers and sat there and soaked up the readerly, yet bar-like atmosphere for awhile. Then kept going. And outside it felt like an improvised fashion-art show for misfits and queers of all kinds. Walking in New York is a complex activity that permeates the literature that has shaped me. In these books — novels, stories, poems, hybrid essays — characters and consciousnesses aren’t only walking, they are also dancing, strutting, prancing, sauntering, sashaying. Other more discreet things too of course and sometimes in slightly indiscreet places. Their very bodies and the art and desires they effuse become the building blocks of the labyrinthine, layered city. It’s not all books about New York either that make you think about walking in New York. Lately, when I read and re-read hybrid poetry and prose texts, often by women authors but not always, I get that visceral and kaleidoscopic rush of — aesthetically-relationally speaking — walking in New York.

This kind of walking, I think, is an experimental exercise in hybridity: feeling it, noticing it, being motivated and catalyzed by it, letting it into your sense of self. Becoming more hybrid through ambulatory perceptions of mixed realities. A walk that entails the orchestration of beautifully contrasting forms. Walking with attentiveness, and with guarded acceptance, too. (Then that word that one of my heart’s mentors Ibrahim Baba spoke so often: mixity.) Any conversation on ambulatory poetics needs to also critique the ableism and the “compulsory able-bodiedness” that undergirds it. I hope to suggest that walking in New York can also be as much a psychic-creative process than a physical one. But I’ll leave this as a pregnant pause to return to later; much of this thinking comes from “Going Out: Walking, Listening, Soundmaking” by the way. Thinking of New York, though, I come back to the hybrid.

I wonder too if women writers are somewhat more welcoming of such hybrid modes of expression/being? A generalizing and perhaps misleading question that I usually would eschew — at best, it can serve as a goad maybe. My own writing experiments are modeled on many of these works. And my sense of hybridity extends off the page into my sense of being a seeker, a teacher, a friend, a mystic, an activist. Although at the same time, all those identity-titles are also aspirational and pending, markers of larger, mixed worlds that I call my home-worlds — also always pending. Suffice to say, my home worlds are also the ones that are the most under attack and daily, hourly threatened by the systems of power currently “in charge.”

These are two hybrid texts that conjure up the Walking In New York poetic sensorium. I’ll need to revisit Wright’s book in a future post, but for now I’ve been spending time again dipping into di Prima’s gorgeous and devastating book. Indeed, I’ll also be returning to it later.

Walking in New York ultimately isn’t about you exactly. Or not the you that sits at work or at home or in the car. It’s really about everyone else, the many other others — the singular lives you see, as you move: smoking in doorways, unloading bags from trunks, blurring by on weaving bicycles, leaning off fire escapes, kissing on stoops, sitting in wheelchairs, lying down on the curb, leaning against lamp posts — even just for a fraction of second — or even those whose presence you sense working behind the scenes, engrossed in the unflattering labors and necessities that keep such a behemoth metropolis going. Then perhaps there are longer interactions, inspired by a band shirt or a book or a piece of jewelry one is wearing. Counter-cultural signaling. Flirtatiousness seems to color such moments, or else it’s all in your imagination. Or half so, at any rate. Regardless, the energy is unmistakable, so you keep walking to build on it, to extend it, to complicate it, and, too, you want to feel good about it. The hot buzzing amiability might be provisional but life is all about change (you tell yourself), so we amble on and we embrace as much shifting wonder and strangeness and vitality as we can. And yet the walker I am, distorted and garbled by bias and ease, is wildly unlike others, too. So the challenges of hybridity return. What can I let in? What wandering voices can I defer to? What solidities can I allow to be softened? Whose poetics needs to complicate my own?

I didn’t have the motivation exactly to visit a mosque in New York but the minarets comforted me. I enjoyed that these sacred enclaves exist in proximity to such contrasting establishments.

Walking in New York is also about the others who lived in these neighborhoods and struggled to make beautiful and shared lives before you were born. Their visions and testimonies are the air you walk through and breathe, the bricks that roughen your hands. The more you walk and the more you attend to, the more you realize that the city is an organism composed of particularities. And all in spite of how gentrification and raised rents and economic monocultures try to flatten everything into repetitive, overpriced mediocrities or else overrated luxuries tailored to a very narrow, inaccessible version of taste. Queens especially caught my attention, due to the prevalence of very specific “mom and pop” type stores offering quite particular services. For instance, a Safety Store. All things pertaining to…safety.

As I ambled past the stoops and storefronts of NYC, I also thought of the stoops of the Victorians in Lower Haight in San Francisco where I used to live. Even while sitting on stoops, smoking and reading the newspaper, these citizen’s minds are ambulatory, their opinions are ramifying. You don’t have to walk to be walking. But the idea is you want to participate at all cost. A poetics of being-in-proximity. Of spiral choreographies. Certainly many have romanticized NYC and so have I. Yet I have spent the most time walking in San Francisco whose own romanticized aspects often rivals that of NY. In romanticizing, we cling to feelings that feel new, exciting, and unresolved. Things that are also inaccurate, at least partly or even mostly. Feelings less as the reverberations of events and more as possibilities inherent in phenomena. These sensations are under our cautious guidance, and we sense that they are largely detached from reality, as it is often perceived. Yet they also catalyze us. We respect and honor the entangled lineages of the source material; and we also experiment with tangents and tributaries.

Some more books from various walks. I’ve read a bit from some of these.

So sometimes I try to walk-in-New-York while walking in San Diego. It may happen that in the process I’m also suddenly wandering in San Francisco or Oakland. This is psycho-geographical and playful-mnemonic and fantasy-driven. All these cities were created to overflow their connotations and boundaries. They were designed for artistic smuggling, subterranean networking, esoteric ferment, and cultural experimentation. It might not be true that I enjoy walking in New York more than I’ve enjoyed walking in San Francisco or Fez or Istanbul or Buenos Aires; and yet New York City seems to embody the heart of a kind of magical ambulatory urbanism, no matter how one is moving. A nomadic community rooted in perpetual difference. Urbanism that also overflows what it means to be a city — and a citizen. Here I am romanticizing again, but it’s ineluctable. The words imply that’s all I can do. The hope is that some measure of precision helps align romance with the Real (maybe?)

I’m not qualified to speak on urbanism or gentrification. I don’t even know if gentrification is the right concept anymore to describe what is happening to many American cities. So I can’t speak of these issues, at least not in any professionally-cited, policy-driven sense. My exuberant presence in many cities, sadly, has typically helped fuel displacement, homogeneity, more expensive coffees, and higher rents. But living my life with a grounding, I believe, in concepts of beauty, I can speak to the aesthetics of togetherness which infuses the aforementioned issues.

Perhaps I can speak poetically, only, and from a lifelong position of aspirational unity. I can speak, haltingly, yes, from the foundation of Tawhid. The New York experience is often about being shoved together with and among a diverse array of others. These crowded differences are vivid in New York City, probably more than they are in most places. And I must defer to the experience so so many others too walking and being ambulatory, in other ways.

One day I was determined to walk to Jackson Heights, which I had been told by many is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country. When people say “most diverse” there’s a lot that can mean. So I was curious and slightly uncertain. It was a long and fascinating trek there through different kinds of areas, defined by various levels of wealth, types of trees, access to parking, and building materials. When I made it to Jackson Heights, I couldn’t quite believe the sheer actual diversity I was witnessing — specifically, non-white, non-European diversity. It was astounding, and nothing I had ever seen in the U.S. before, reminding me of walking in Istanbul combined with Hanoi (at least in terms of places I’ve been.) Maybe I make these inaccurate comparisons mainly to suggest the bustling and colorful aspects of the streets, the many different humans walking them, and the overflowing storefronts using sidewalks for all sorts of supplemental activities. I didn’t take any photos but there is a documentary I was told you can watch about the neighborhood: In Jackson Heights. While there I wandered around, had coffee at a Yemeni cafe, went to the new bookstore, looked around in startled reverence, and ate some arepas. I didn’t do enough there, that’s for sure. From the documentary description: “Jackson Heights, Queens is one of the most culturally diverse communities in the US where 167 languages are spoken.” I barely spent part of a day there and need to return. Hopefully I might be able to show parts of the documentary to my students.

This trip, even though I walked an absurd amount, I didn’t take that many photographs. The ones I did take strike me as somewhat odd or even plain. This one I took because I was drawn to the metal sun emblem stuck against the concrete overhang. A minor aesthetic embellishment waiting there to corrode and fall off.

Walking in Queens I recognized, like in other parts of Brooklyn, a vibrant late night gathering space. The summer heat means later nights, less sleep, more sheltering out of doors, eating at odd hours. More not knowing the time nor caring. While quieter in Glendale than in Brooklyn, I still sensed an easeful nocturnal society. And my fascination with the endless bodegas with their 24 hour delis was nonstop. For I am always wondering about all the food these places have which is available at all hours. The sheer proliferation of matter. And the shocking inequity of shared resources. The part of me that is mystical and religious shares and mixes space with the part that is material and concrete. Actually it’s all one. So I tried this place (pictured above) and was happy about the modest price of the surprisingly delicious falafel which I ate in a shabby but relaxed common area down the street: black iron tables and chairs, little islands of ashed-on foliage, a neighborhood cat begging for ground chuck, people boozing and smoking and watching movies on their phones at midnight. As I keep telling myself: the literature of the present must center on the detailed life-worlds of 24 hour delis, liquor stores, rest stops, public restrooms, late night kitchens, uber eats drivers, late night nurses, etc. These are only some scattered notes really. My whole life this summer has been books and notes and walking. It’s time to cook more and lift weights and grow something.

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A good place to conclude is this wonderful cafe, Cafe Reggio my friend B. took me to. Our time together was a lovely and heart-soothing convergence of two kindred souls talking Islam and art and books, and sitting here with him, at Cafe Reggio was a highpoint of the trip. This is a place of deep ambience — and that is a concept that is becoming increasingly central to my work. Almost exactly 100 years old now, Reggio was a bohemian and beatnik hangout and a cultural hub for decades. They apparently served the first cappuccino in the U.S. there? Today it seems to have not changed much and, reminding me of what I loved about Quimby’s, at least in terms of a weirdly curated space, it feels like a hodgepodge of grotesque-twilight aesthetics meets goth-Renaissance kitsch. Twilight aesthetics doesn’t refer to the movie, ha, but maybe a quality of lighting, an interstitial mood. Grotto, of course, is the root of grotesque: an idea I never fail to find joy in. Slightly cave-like, and relying on green and sepia hues, this crepuscular quality induces lingering and conspiratorial conversations. I also was in love with the clearly visible undulations and unevenness in the walls and ceiling, as if the years had really molded the place, as if it was a cave. After I parted from my friend later that night, I returned to Reggio and took some notes but mostly eavesdropped on a couple on a date talking about holiday traditions like, apparently, wearing yellow underwear on New Year’s Eve. Where the fuck am I going to get yellow underwear? the man kept asking. Then later that night, I walked back across the bridge and didn’t know what time it was and felt slightly sad I would be leaving.

After New York, I went home to San Diego, carrying all these resonances with me, and using my time off to write, read, pray, meditate, and strengthen my relationships.

It’s all a gift and yet a feeling of lostness and disorientation has lingered through parts of July. Is it that the world feels less beautiful more and more of the time? Perhaps. Or that the beauty that we long for is not unified enough, not stable enough? Those are some big daunting questions, but I’ll for now say a lot of it is inevitable middle age transition work. Discovering, too, again and again the effusive and enthusiastic hungers of my mind. Damn, my mind hungers and yet, I also want it to be calmer too. Joining others too, in some de-regulating ups and downs of July that many attribute to Mercury Retrograde (!) Astrology can seem to offer comforts for some: I’ve decided if it helps people, then help is good. I’m more prone to think this is a difficult time for everyone now and that life is composed of trials and tests. Not only are there difficulties as any life contains but there are also aberrations in humanity’s very fabric (our farcical leaders, our tech, our genocides, our wars, our climate devastation). Faith means…Faith means: that difficulties are hiding something beautiful, that aberrations can be rectified. They must be. There is more to say about books and spiritual work. About hybrid writers. About everything else. Next week I return to teaching work and there is considerable prayer and centering I need to undertake beforehand. And in my next post I want to share some big news too! Thanks for taking this journey with me! More soon, Alhamdulillah.

another photo over ten years old that captures something of my first quite romantic visits to New York City.

Dear unknown friend,

This letter-log I intended to post a week ago — but by then I was immersed in a beautiful and multi-layered journey to New York. Those impressions infuse this unfinished letter, but the specifics will be in a follow up one.

For now, I think with the cool, nickel-blue overcast light that sits among the buildings after my return. Floral silences yield opportunities for deeper attuning. We are invited to stand in unfrequented corners and cast our glances onto neglected convergences of texture, light, color, and shadow. To cast a glance like a fishing line: patience is necessary. “Boredom” and “nothing” become the invitations into the mother-night-oases hidden in the frantic day: these lunar afternoons of shadow-play and waking dream and sensuous recon.

The teacher is the unnoticed moment. The guidance speaks in the un-event.

Watch how the morning light suddenly acquires a layered fragrance after it is engulfed by the magnolia’s shadow-lacing. One’s immediate impression of this downtown-adjacent world is concrete and window, tree and shadow, door and car. From these foundations, reveries accumulate. From reveries, prayers. Praying, I think, leads to a deepening experience of what is real.

There are endless stories of exiting one’s abode only to return some time later with something meaningful. Flowers or money. Lunch or books or a bottle. A new friend. An epiphany. So many stories and novels built from this premise!

Improving a room with flowers is perhaps an obvious move.

Stopping to smell them every morning before they die adds wind to the soul.

The existence of flowers suggests a qualitative urgency to being.

When I think of qualities now, I think of the Divine Names of God.

But we also call them the Attributes of Reality. The Harmonies of the Source.

In naming more particularly, we sense a need in us that is crying out to a certain face of the Beloved. The names change, as days and seasons do, and even as the faces of the Beloved alter, the Beloved remains changeless in essence.

Flowers and their colors and fragrances ask us to think about what remains changeless amidst the beautiful, permutating carnival.

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Mysterious water lingers. Radiance cleaves. A verb meaning to either sunder or cling.

I am drawn to how freshly disclosed sunlight awakens perfume from the puddles.

Rooted in perplexity and scattered by the foundations: this is where the traveller finds herself. A straight path that is also a spiral nestled in a labyrinth which is also a garden.

She’s attempting to articulate the paradox-source of all being. To articulate anything is to imagine trying to live with it. Images help, but also deter. The senses need to be tricked into beguiling us toward and beyond at the same time. A rose is a rose. But the scent of a rose is a road.

In articulating these primal contradictions, she hopes to wrest at least some pragmatic hope from it. Then to share the hope with others, along with flowers and snacks — and maybe banter about dogs.

One whole morning and afternoon spent circling through the theses and counter-theses to arrive at what feels like the most beautiful, realistic, and also empowering, conception of what is surrounding her;

then within the next hour of evening, a surprise unfolds, and escalates, and it’s not the kind of surprise that brings joy or relief, no;

and so abruptly, pitilessly, the day’s calculations all wither up, save for one detail in them that, previously, she hadn’t attached the least significance to.

Maybe it’s a historical date she’s been convinced to remember, or the peculiar color of a frock. Maybe it’s what some famous personage had for breakfast the day they were to be exiled, or the mystery of why, when asked to empty their pockets at TSA, her friend had so many little colored pieces of paper in their jeans. Most likely it’s a short, cryptic phrase used as a makeshift caption beneath a photograph she can’t identify. Than again, it might be something else.

She holds the unvanquished detail up to the light in her railroad apartment and it acquires new facets. Setting it aside, she sleeps and dreams of tangled roads and traffic jams. Waking the next day, she realizes the redemptive detail from the previous day has already worked itself into a mosaic with kindred details that have appeared, as it were, overnight. So the work of wandering and reconciling begins anew, even as she senses jarring surprises await.

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We join together as we walk — the Huntress and I.

Life’s hybridities suddenly grow brighter, more mysterious, strangely sensual even when abject. We sense the moment-by-moment strata of sounds, rustlings, resonances, echoes that include the codes of hidden animals. They hearken in the plumbing of things. The first is the black bird that races the train. The second is the fish living in the bole of the oak tree. The hundreds of others are conspiring in the margins. Every paving stone has its familiar. This is how we think now, realizing that what was once called thinking has escaped its own lineage, taken the train to the edge-realms of the deep Present. This is the trajectory of the mystic with the patched cloak. The spiral-gardener, the labyrinth-trail walker.

In the porticoed walkway by the train tracks, we never see other walkers, even though a chain of bougainvillea petals entices the wanderer into wet and aromatic funneling shade. How do these columns affect the saunterer? Their cylinder shapes suggest the ease of cooling embraces; their thinness implies a fragility to boundaries; their Doric style evokes ancient discourses by firelight. I need to remember how the bougainvillea actually smell. So I need to return, the Huntress and I.

Swept away by the crystalline silences, only to hunger for a music that is hiding somewhere in the landscape. More frequently now, I feel space unfolding as analogous to a musical composition. Rhythms, melodies, harmonies. I turn the corner of a corner, finding myself, not me, yearning for what can never be mine; for “mine” is not a word recognized in this uncovered thought-land. What I mean to say is I’ll never know what I’m becoming except that I’m moving/composing. We are sitting still in a corner that we rarely pay attention to, inwardly moving in an alchemical spiral.

And towards or near what was before what is.

Naming is hinting. Movement is apprehension. Even while still. And nearness?

That’s where all the friends are and especially the friends of the Friend.

The incomparably near is what all movement yearns for.

As such, it is all the most inexpressibly subtle.

And all expression aspires to the most Subtle,

Ya Latif!

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I look at this window most days when I’m on my balcony.

It may happen that we grow aware of our proximities. In considering them deeply, then the city starts to unveil its unreasonableness and its discrepancies. Even as our very lives are built on bewilderment and imbalance, the worlds we build somehow must aspire to ethical beauty and inclusive harmony. Not best, but better is our cry. The problem is we act as if money is best, so then nothing really can get better.

A hotel near me that has undergone many permutations and is now vacant captures my curiosities. The rooms appear boarded up now after being gutted and fumigated. But this window remains somehow alive; its room, strangely occupied. And at night, the light is often still illumined. Such a window is a motif in so many stories. But it is crucial that we understand that a motif must not only be a symbol for something. We are familiar with what windows are suggesting, or hinting at, but not every window comes from those books. I also realize that what I’m really looking at is the curtain.

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Many afternoons this summer, I idle with a book and journal on my third floor balcony — which is an anomaly, being the only balcony on that floor. My most dominant view is of the condos opposite mine (pictured above) and, usually, there aren’t that many people lingering on their own balconies in the early afternoons. However, (although not pictured here out of respect), there is often one person, an older man standing in his tiny, cavernous covered balcony opposite the green lamp pole and overlooking the shaded, sloping sidewalk. His own balcony seems absurdly low to the ground while also oddly constricted. But that doesn’t deter him from appreciating it. Nearly every day, he is out there, in late afternoons or right before sunset, in quiet rumination, resting his arms on the railing and looking back and forth at whatever is unfolding. Sometimes he stays there in meditative silence for twenty or thirty minutes, glancing one way, taking it in, and then the other, taking that in.

At that time of day, not much is underway. Maybe some people are looking for parking, while others are walking their dogs. Occasionally someone needs a jump on their car or two dogs get in a minor altercation. I wonder about his reveries and, consequently, his life. But then I wonder if I can’t speak of a life, singly and holistically as such. What I’m really wondering about is his reverie-life, or his inner life that has found a supplement in this diminutive grotto of a balcony.

I try not to gaze on him indiscreetly or puncture his solitude. And I garner some comfort by his proximity too: here is another devotee of the nocturnal afternoon who knows the waking dream life is as fecund and fruitful as the active life — knowing too that those distinctions are illusory. So it is one life, after all then — but one life composed of many lives.

******************************************************************

A phrase I woke up with the other day: the patience of dawn.

I wanted to arrive at a feeling of the slowest most melodious unfolding of soft luminosity. Such aquatic-quartz-like light spreads not in a contagion of revelation. For the light still longs for shadow’s earthy life to flourish. The ink-dark corners to keep spiraling their mysteries ever deeper into the worlds inside themselves.

There’s more lyrical ways to say this. But I feel its implication: the unhurried exhalation of illumination from primordial depths. Us, the heedless participants caught in the rays. Slipping into hubris caused by excess sun. Then wistfully remembering the early hours when all was slower, more subtle, and more of a benediction. The dawn remembers, without bias, darkness and light. We are the forgetful ones. To feel like the dawn feels seems too difficult, but worth aspiring to.

Today, I add to it another phrase inspired by recent classes: a breathing that sees.

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The day can hang sometimes on securing a quiet, shaded table or bench ensconced in greenery and close to the gleeful clamor of families. Entire weeks, I remember, structured around finding and securing such benches. Pandemic weeks. Heartbreak weeks. Normal weeks. Spiritual weeks.

Here’s one question that’s hard to ask the sun: How do you get through the day when so much feels incoherent? One detail after another, whether in work or in the local or global order, or in terms of necessities and daily interactions and habitual patterns, can feel more incoherent than the last. (Where is all the rushed dazedness leading?)

You don’t. I mean: “Get through it,” which is a phrase rooted in attrition.

Rather, at your best, which is rare, you glide or dance or meander or saunter.

A fragmented music is ideal; coherence wells up with rhythm, however irregular. An orchestration of action and intention, inertia and overcoming, silence and disclosure. Movement is sacrament, no matter how you feel. You lean on what feels right and kind and good, even if jumbled. Even it means doing nothing. You remember who you have to embody goodness for. And that could be anybody, even somebody that isn’t there or that you don’t notice.

Moving around in a spiral can create the impression of a flower. Thinking slower adds bolder colors. Giving without expectation is a sign of the greening of the dead. Some soul is observing your goodness blossoming, despite everything that negates. Sea breezes come through the trees to assist. What is this? A composing of hybrid life.

****************************************************************************

At night, there is a neglected world that moves and jostles and yearns and convulses around my building. The narrow one way road by the train tracks comes alive. California Street, it’s called. I am intrigued by what certain parked cars are doing in the dark discretion of the empty parking lot that you can walk in to through a hole ripped in the metal fence. Actually it’s more like one section of the fence has simply been rolled away to allow unfettered access. From my balcony, I watch words and exchanges happening in the night, sometimes via people huddled up in a corner, or leaning in through car windows, all of it contoured by the the empty space where a fence once was. This is how cities are reimagined, I think.

One view from California Street, further down from my home.

Then what I see in daylight from my desk are the waving tops of the trees and the black birds sauntering the rooftops. Purple blossoms, sour-smelling. Constant melodic responses to the wind. Who is choreographing whom? — for the wind’s dancing remains, as of yet, unseen, only felt and smelled. The remains are dancing is a variation I heard in that sentence.

In my neighborhood, I hear all kinds of people in torment and inebriation and exasperation and desperation — voices that the wind carries between branches, birds — and I think, too, of how holes in fences form through human longing. In the building across the street from mine, a man is always at his computer. Night after night, he posts up in a white t-shirt, his face eerily green from the screen. The screen as portal or promise of an embrasure into another way of interacting with these contexts. Potentially, a canopy of purple flowers might join us away from our screens and pages. What is a balcony except a potential conjunction? What is “reality” but an ossification of illusory barriers? When I take the scare quotes away, Reality is a different kind of placeholder.

In another condo unit, in the early pre-dawn hours, a woman makes coffee and breakfast. Hers is the only lit window in the whole complex. I imagine our desks carrying on subliminal conversation. As her kitchen comes to life, I’m sorting through some old notebooks, wondering who will read them when I’m gone. Facing windows of other lives on my balcony reminds me of all the novels I’ve ever read. They all blend into one lyrical, fragmented work called Unknowing of the Neighbor. Or you might call it the Enigma of That Over There.

Too heavy-handed, she’d say. Remember that lightness you always talk about? Easy to forget, eh? Her desk seems to be a marble counter crowded with roses, coffee, half-eaten pastries, spices, and letters. Desks, like beds, can be improvised. The whole building is a stack of lives with glass-faced and shutter-lidded openings to the world.

I’m also reminded of the terrible loneliness we can feel knowing that we can’t help but be a part of a meta-machine that keeps creating new and crueler suffering — and exacerbating old forms of suffering. But loneliness happens in other ways too. Sometimes darkly musically. Sometimes bird-like and blossoming.

What I attempt to call ambient writing is to experiment with just the music of impressions and moods that often engulf one who is alone in a subtle, abandoned, or under-acknowledged landscape.

It is not just the liminal or the ruined but the oddly-abandoned and un-tended and under-utilized that I seek out and notice. Like this park-space that they decided to close and fence off on Bankers Hill. What life is still lived here? What stories still happen?

Down below us, the structural nature of a cul-de-sac is to collect all the voices. It’s a place of turning, or false starts, of washing ashore, of congealing. I need to be better at blending voices, and giving help to the the unheeded ones. We imagine all the times we have failed to listen and the accumulations of abuses that have consequently resulted. This is especially true with those “above us.” They never listened. (Didn’t have to, they said. No money in it, they added.)

Here in this downtown-proximate neighborhood where I live, everyone is looking around for a new storefront, or at their phones, tragically limiting what faces them. A face is always a pending cry awaiting an unlikely response. The face bears some resemblance to a screen? Maybe. But I think too of how faces are also in-mixed and co-determining with the landscapes they are in. No matter how many times I hear it, the word screen evokes control, manipulation, constriction. Then I think of how the word “field” generally makes me think of healing conditions that uplift me.

It’s not accurate/fair to say there is an opposition between, let’s say, screens and fields, only because proposing such binaries betrays Reality. But these are words that accurately convey for me contrasting states of attention/receptivity. A field might also be a milieu, as in surroundings or contexts but also the middle of things. When I see the house with its blue door at the top of a small set of stairs — a blue door that is also crowned with vines and branches, and is also (oddly?) parallel to the street — and the mural of the woman and child adjacent to the door — and I can’t really tell what the woman has on her head? — and that single, gothic light fixture mounted on the wall, too — when I see all this, I’m also tripped up by the abundant wall-clinging vines, and wondering how this whole milieu came to emerge as such. That peculiar array of interwoven details — absolutely unique on that particular block — makes me feel I’ve indeed been placed in the middle of an unfolding, multi-layered tableau.

All my writing/thinking is rife with landscapes. Something about spaces that humans are always aspiring to. Or maybe wanting our spaces to respond to us somehow. How sometimes we feel trapped in our own faces, yearning for the ventilation of wind-caressed expanses, moss-eaten walls, back-alleys that tumble discordantly for miles into the bay. Rifling through old journals, all the times I wrote the words: “intense” and “journey” and “beautiful” and “pain.” So many faces in motion. So many pleading eyes that are pathways. All those moments when I thought I was on the verge of really responding.

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Walking while fasting in Ramadan arouses new sensitivities to smell and light and sound and curvature. Ramadan has taught me that there is a whole creative science of the senses. And it is a poetic science above all, one in which scent and hearing are often prioritized. One afternoon, I found myself considering the opening of this discreet thoroughfare or passageway around this office building. It’s embrasured curves seemed to be amplifying the howl of the wind. And the wind from that turning seemed to also convey a curiously sweet smell. This all reminded me of how the wind used to sound in Las Vegas as it moaned in acoustically-intensifying fissures between buildings. So I took the bait and slowly began striding down the passageway.

As I walked slowly, feeling the breezy light on my arms, the wind grew silent and I had a sense of where the walkway was leading. But I was still anticipating something at least mildly unexpected at the other end. A surprise that would come right before the more or less expected terminus. The part that I was anticipating was also surprising, but one I was already aware of: a truly contrasting space and building that I knew, geographically at least, was directly behind this building, right where this walkway must be leading. But as the for surprise I wasn’t expecting? I’ll need to return though, at least to confirm to myself if maybe I had indeed missed seeing that unexpected detail or unforeseen landmark at the end of the passageway.

There is a science to expectations too. A poetic one.

Afterward, my steps often lead me “down to the docks.” This phrase is both evocative and amusing to me. Euphemistic, cryptic, mysterious, all at once. Poetry.

Ambiences evoke the Imaginal. In the work of the Salik, we begin to learn how to seek and attain stations or states, which both comprise and depend on methods, vocabularies, conditions, and modes of attention. I’m at the very beginning of that particular study. But the overarching vision of a journey replete with different stations is a life vision. And an art vision.

My deep, lifelong work is to join religious striving with artistic creativity. What I call Sufi field work, perhaps half-playfully is to heed the Quranic injunction to witness the signs, in one’s self and on the horizons, and to meld the Akbarian Imagination with the Artist’s Imagination. The signs are here and there, even when nobody else is. Walking shows us. So we were compelled to invent an unoccupied cafe that only occurs in these imaginal walks. The Cafe Precipice. Invisibly occupied, sparsely outfitted. When frequented, the denizens are quiet. Sometimes invisible. It’s as close as you can get to the water without capsizing. The empty breeze corridors between tables are where the unseen action takes place. Once seated, though, all kinds of novels as art forms become apparent.

We’ve all been to some version of the Precipice before. Where light and sea mingle to create a third type of mind-writing. Where wind is the dominant discourse, buffeted by surly waves, by cloud-diffused rays. Where one’s destiny seems to be mostly elemental. The ink is the interstitial blood. Here you sit and strain against the uncertain future. And what is written is the past. While what escapes with the wind is the present.

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Ambient writing/ambient thinking.

Sufi field work. Quranic walking.

Eco-poetic itinerancy. Nomadicizing roots.

Returning to art and writing that helps me bring things together in unusual and exciting ways. Gaining inspiration from multidisciplinary artists who try to include elements of the ethnographic in their work. Deepening my devotions on the path.

Here are some instrumental records that I’ve been thinking ambiently with:

One of them I had to pay an import fee on!

Forest Bathing by A Hawk and a Hacksaw

Nocturnal Consolations by Iztok Koren and Raphael Rogiński

Unfolding by Jessica Moss

Also here’s a big beautiful art-project, hybrid anthology of a book the good people at Ojala Books convinced me to get a few months ago. It’s also stirring up connections and experiments. Highly recommended.

I will have more to say about this big book once I go deeper into it.

Finally I was compelled to do some sound and texture experiments myself. As in: simply capture some moments when sound and energy were transpiring in beautiful ways. Everyone can do this. The last video is not without some humor? But everything finds a place, too.

Here’s a song from the wonderfully rich and subtle Nocturnal Consolations album I mention above. And the title is quite germane to all I’ve been attempting.

As I’ve done before I want to celebrate the zines we made this year in my English classes. The time allotted for them to complete them was longer than it was in the previous two years; the supplies expanded to include generous support from our art teachers and color printing from our counselors. The zine-making process itself became a viral phenomenon. Students who weren’t in my class wanted to make one. Some wanted to make two of them. Everyone agrees, if anything, it’s fun, energizing, and also relaxing.

(I am humbled though to admit I have very little idea how to get all the resources we need to keep making these zines and to also build my upcoming journalism class. Thus, my awkward forays into fundraising, which, God willing, will become less awkward and more professional. Thank you all for listening to my appeals and for contributing.)

Specifically I want to share and discuss the processes and creations of work resulting from fandom, curating/museum making, manifesto-making, and syllabus-inventing. With some asides from other genres too. Mostly these are notes. Unfinished and sloppy ones. As they are notes, and very playful and raw, I want to braid these creations made by my 10th graders with larger explorations from an experimental eco-educational book I’m revising. It might be curious to blend the academic-theoretical with the very hands-on, raw, messy work of high school students. But that is the point: in this curious convergence, new potentials emerge.

I envy my student’s raw sense of creativity. The ways they get absorbed in making things. I’m trying to be more like them. One must turn the running commentary brain off. The intellectual mind I have yearns for just making things without too many expectations or too many ideas to thwart their joyful, intuitive unfolding. But ideas can add energy to the processes involved. It is a delicate mixing. Flow and intuition are more beautiful than theory and perfection. All the same, ideas can give their own intuitive charges and blasts. Ideas bring their own roots with them, traditions, ancestors, mentors, and framing and structuring strategies. I want to throw out propositions that internet searching helped me articulate, and working with my students helped me realize in concrete form. Propositions posed as questions mainly. Answerable questions? Not conclusively maybe, but very explorable and catalyzing.

**Can any space generate artistic and intellectual work/play?

Yes. (And the benefits of this perception might be that the spaces that feel the least dignified, noticed, respected, supported, esteemed, privileged, etc. can generate or reimagine their own energies of inspiration and vivification — while also knowing that the critic-archons of taste and seriousness only see with hyper limited vision.)

**So then, the quest:

Reveal every space as a dynamic site of artistic-intellectual inquiry-creation (without neglecting material needs and accommodations that every site’s particularities require, which, in turn, may entail contradictions, conflicts, trouble. )

Or:

How can we engage in intellectual and artistic adventures that carry the provocative boldness, conceptual richness, political urgency, and philosophical nuances of work made in more “legislated/traditional” intellectual-artistic spaces? I hate this question a lot. But it’s one that is assumed in so much of teaching and art labor.

Overall these queries can lead to an awakening of a kind of multi-faceted, complex sense of Beauty.

These questions also assume a lot: that what is bold and provocative in a place of academic learning will hit with similar energy in other contexts. Boldness and provocativeness cannot live outside of their specific expressions. Yet even using the words, bold or provocative, entails so many connotations. As does beauty. So I need to experiment and listen and avoid qualifiers, for now.

Above are pages from an absolutely gorgeous fanzine about the artist Laufey. The student who made it worked consistently and obsessively on it in class every day for three weeks, plus probably some time working on it at home. A marvel!

Examples of places that can become artistically infused/inspired?

Besides the public school classroom which is my foundation for this kind of thinking, there are others: kitchens, janitorial labor/contexts, parking lots, rest stops, hotels, public spaces of all kinds, sewage and waste management, resource centers, hospitals, grocery stores, political rallies, etc. But singling them out threatens to fetishize them. These spaces do no need to be improved by artists. If anything, they need more resources and financial support and organizing and maintenance, of course.

(It’s tricky too: does all aestheticizing lead to gentrifying?)

So we want to behold and inhabit these places respectfully and lovingly as what they are: crucial, life-affirming, beautiful livelihood-community building spaces. In terms of artistic interventions: it’s not that we are simply wrestling non-artistic contexts into self-labelled artistic ones; rather, we are applying artistic methods and experimentations in otherwise non-artistic contexts to help engender new inspirations. To be inspired, I think, means survival becomes that much easier? Lighter? Inspiration doesn’t have to mean having a big idea. It can come from observing the care another person shows towards you, which, in itself, becomes a work of art. Which leads to more flourishing. And of course pop culture and entertainment are other contexts. And as with all such experiments, there are boundaries and limits, each of us brings our own criteria and ethics and biases. Forgive me: these are notes!

Here’s a beautiful zine that can’t really be photocopied because the paper’s hue and texture has been expertly rendered and nuanced by coffee. Or perhaps every copy made needs to be re-dyed with coffee?

**Ideas are one thing; what about theory? Does theory have a place in non-academic, non-intellectual settings?

If I’m not schooled in the theory disseminated in legislated, academically-presenting art and intellectual spaces, how can my own intellectual/artistic adventures be seen (i.e. taken seriously)? Again: questions that are painful/annoying to ask but are also ones that underlie so much of our labors.

The economic and material realities that occur outside of academic and gallery/professional art and research spaces are the ground for all experimentations in being alive. Experimenting in aliveness means experimenting in togetherness. In suffering, in lessness, in not-enoughness, in uneveneness, in brokenness. A public school classroom is a microcosm of all of this actual diversity.

So let’s start there: the work is to help build more intellectual-artistic-interdisciplinary spaces in public school environments. But without stopping there. To also treat the material realities of daily enduring and triviality as art. As experiments in community making and co-inspiring. This requires a sense of the school as being unbounded and pending, joining with other kinds of equally open-ended communities.

It also means taking what happens in school outside of school. Compulsory education often prevents students from understanding that the intentions behind being in school are wisdom and flourishing, not clock punching, mindless routines, and rule-following. The pedagogical (and the artistic) must become the daily itinerary. This is also meaning getting at what is primal about education, as a concept, and stirring up those energies into new configurations.

So what is primal about it? The truth that a being’s ongoing sense of presence/vitality depends upon a deep attending to the immediate, multi-modal, ecological surround; that clusters of contexts and energies, from other people, from other beings, etc., all coalesce to create our experiences, too; that wisdom is probably the most enduring takeaway from living this short, wild, chaotic life.

An inspiring way to think about Wisdom is to go back to its roots in the word/name: Sophia. All learning/living is sophiological.

Here is a photo of a time and space that will never be revisited.

Another photo of an attempt to enliven a corner.

Now more zines from this year:

One theoretical word that I admit I haven’t read too much about but I’m borrowing is: Assemblage. I love this word. I think, however, I love its roots in the art forms of the 20th century, beginning with Debufet’s 3D collages and achieving for me a beautiful and messy harmony in the “Combines” of Robert Rauschenberg. I think it’s wise to realize that some trendy intellectual words and concepts — for instance ones borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari — are beautiful for very concrete, hands-on reasons that many of us can relate to.

In public school milieus, as I’ve written about, specifically in humanities classes (but really I should not limit it) I’ve already discovered what amounts to an unsurpassed spiritual-ethical communitarian vision. This ideas I explored somewhat in my last post and will keep elaborating on. It hinges on the Sufi idea of “sohbet” as well as the sociological-ecological concept of “contact” elaborated by Delany and Thoreau and others. One could call it an “encounter poetics” too. Or, as many like to say, it is relational practice. Messy, difficult, chaotic. Assemblage hints at this too: mixtures and hybridities of forms, identities and energies to achieve surprising harmonic structures and convergences.

Here is a zine made by a senior who graduated this year. It is a museum catalogue of her life. Beautiful!

Another proposition: the relationships between being an artist and an intellectual. Later I’ll write more about the activism parts too.

Intellectual work and artistic work at their most powerful are impossible to disentangle. A work of deep intellectual analysis, if it doesn’t express itself in ways that feel or affect me as also artistic, I might not pay enough attention. Which is probably unfair? I’m not sure. What enhances thought must engulf us like nature, or art. Or should I say the most magical kind of art? Likewise, all wise thinking leads us back to what we are: nature, and what nature asks us to do: art. These are playful propositions open to transformations and interrogations. The truest insights are often rendered in the most beautiful ways. Groundbreaking, rigorous analysis can change a person just as much as creative/artistic frisson can — I love that word: an “aesthetic chill” or “psychophysiological response” to an encounter with art. When you combine the rigor with the frisson, epiphanies can happen. Surprising ones.

But also so much of what is beautiful is also what is intuitive and wild, like this wonderful, raw gallery zine of alley cats a student made:

Another proposition:

Theory and genre are interchangeable ideas that serve what you can call a framing function but, more crucially, a focusing/attention function. They must emerge along with the creative process and not necessarily before or after it.

This proposition is extremely shaky, resting as it does upon my frequent ambiguity about “theory” in general and how to use it. Perhaps use is the wrong word? Play? Be transformed by? I think if one can’t play with theory or put it into concrete, relational action then it sits around gathering dust along with painfully pedantic, harmfully abstract accretions. That being said, putting something into action can also look discursive or contemplative or non-active: what matters are the encounters and the contacts the theory helps to make real. A quick fix is to treat theory more like art. And to steal from theory, as theory steals from other disciplines, in order to make more art.

A theory of alley cats, for example, as exemplified in the gallery of alley cats zine above, could include many amazing concrete, relational ideas. Theories of friendship, too, are beautifully expressed in the friendship-museum zines many students made. I was amazed that one student has 9 good friends to write about!

It’s worth considering too, that the moment you call it a theory, or you are manifesto-ing your ideas, they can seem more catalytic and even irresistible.

Other fields of playful intervention: The artistic-intellectual realm of museum and curating is ripe for playful expanding and subverting. The museum-instinct is also an archival-instinct; on large scales, museums and archives are contested manifestations of the abuses of power, selective history, suprematist theories, and ideological conditioning. These theoretical and ethical difficulties are worth considering while also using the concept of a museum in anarchic-subjective, highly personal ways. The internet has many suggestive resources for personal museum making like this one.

Creating a museum exhibit catalog is just one foundational step in making the museum space, itself. But the catalog, of course, can become the art form in, itself. It can become its own space. An exhibit catalog can also slip into being a tour guide. Many students loved this option for their own zine project.

The manifesto/syllabus option remain somewhat unexplored in the high school level. However, one of my very best students made this protest/manifesto anti-ice zine below and it was included in a museum show too! I’m so proud of these students:

As I create curriculum for classes, and lessons, and gather readings,

As I keep trying to archive and celebrate my student’s work and to help them expand their creative, activist, and interpersonal skills and projects outside of school,

As I also encourage them to keep building activist and creative and interpersonal contexts inside school,

As I also try to keep turning and shaping my own classroom into a kind of curatorial laboratory that feeds on hybrid inspiration and intuition,

As I try to fundraise and get supplies and teach myself how to teach my first Journalism classes, while also keep enhancing my Honors English classes and regular 10th grade classes, and maybe AVID too if I can ever teach that again,

I’m also trying to shape

a book that includes all this and also my own status as a student and learner and creator, in school and beyond. The sophiological model of life.

Here’s some other points I want to explore later:

More about fandom!

Teacher as curator!?

Education as art.

Another article about education as art form.

The teacher as artist/artwork?

Everyone is a potential educator!

While it wasn’t the most popular option for many of my high school students, when I taught college, many students enjoyed designing their own classes and syllabi. Here was my original reflection about the project after a couple years of teaching it:

Students are often taught to be passive, to consume education like a product, to do the work that pleases their instructors, honors the rules and that rewards the student with the desired grade. Not always the best approach, of course. Everyone, even if they’re not a seasoned teacher or an acknowledged master, can assume the position of an educator, either by the examples they set for others, the behavior that they daily and often unconsciously perform, or the things they “share” on the internet, or in person. Taking this approach, I think, might make us consider our actions and thoughts in a more ecological and holistic manner, while also making us more receptive to what others can teach us, no matter how different they are from us.

I ask students to design a 3-5 page syllabus of a course they would like to teach. It can be anything, as long as they can justify the subject’s importance and usefulness, provide supplemental texts, videos and links, and list realistic course objectives and a few exercises and assignments. They can present their syllabus to the class, as well, for additional credit, which is the fun part. Some of their very creative, and useful syllabi have included: How To Be An Ally (To Persons Of Color, To Women, and To The LGBTQA+ Communities), How To Forgive 101, How Not To Give A S*%$ About What People Think About You, Holistic Health, Intro to African Cuisines, The History and Cultural Importance of Soccer, How To Have A More Adventurous Life, Kindness 101, Intimidation In Sports, Wilderness Survival Skills, What We Can Learn from Atilla The Hun, and Commitment For Commitment Phobes. Still others have been brilliantly humorous: How To Take Photos Of Your Cats So They’ll Become Internet Celebrities, and How To Enter Into The Mind of A Goat (& Why It’s Beneficial). Even these seemingly absurd ones had valuable lessons and instructions, and also provoked lively Q&A’s.

At the time, I also discovered an online pedagogical art archive that was doing the same thing! I’m revisiting it now and it’s a glorious archive:

The Syllabus Project

Explore this wonderful site!

In a related follow up post, I will document the OTHER option that some very ambitious and art-obsessive students made: The Personal Oracle/Tarot Deck. This particular choice requires its own post. I will also contrast them with other oracle decks and the pedagogical/sophiological ideas behind them.

Thank you for celebrating my student’s work with me and considering all these different connections.

The students were there with me in the classroom one week ago, Monday, May 18, as I was trying to comprehend the horrible tragedy happening to my San Diego Muslim community. An act of white supremacist homicidal terror against my Muslim brothers and sisters. Evil rooted in the depraved, vile rhetoric of the most powerful people in the nation. An act of unhinged hatred, the kind that feels woven into our country’s most pervasive ideologies. And it all happened in the place of worship, the Islamic Center of San Diego, serving thousands of people from all backgrounds, and where I underwent my conversion ceremony, or shahada, in the early pandemic.

Just over five years ago, compelled by transfiguring love and deep heart epiphanies, I was warmly welcomed into the Muslim community of San Diego at the Islamic Center of San Diego. Despite pandemic restrictions, I could feel the intimacy and serenity of the religious life of the masjid. It was also my first year teaching in public schools. And my first year figuring out zoom and who was behind all the silent, dark squares on it. Along with everyone else, I was adapting to masking and avoiding proximity to others and worrying about variants and my more immunocompromised loved ones. Crises and challenges interweaving in excess. And here was this 1400 year old metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, spiritual, and ecological path of faith that was changing me and expanding my heart in the midst of all those upheavals.

I had spent much of my life not knowing anything about Islam. The (mostly) unspoken directive was to not ask too much about it, to assume it belonged to “other” places and cultures. It is a tradition, we were conditioned to believe, that is hard to relate to, practiced by “others” that we should be nice to, but maybe not get to know too well. The Western white framework I was brought up in seemed to be incurious about those others, even wary of them. Suffice to say, any representations we had of Islam were of non-white people dressing in ways and performing rites that appeared quite “foreign” to our understanding. (My European-Western-American-settler-whiteness of course is part of who I am and how I am. It’s ineradicable. It is the index of all the privileges I have, all my blind spots, my biases. Though it can also hopefully be where I start learning and unlearning from, anew, each day. Thankfully, my disposition as an artist and writer, largely guided and mentored by marginalized, queer, feminist, and outlaw creators and visionaries, often in inclusive, progressive, activist, and Leftist spaces, has always made me curious and open and idealistic. And sometimes wisely adventurous in heart-expanding ways. The work I have to do is immense and difficult, the mistakes I’ve made are many, but I’ve been lucky to be near the best guides.)

So I was astonished by all I discovered and all I took with me. Not just from the faith of Islam, but from the people practicing it and guiding me, even if we were different in many ways. That first Ramadan I witnessed I couldn’t believe the communal vision of unity I walked into, along with the sharing of food at the end of the long days of fasting. Likewise, I couldn’t believe the benefits I gained from fasting, which was something I hadn’t done before. I never before experienced such sincere, reassuring warmth of communal prayer; nor had I ever beheld such willingness of people to give their wealth to the poor and needy. The kindness, the patience, the attentiveness, the community care, the generosity, the tenderness, and profound knowledge given to me then from my Muslim brothers and sisters changed my life forever. This Companion Moon Substack, now a book in draft, began as a way to help me elaborate on all that beauty I discovered. Too much beauty for one heart, certainly.

Memories and images flashing in my mind, I watched the news, along with my class. It was horrifying and shocking. I was holding my prayer beads and looking quite frazzled. My students witnessed me, and were instantly supportive and kind, receptive and patient. As I checked on some loved ones, they waited with me. They kept the mood light and buoyant. But I also knew they’d make space if I started crying. And if I did cry, I wouldn’t be crying for myself, no, but for my wounded, devastated community who has weathered so much injustice and oppression, so much abuse and loss — here in this soul-sick, broken country of ours, and everywhere else, too.

And later at the memorial vigil the next night, I did cry: foremost for the selfless men who died that day, for my friends, neighbors, mentors, and loved ones who were more intimately connected with the mosque, who went there every day like to a second home, who cherished and grew up with the beautiful souls who sacrificed their lives, and for the many indigenous and immigrant communities who are routinely so violated and betrayed by this country.

One of the highest virtues in Islam is to risk your life to protect the lives of others. Another is to always stand with the oppressed no matter what. These beautiful souls — Amin, Nader, Mansour — died protecting children. We mourn them painfully, and also will remember their heroic examples forever. The vigil was a heartbreaking, yet defiant and empowering gathering of solidarity against hate, racism, white supremacy and Islamophobia. I take strength from all those who came together. This is the strength I try to infuse into my teaching. I appreciated the moment when one of the speakers encouraged us to hug our neighbor in the crowd and a man I didn’t know gave me such a reassuring, kind embrace. More of this, please.

The night gave me inspiration that all oppressed groups, whether immigrants, Muslims, Jewish people, the LGBTQIA+ community, women, the impoverished, children, indigenous people, and so many others can keep working together, despite their differences, against the hatred and dehumanization that is so dominant in this country. This difficult, messy intersectional-ecological work that spirituality is asking us to do. The work that unities my Sufi-Muslim faith path and my public school Humanities teaching.

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I’m very grateful my 10th graders were there with me that day, working on their magazines, joking, concocting side-quests, and sharing minor amusements. As challenging as my job is, I’ve never ever laughed so much, and with such joy, as I have while teaching high school English in Logan Heights, San Diego. The laughter, it’s true, can sometimes be sardonic, reflecting the maddening structural, bureaucratic problems of the job. But most of the time it emerges from the frenetic, life-affirming dynamic the students, counselors, and teachers create together.

(I think there is an insolent, absurd, rebellious, goofy-contagious humor you develop as a teenager and you’re blessed if it stays with you always. )

Which isn’t to say this is easy. It’s still the most difficult work I can imagine doing. I definitely don’t want to do anything that is harder than this. Our community and the families we serve are daily targets of this administration’s white supremacist hatred. Our students endure the social-emotional, socioeconomic challenges that come from trying to live in inequitable urban conditions. As cities get more inequitable and unjust, young people suffer. Then there is the fact that, as a teacher, you’re engaging daily with a hundred plus teenagers. Teenagers who are moody, chaotic, hormonal, rude, crude, and vulnerable (as every teen is) — teenagers who have suffered greatly and are carrying so much unimaginable weight and trauma — and the same teens who are also the sweetest, realest, and kindest people you’ve ever met.

Because of all these factors, and the tough joy amid constant crises I witness every day, as well as the love that suffuses every classroom, it remains the most spiritually powerful work. One key reason is that every moment there we have the opportunity to mentor souls in need. These students might be enduring times of confusion, pain, dread, aimlessness, and boredom. Our country seems to just manufacture these feelings on an hourly basis. So there are a lot of those moments and so there are a lot of opportunities to help. And to let others, like our students, mentor us too. Not because any of us are qualified to be mentors exactly, even if it says we are on our diplomas and certificates — but because we’ve been put in loving proximity with each other in a space where dialogic, inquisitive closeness is both sacred and creative. If we really think about mentorship and teaching, we know that every moment, no matter where it happens, is instructive. Every other soul we encounter is a potential guide, as we are to them.

Can we have more of this, outside of the classroom, please? What couldn’t be improved by this collaborative levity and open-hearted conversational experimentation? This reassuring sharing of presence-through-difference that becomes, itself, a model of guidance?

A public school humanities classroom’s beauty is that it is a place of discursive openness and collaborative wonder and inclusive sanctuary. This kind of classroom is often the closest to an ideal space I can imagine. In many ways it resembles the concept of “suhba” or “sohbet” in Sufism which entails spiritually-rich, edifying conversation and companionship -- often along with music and shared snacks and tea (also like in my classroom!) As I experienced these hospitable spiritual gatherings first hand in Turkey and Morocco I tried to emulate them in my English class.

There needs to be other words and ideas for what is cultivated in the interpersonal/intersectional spaces of a public school humanities classroom. Or a kind of poetry for it. A kind of art. A kind of strange, interdisciplinary theater. While I know I shouldn’t romanticize it, I want to celebrate the complex material and emotional realities this particular context discloses. It’s towards this unnamed but real concept I reach when I also think about what my religious path of Islam has shown me. A simply, un-glitzy word that conjures up what I’m hinting at is one used by both Samuel R. Delany and Henry David Thoreau: contact!

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In times of crises, we can get our hands dirty making cool things. We come in contact with stuff and it’s exhilarating. We have spent the last month making zines. Zines will alway endure as the best, most engaging alternative to anything else — inside and outside any classroom. It’s the most successful project I’ve done as an English teacher and I can’t take any credit for it: the students can. They thrive while making them: their passions for detail and design and nuance shine forth.

This year was exceptional. Everyone made something uniquely lovely and lovingly detailed. They play off each other’s inspirations and fandom; they include each other, often comically, in their visions. There is competitiveness but in the service of mutual inspiration. There is a kind of improvised perfectionism, as I’ve also dabbled in when making zines. Every day I try to get them supplies that they need, including stickers and special tape and paint pens and colored paper and old magazines to cut up. It’s like we are running a small press. (And maybe one day we will when I teach Journalism.) We print out photos and text, we slice, we glue, we collage, we make a mess. It’s contagious and obsessive, a tad chaotic and also elegantly orchestrated. Half the students are already artistic prodigies, too. My student’s creative experimentations and their affectionate friendships come from the same source: a reservoir of playful, mischievous, generous, and tender openness that feels so threatened by the pressures of adulthood. (A future post will go into more detail about these zines.)

Years ago, teaching undergraduates in Las Vegas, one common complaint I always heard from students was that school had destroyed their creativity and imagination. I never forgot that, nor do I ever forget that my own creativity/imagination is one consistent bulwark against the dismal and soul-sucking and stress-inducing demons of life. As a younger person, with considerable privileges, I was gifted with a lot of time and space to let my imagination develop. Now it can seem like young people aren’t given the space or time to revel in the open possibilities of the imaginary and the creative. So much of their attention is tyrannized, their freedoms stolen, their youth exploited.

Most of what adolescents consume for entertainment and consumption are created by the enterprising/capitalist adult world; many of these diversions and pleasures are designed to be habit-forming and unhealthy; and the conditioned rush to become more adult-like is, also, an excuse for others to more quickly exploit you. But wait, I thought adulthood meant maturity? Independence? Responsibility? These students are growing up watching children getting maimed and murdered in Palestine and elsewhere by bombs dropped by adults, and they keep reading about another influential “adult” who was a predator of children and/or associate of epstein. What faith can they have in the adult world, exactly? And yet where else are they headed? Many of my students have loving, responsible parents; many others do not. They’ve witnessed adults do all sorts of egregious acts. Many of them, themselves, have been victims of abhorrent adult behavior and it’s repulsive and depressing to even think about any of this. It’s also part of my work.

My presence as a teacher must be an expression of some kind of faith.

(Not religious or spiritual faith, exactly/necessarily — although for some that’s inextricable to who we are, as it is for me — but I know my atheist and agnostic colleagues are some of the best teachers and human beings I’ve ever met.)

More pointedly, it is faith in the shared, built belief that there is a harmonious bridge between adolescence and all the adventures that come afterward. I hesitate to use the word adult with any sense of knowing what it means. What comes after high school is something more complex. It is experimental; it is vast; it is multifaceted. As teachers, we are helping to orchestrate inspiring and supportive continuity in all directions — past and present and future — if we offer anything at all. Continuity, of course, necessitates possibility and spaciousness. The wild vitalities of childhood and adolescence never diminish, either; they are reconfigured on first one bridge, and then others. Generally speaking, the factory of adult life pressures you to relinquish these energies. (Or at least to turn them towards more practical, profitable ends.)

At the same time, we guide young people to revere and learn from their roots and their ancestral sources and protectors. These are enduring, angelic realities that will accompany them. We offer ancient suggestions for how to build a conscience that can withstand the fluctuations and instabilities of our human-made contexts. My students and fellow teachers make defiant bridges with me to keep some kind of wisdom alive and protected. Our communities and elders and ancestors are making them with us too— but it’s those latter treasures we so often neglect or forget. I’m saying this all, heart-forward. It’s not polished or smoothed out, but intuitively leaping and greenly connective.

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As we watched the news in my class on Monday, we also briefly prepared for the possibility of going into a lockdown. It turned out, thankfully, we didn’t have to. Again I had to remind myself what could be at stake if we did. I have been in a couple lockdowns before and a variety of scenarios can happen. In one particularly troubling incident the lockdown in question was caused by an escalating series of conflicts in my own middle school classroom a few years ago. I learned that day that some people’s lives are rife with such furious, unjust pain that it’s hard to know how to begin to help them. In any kind of lockdown the teacher becomes a new kind of leader or guide. Inshallah, any teacher in such conditions will have the courage of the beautiful martyrs of the Islamic Center of San Diego who died protecting children.

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About 13 years ago, in an entirely different environment, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, I sat with my MFA creative writing cohort, right before I was to enter a classroom as a teacher for the very first time. We were in a stuffy, colorless room to received an active shooter training that I don’t think any of us will ever forget. The university police chief, a former soldier who had seen extensive combat, witnessed the deaths of friends, and had researched school shootings extensively, spoke from a place of trauma and pain. In short, he told us that each of us needed to be prepared to die in order to protect our students. Not die through inaction, but by willing to attack and resist any assailant who comes in the room. At the time it was shocking to hear, and his delivery could have been construed as darkly comic in its intensity. Years later, I’m teaching an English composition class the day after the mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas. One of my student’s friend’s had been struck by a bullet while attending the event. Later, in 2023, after I had moved back to San Diego, the university, itself, my former place of study and employment, experienced a shooting resulting in the deaths of 3 faculty members. The web of violence seems inescapable so the web of care needs to be indestructible and omnipresent.

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My students sense that I’m always trying to be empathetic and loving and “chill.” They also likely sense that like many teachers I’m tired and often a bit melancholy about the state of the world. A “chill” exterior is often because one is grappling with bittersweet truths about life. There is a softening that happens when you acknowledge that the world you are paid to guide young people towards is not, generally speaking, the world you most wish for them. This might sound strange. What is softened, though, is any institutional insistency that they conform to that world’s expectations, norms, and biases. Yes, we must learn to make money, spend it wisely, and survive. Yes, we must learn responsibility and health and care and time management. Many of my students learned all of this, long before I ever did, because of tragedy and necessity.

We must also learn and relearn defiance, gentleness, presence, laughter, wildness, imagination, spontaneity, kindness, collaboration, sustainability, lightness. I can’t hand them any complete vision of an alternate world; I can only show them imperishable possibilities, scattered like luminous fragments, in the words and art forms and traditions that we study and have been handed down to us.

What softens the heart is the possibility that something can be otherwise. And yes there is something wistful here too. Something bittersweet, because we know what this world is and what it can do.

When you’re fifteen it isn’t always easy to understand the pain of the adults around you either. What looks like pain may also be a heavy-handed seriousness that also manifests as a jittery superiority complex. If this seriousness is any way mitigated by levity or humor, you might start regaining some tendency towards wholeness. We’re never exactly whole unless we become saints or friends of God, as Sufis call them. But forever tending towards wholeness is the choreography our hearts are made for. This tendency is cultivated at all ages. It thrives in all directions. I sometimes call it Sufism, or the path of the heart, or Love, too, is a good word for it.

The difficult part of love is believing that it is always there, even in unusual forms, even in invisibility, silence, loss, negligence, and apparent absence. It strikes me that in moments when I receive the worst possible news, I might not have anybody to immediately turn to except the 15 year old students in my English classes. I’m humbled and grateful that this possibility of love exists. So knowing that, I try to be honest with my students and to respect them as not just students but also unique purveyors of wisdom and care. And that maybe care is, in some degree, the highest form of wisdom.

Tragedy is inevitable. Yet being in a network of care is, sadly, not. Our social systems are not designed so networks and collectives of mutual aid, support, and care can flourish. There seems to be little profit in caring for others for the sake of primordial goodness. When learning about Islam, a jolting epiphany for me was discovering the implications of zakat, the obligatory charitable giving to the poor; later, in a course called The Islamic Gift Economy, I was presented with a comprehensive social-spiritual system in which the poor and indigent and needy are taken care of by the community while necessary resources are equitably shared. A care economy, too. An economy-ecology in which our God-given status as earthly stewards and protectors is fulfilled and our individual livelihoods are interwoven with collective flourishing.

Many of us, together and individually, curate online faces of concern and righteousness, with reshared reminders of grieving unity. We want to believe in care and love so we keep saying the words and posting the slogans. So many theoretical essays celebrate — and rightfully so — the urgency of relation-based practices; of rethinking the individual vis-a-vis the collective and the nonhuman. I love the lyrical, evocative gymnastics of this eco-poetic prose. I have tried writing similar things many times, despite the fact I barely know my neighbors and can barely identify any trees in my area. The concrete, messy, impure, unglamorous details of relational/ecological practices, in worlds that have been permanently disfigured by colonial, capitalist, racist, hetero-patriarchal, classist dominance and exploitation, are both exhilarating and daunting.

Islam and public school teaching showed me how to become a hands-on student of concrete, relational practice. What does this mean? One quick answer is it means helping your neighbor. It means choosing deliberate nearness and intentional proximity to others. It means constantly harnessing strength from a collective vision of goodness and interdependency. But also knowing where your food comes from. Where your waste goes. How to make things, how to fix things, how to build structures, how to be devoted. I’m not very good at a lot of this — and in many ways, it’s in these areas where my students shine the most and teach me — and certainly where my Muslim community has been exemplary.

So I’m again becoming a student of the intricate details of being-with-others which, paradoxically, allows one to be better-with-oneself. In the raw problems of survival and emotional management, nourishment and safety, care and livelihood, difference and conflict, all the intellectual, academic adventures are derived — the fun, exciting stuff to think and write about — but before you get there, you must confront and learn to love and work with this chaotic, messy stuff.

To study and try to embody a collectivist, communitarian vision that runs counter to the capitalist-individualist-work-and profit driven ideologies. All the sparkling, multi-faceted particulars and materialities of shared life. The proximities of flesh and blood groups; the food, both eaten and wasted; the over-filled trash cans; the sounds; the screams; the gossip; the heat and sweat and fragrance; the tears and blood; the grief; the strength; the defiance; the laughter of all kinds; the dead flowers and crumpled money and lost ID’s and broken toilets and scratches and headaches, too. And the unimaginable tragedies. I can think of several students I know well and care deeply for who have suffered losses and tragedies I can’t even begin to fathom. And I know that we have worked together to create varieties of help and support for them.

What unites the work-vision of Islam, Sufism, and public school teaching for me is a holistic, anarchistic vision of inter-relational artistry and mutual flourishing — which is also an imperfect way of expressing what I’m intuiting. Being muslim, lower-case, refers to anything at all in the cosmos, reverent and humbled by and loyal to the Source of all Creation and the daily acts of beauty and goodness the Source asks from us. And our public school sites as well are founded on inclusive, nonjudgmental access to education and resources, however flawed and broken and compromised this is in its actual execution. And yes, all of it is flawed and imperfect; all of it is fractured and stifled by patriarchal, hierarchical, profit-driven, exploitive, power-hungry, bureaucratic systems and tendencies. But these are the visions I’m working with. That have changed me, expanded my heart. Growing. Trying to make more real. Learning from teachers, from students, from elders, from ancestors. Listening. Experimenting. Fucking up and starting over. Loving and losing and not really losing. Realizing the love is there and workable and shareable. Always.

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Some projects ongoing:

***Building the teacher Insta page to document student work, pedagogy, and community events: https://www.instagram.com/mrbergerenglishteacher/

***After some advocacy, I’m going to be teaching a Journalism elective. I want it be Journalism as Civics, Activism, Community Engagement. More soon.

***Keep learning more from Black Muslim traditions and writings, local indigenous communities and teachings, and the local Latino/Latinx communities I serve, for curriculum I’m building and events I want to organize. Any suggestions welcome!

****More in-print, zine and press adventures coming.

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I did a quick trip to LA last week to see some music and stumbled on a little bookshop in Highland Park that warmed my heart immediately by its name. Inside the wonderful proprietors gave me space to share some of the stuff I’ve been writing here. I look forward to returning and to keep supporting this wonderful place.

Also here’s a little glimpse of one of the walls of my classroom that became the first photo I posted on my teacher-gram. I’m proud of this chaotic and colorful section of the room. It gives me persistent, energizing reminders. The kids like looking at it, too.

As Ramadan ended, I considered all the words I have written down in journals, on blogs, on documents, etc. I feel it all pointing towards this time of my life— which is a provocative feeling that I’m going to let sit and not rile, just yet.

As Ramadan was ending I saw the writing in the sky again. Perhaps more cursive than calligraphy. To remember that each cloud-glyph is a visage that is entirely unique, perfectly precise yet mixed with my (mixed) vision. And my vision is the child, born every moment, of what might be possible. Potential possibilities.

So, what is possible must first be rooted in what can be imagined. And what can be imagined? It seems like I ask this question every day to whomever is listening. All my reading has occurred so I can ask these questions; all my writing are other attempts to formulate essential queries. This makes me, more or less, an idealist. On the grass, so green it looks fake, ants on my ankles, my hunger irrelevant, children playing close by, and the sound of tourist ships blowing their horns. When I daydream in this admixture of light and sound, warmth and shade, I understand that it is perplexity that I am addressing. And do they respond? Not in ways that I anticipate. Two friends, one ancient and impenetrable, and one who will be gone too soon to know what happened, keep listening, ever onward into the patient light.

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Some reading from Ramadan and beyond……..

This is a book I read in Ramadan, probably too quickly. Blessedly, I will soon join a book club with some friends where I can read it again and with closer attention.

My initial impressions after the first read are awe and gratitude. This is a gorgeous, heart-stirring book of interconnected mystical stories, written by someone I call a guide and teacher for me. Beautifully illustrated, too, the book is an interwoven compendium of spiritual fables and myths. Many are familiar ones, at least on the surface; some are ones we may have heard once or twice and then forgotten. The profusion of narrative details within, as well as vocabulary particular to a deeply mystical phenomenology, is dizzying and energizing. It’s also fair to say that these stories have been imbued with esoteric nuances. They aren’t just the stories we have heard. Pir Zia’s approach in this work, and one that is integral to his larger vision of spiritual guidance, is to poetically articulate sympathies and subtle resonances between different traditions. He is guiding us through a cosmology that might feel recognizable on the surface, but that we are invited to experience anew through freshly articulated harmonies. What may seem like one easily parseable phenomenon on the surface reveals itself to have more mystical meanings. The distinct differences of each spiritual tradition — the particular fragrances and poetics, the energies and focal points— remain, but there is an overarching energetics that draw fragrances toward each other. In these magnetizing moments, surprising kinships arise. We recognize a yearning in Beauty, herself, to find her beautiful kin.

He also evokes a larger counsel — the Diwan — that oversees these many traditions and how they manifest in human and earthly life. This work agilely avoids the trap of easy syncretism by being so precise and specific in how the various stories unfold and how the varied spiritual sciences play out in the lives of humans and gods and spirits. Neither does it ever say that one tradition is just like another. Unity and Multiplicity are honored together, individually and in dynamic in-mixings.

One quite beautiful aspect of this tapestry of tales is that error, harm, cruelty, egoism, and violence are almost always the products of figments that deceive human awareness. Our suffering, then, is largely the product of illusions, some which we create ourselves and some which are thrust upon us by outside forces. In either case, there is freedom, and especially the freedom for us to seek counsel among the cloud of guides, ancestors, spirits, prophets and messengers. Such intricate guidance is our spiritual birthright. Not seeking guidance, indeed, is when the foolishness is most inevitable.

A few other quick notes before I begin that deeper, group reading;

The book encapsulates a sacred, mythical geography — one that we can still wander in, whose breezes we can breathe, whose lands return to hold us at night, in dreams. The land as subject, constantly beseeching the prophets and friends of God. Revisiting the stories of the Garden. Seeing the Garden, again, with renewed vision. Mysteries and initiations and descents are described in the same language as the more “religious” stories. Religion and magic and mysticism and poetry are undivided in this secret history of the world. The Hermetic and the Sufi wedded in the unfolding of the world’s destiny. Another magical word he uses a lot is SYZYGY. Much mystery in that word. Wisdom is a multi-faceted jewel whose different facets are the provinces of different peoples, but all of whom also cross paths and intersect. Rediscovering, too, the deeper vibrations of the Grail story. More, so much more to rediscover here. Rediscovery is our birthright.

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Here’s a trilogy of books that accompanied me in Ramadan and remain by my bedside.

What does a reader want?

All my life I’ve delved into books for all kinds of inspiration and knowledge. In terms of spiritual, esoteric, or religious knowledge, books have always exerted a certain fascination, as if the next tome, and the next one after that, will suddenly unlock more exhilarating mysteries. There is a lust to the pursuit of books, especially spiritual and esoteric ones, which I have succumbed to often. For a voracious, ever curious reader, books are allegories of unfinished knowledge and incomplete wisdom. Books also embody a vision of nascent, unquantifiable inspiration. But it wasn’t until my conversion journey began — beginning with the nominative act of converting, itself, in front of loved ones, through spoken words wedded to sincere intentions, all guided by an overflowing heart — did I really realize all the pages of books act mainly as supplements to the experiences of one’s heart turning to a an unveiled Reality.

God, the turner of hearts, we say. Metanoia is another word for it. Tawba too.

As of the middle of this month, April, then, it’s been officially 5 years since I converted. What happened? A slowly building music of encounters and intimations. A daily beholding of small beauties, and some more capacious ones too. The books had, indeed, pointed or alluded to many of these disclosures. But not fully — and they were events I had to enter into, myself, without too much expectation. Was I planning on having those heart-turning experiences? Not really. They crept up on me or, in some cases, consumed me. I didn’t enter into them but let them wash over me, bathing in light beyond ordinary light, waters enfolding me from unseen oceans. In many cases, they were just everyday moments cast in a shuddering, otherworldly glow: sitting with others, sharing food, walking in the sunshine, donating money, holding a loved one close, getting ready for bed, cleaning up for the night. These were the moments that expressed truths that no writing could get close to conveying. All that the writing could do was point to those moments and say: here are the gifts we can’t quite say.

(And here we are, writing! Almost in homage to what can’t be said! Or what, being said, also asks for something more than speech.)

The books and the scholarship are integral to the Path. They bring so much insight, beauty, nuance, and wisdom. (And yes, I will likely die with a book or pen in my hand!) Indeed, a particular book, the Quran, is the beating, inexhaustible heart of the faith; its pages exist as a radiant distillation of divine speech that humans might conceivably process, be transformed by, and be guided by; the book, then, for millions of believers is further translated into their specific tongues. Even in translation, the meanings of the Arabic lines rustle as radiant fragments of the Absolute. Scriptural epiphany is central, as is textual translation, and these divinely charged words orient every prayer and supplication. So books are needed friends, anchors, allies.

Thus every Ramadan so far I’ve eagerly had some special books set aside, besides my translation of the Quran, to read and ponder, to sit with, to pray with, to let subside into me.

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To read as if I wasn’t reading, but letting myself go under:

To let myself be read by words, converted into the spaces that words yearn for.

Letting teachings sink in, like spoors, be breathed in through the mind’s body.

Let being a body imply a vast series of slow re-readings.

Sitting with and among the Subtle. Being slow with the Unhurried Source.

Letting study be a deliberate and slow subsiding of essences.

Allowing intellect inhale more deeply. Allowing the skin to breathe for the mind

During my Sufi school training, many teachings are transmitted and shared, and here are just a few from a separate course on Hazrat Inayat Khan’s collection of talks, In An Eastern Rose Garden. These teachings are reflected upon and added onto in one hour videos by his grandson, Pir Zia Inayat Khan. Through his thoughtful and poetic commentary on these chapters a few points stood out to me.

There are three connected chapters on “Freedom”, premised on the startling idea: “The human being pursues captivity and seeks freedom.”

It’s disarming to consider the meaning of this statement. On the one hand, it seems inarguable that many people do things and undertake actions that are contrary to their best interests. More broadly, we act as if our consciousness cannot accept something that, were we to accept it, might finally offer us a spaciousness that is, indeed, already integral to our natures. Being human then seems to involve a conditioned rejection of what we really are. There is a self-sabotaging desperation in our fear of death and decay. False freedoms emerge that we chase to take the place of a freedom we mistakenly think we do not have or that is contrary to our desires.

Freedom is a confusing idea. In the second of three talks on “Freedom,” he discusses how one word summarizes the reason for pain in the world: Limitation. He adds: “This limitation comes from a heavenly being turning into an earthly being (…) What one pursues, what one seeks after, is a feeling of freedom, and yet everyone pursues freedom wrongly.” One of the inevitable tragedies of life, then, from our mortal perspective is: “Freedom is lost in order to come to freedom.”

I feel this deeply, myself, in middle age, having found a path that makes the most comprehensive sense to me, specifically because it is so comprehensive and inclusive; and yet that very spiritual comprehensiveness helps me realize my dependent reliance on a deeper Reality that is both in this world and elsewhere, as well as my need to strip my life of unnecessary distractions and attachments. Our predicament then is engaged with through the practice of mutu qabla an tamutu, or to “Die before you die.”

He elaborates quite succinctly: “No one dies really. What dies is death; what lives is life. Life lives, death dies. Therefore, the art of the mystics is to learn how to play death. Call it meditation, call it contemplation, call it concentration, call it worship of God, it is all playing death.”

In another talk on “Spiritual Democracy,” a similarly startling concept serves as a springboard: Idealism. We must above all build and imagine communities from a spiritual ideal, he asserts, “for no nation without religion or spiritual ideal but only based on material lines, can suffice the needs of a world that seeks constant peace. However greatly people are developed or learned, and yet are not in touch with the spiritual point of view, they remain selfish. Their outlook on life is partial; their justice is self-made.”

Later, he begins a second talk on democracy with a provocative idea which would certainly unnerve and upset many: “In point of fact democracy is always spiritual, there cannot be a material democracy (…) As long as there is no spiritual light to guide one’s life, one does not know the real democracy.”

Later he bemoans how any true spiritual democracy has been stifled by limited thinking in terms of nationalism, tribes, and families: “When people become hardened in feeling, when their only interest is in the family or the nation, they do not go further, they are dead.” The aim of Sufism then is expansion of self among others, with the ideal of unity always in mind: it’s not that everyone become a member of the order, “but the ideal of the of its members is to invite humans to become members of humanity.”

What, then, is the deeper meaning of becoming a Sufi? He concludes the chapter with a compelling answer: “The Sufi idea is that in time one may arrive at that stage of understanding where one can hear the voice of God from all sources, all sides, all things, all beings. There is a saying of Sa’di: ‘Every leaf of the tree becomes as a page of the sacred book when the eyes are opened and the sight is keen.”

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We read from Ibn Arabi: “The Mystery of Destiny is one of the highest kinds of knowledge.”And also the most perplexing idea in general. It is in the shadows of this quandary I discuss a small part of the next book that is accompanying me into spring.

I’m loving Dissolving into Being, by William Rory Dickson for several reasons which I will further elaborate on in other posts. But for now I want to say that I admire his unique melding of scholarly insights with warm levity and experiential lyricism. This is embodied Sufi scholarship that is meant to be put into practice and tested and tried. The book itself is a generously lucid commentary on some significant chapters in Ibn Arabi’s immensely complex, metaphysical masterwork, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam. I recently read a translation of the book, but cannot begin to attempt any sort of reflection on it. Dickson’s words, now, will suffice.

I want to focus now on just a small part of Chapter 2 of Dissolving Into Being, “The Abrahamic Paradigm” which lucidly explores what is meant to be a baffling and even impenetrable mystery in Islamic mysticism: the mystery of destiny.

During my days learning the rudimentary elements of Islam, I stumbled a lot on this complex conception. The central paradox of destiny was hard to abide. There is the fact that humans are invested with freedom, hinging especially on the freedom in every moment to either serve and honor the Source of All, or to de-prioritize the Source and, instead, revere Life’s fleeting manifestations. From this moment-by-moment dilemma, immense complexities begin. Imbricating this freedom is the fact that God determines your Destiny and what you will choose. The best one can do is try to align one’s decisions with what one believes God wants. Indeed, one is asked to read the mind of God in every moment — which, in a sense, is what spiritual devotion implies, if by “reading the mind of God” we mean hearkening to God’s signs in every moment.

Thus one’s Destiny is still freely sculpted — and perhaps we need to consider that we are dealing with two kinds of freedom, the finite freedom we have and the infinite freedom God has. And it’s also possible that I misunderstood all of this. So, as we like to say, God knows best.

In this chapter, Dickson elaborates on how our Destiny is co-determined by us and the Creator. Existence and Essence are also essential concepts here. Neither concept exactly sits well with me. Perhaps the words feel too systematic, too orderly? But even so I can understand the questions that they are inspiring. What we are, essentially determines how our live will unfold. But, what are we, essentially? The word Essence is another stumbling block. For Essence seems to be discovered only by living our lives, even though this Essence, we can believe, pre-existed us in the mind of God.

Despite my issues with the vocabulary, this complexity I still find exhilarating, as it offers a rare opportunity to grasp one’s life as a co-creation involving not just one’s soul, but also one’s creator, as well as the spirits, influences, ancestors, and wisdom traditions in between. If Destiny is the ultimate mystery, it may also be the ultimate quest or adventure — and the most rarefied act of perpetual collaboration. Which is also an act of listening. If each moment conceals rustlings of our Essence, hints that are whispered by subtle energies and coiled within spiritual folds of matter and ambience, than we can resolutely aspire towards masterful, receptive presence.

But then, always, we find the dark questions: what of the destinies of children born with terminal illnesses? Of those killed in wars, genocides, senseless murders, preventable tragedies? Here, perhaps, is where Destiny’s collaborative, inter-relational nature is most poignant: these tragedies that cannot be made sensible or bearable ask us, then, to live our lives in ways that bear witness and tribute to those whose lives were cut short far too soon. But why us? And how?

Or as Thoreau so beautifully said in his journal:

“On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living - that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world."

Now this emphasis on how our destinies are intertwined is not specifically emphasized in Arabi and Dickson, at least I don’t think, but I believe the Sufi metaphysics leads to similar Thoreauvian conclusions.

Dickson for instance states:

“It follows that we determine our essence after the fact of existing, and we do this through our choices: we create ourselves through our ideas and the acts that follow them. This is the simultaneous thrill and burden, the joy and anguish, of human freedom.”

Of course his own understanding of this proceeds from Ibn Arabi’s more subtle theological grappling in the Fusus:

“So you nourish Him with your determinations and He nourishes you with existence. What can be said to be yours can be said to be His. The affair proceeds from Him to you and from you to Him. However, you are responsible, and He only makes you responsible due to your request, “assign me responsibility, which you spoke through the state of what you really are.’”

The fact that we have requested being assigned the responsibility of freedom and destiny is a moving notion. This entails a spiritual maturity hidden deeply inside of our hearts. I also believe it resonates with the Quranic conception of how the earthly nonhuman world declined the Trust of worldly stewardship but humans took it on, despite our ineptitude and heedlessness. It is up to us to prove worthy of the Trust, and to our existential responsibilities, sculpting our destinies in the process. Years ago, I recall writing in a journal that true peace comes when “our responsibilities bring us relief.” At the time, I didn’t think of responsibilities as good things, exactly. But here there is a vision of shouldering our tasks, no matter how menial, within the illuminative and empowering rays of Divinity. The work is hard, still but it is work that is shared with Eternity.

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I also reflect on Destiny in terms of how our lives are complicated by injustice and the ways we fight against injustice. Systems of oppression are designed to thwart and limit people’s lives.

So how do you fulfill the promise of your essence within predatory systems likes ours?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been teaching persuasive writing to my students. We began with excerpts from Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl in which he makes a compelling argument that destiny may have a lot to do with how we imagine our lives unfolding. This imagination of our lives must refuse to be determined by the conditions that we find ourselves in. Not just imagining, then, but strongly, willfully almost magically visualizing our preferred life trajectories, almost as prophecies. He was able to imagine himself surviving the Nazi death camps and then publishing his book, both of which he did. Of course, positive visualization will not guarantee that you survive what for most people is unendurable. But that having a vision of your life, rooted in what you feel must be your Essence, is one way to sculpt your destiny in defiance, too, of oppressive contexts. It feeds the destiny-instinct, one might say.

True imagination is always an enemy of the oppressor.

The problem is that oppressors are everywhere.

Then there is someone like Malcolm X who felt keenly all of his life that he wouldn’t live long and who was simultaneously unafraid of death or the possible consequences of speaking out for justice. His violent death at 39, then, almost seemed “destined” based on his own words; and yet such a death at such a young age, and right when he had undergone another profound conversion, is also a betrayal of his destiny. Really, the very worlds he lived in betrayed him. His destiny, in this sense was not one for him to sculpt; it was imposed upon him by oppression and injustice. This induces unreassuring questions, certainly.

But they also make us reflect on how our individual imaginations and our visions of freedom and justice — themselves the products of how we imagine our interconnected lives — need to be forces that reshape and refine our social norms and contexts. We cannot really honor our own destiny unless we honor it in others. Similarly, we cannot realize our Essence, per se, without other people. Finally, we understand that the fight for justice, which is really the constant fight for the perpetually postponed destiny of all oppressed communities, is a fight that entails dangerous, life-threatening risks. If our lives are cut short while fighting selflessly for justice, then have we fulfilled our destiny? We can’t know, really. A better question is: have we done what’s right?

I am troubled by these questions and considerations for many reasons. For one, life is chaotic and messy. For another, all our lives are over-determined by power structures and capitalism. Aside from considerations of oppression affecting the qualities and durations of people’s lives, I also think about how destiny often conjures up “meaningful occupations,” in the sense of “what we do” or “what our work is.” So much work now is undertaken simply to make money: is this really any indication of destiny? According to Dickson, the word “qadar” or Destiny, Divine Decree, “contains meanings of power, ability, and determination.’ The word “destiny,” then is maybe not the best translation of the word, and, more pointedly, maybe our destiny, as such, cannot really be apprehended outside of a spiritual context. One’s destiny within a secular-capitalist framework is an entirely different concept. I don’t know. More on this another time. In following posts, I will return to other parts of Dickson’s book.

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A Compact, Prismatic Tale

My own beginner, heart-guided views on Hadith as spiritual guidance is to first read the Hadith and see how if it correlates with Quranic-Sufi injunctions to love, mercy, beauty, and justice; to see who is citing the Hadith and in what context; to check to see if the Hadith has commentaries on it by Sufi luminaries; and then to check to see how “sound” the Hadith is in terms of its transmission and authenticity. The last part though often seems superfluous if the other parts are robustly affirmed. I am not even remotely grounded in the nuances of the Hadith sciences, so this is my amateur heart-centered method. Do not consult me if you want expertise in these areas. There are ample resources out there. That being said, a rather scholarly writer online alerted me to the existence of the beautiful and spiritually rich collection, Spiritual Teachings of the Prophet: Hadith with Commentaries by Saints and Sages of Islam.

I also love the Hadith + commentary genre in a literary sense too.

For I appreciate how a very compact narrative or aphorism can yield layers of conceptual resonances and semantic hues. There is a magic to this ramifying nature of a succinct, semantically-charged story. Once you hear it told a number of times and also read and reread the commentaries on it, the story accrues layers of radiance and color, much like a poem or prayer. It ceases to be just an act of communication and more of a transmission. Or even a talisman. Here are a few from this book, with some commentary that accompanied me through Ramadan and now beyond:

page 14, Hadith 12: “Verily God — exalted by He — has decreed simplicity for this community and He detests difficulty for it.”

In the commentary, the author mentions that such simplicity implies, “a quest for the qualitative and not the quantitative.” He also quotes Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī: “Sufism is but five prayers and awaiting death” with an added footnote in which, after quoting this line, Ibn Arabi adds: “There is an immense science in this.”

There is some unintentional (yet quite appreciated, LOL) dark humor here, at least how I see it; but also a sobering vision of how to live a qualitatively charged and intensely present and sacramental life. Great simplicity yields great complexity.

page 35, Hadith 29: “Verily, every thing has a reality: the servant does not attain the reality of faith without understanding that that which has befallen him was inevitable and that which he did not go through could no befall him.”

The commentary for this Hadith riffs on al-Ghazzali’s reflections on patience (sabr) and gratitude (shukr) being the two halves of faith. Before I discovered Islam, it had never occurred to me how these seemingly simple ideas can be such sustaining pillars in one’s life through all that life brings.

page 39, Hadith 31: “Worship God as if you see Him, and count your ego amongst the dead, and beware the supplication of the oppressed.”

I like the comprehensiveness of this Hadith as it combines the idea of ihsan (worshipping God as if you see Him), fana (the annihilation of the ego), and the Quranic injunction to stand for the oppressed. In some ways, it’s a concise summary of the whole Sufi path.

page 43, Hadith 33: “When a servant is given a spiritual opening during a supplication, he should pray to his Lord, for then he shall be answered.”

The commentary here provided by Shaykh al-Darqawi, emphasizes the inherent indigence of the human condition, which might be construed as a negative condition, but is actually the precondition for Divine Generosity. Our “intense neediness” becomes a portal to answered payers. Staying spiritually needy creates a spaciousness that can be filled by abundances beyond the human and earthly. Of course, the problem is our spiritual neediness is often veiled by our earthly neediness.

page 62, Hadith 45: “I recommend for you nostalgic sadness, for it is the key of the heart: leave your egos hungry and thirsty.”

As I advance into middle age, it seems nostalgia can be inevitable and it is a concept that certainly haunts a lot of my creative work. I’m already something of a romantic artistic idealist so nostalgia is an old friend (frenemy?) However, I always believe that there are different kinds of nostalgia, and even various kinds of melancholy that can give rise to a fuller, more fulfilled life. A paradox, yes, but that is the nature of the path, too. A nostalgia for divinity, I believe, is the foundational feeling in my life that underlies everything else, too. It’s a bittersweet yearning that can orient you in all moments.

page 110, Hadith 78: “Wisdom is divided into ten parts, nine of which are associated with solitude, and one with silence.”

page 161, Hadith 114: “Every person will be resurrected in the state in which death caught him.”

The most daunting theological questions for me, in any possible faith, are ones to do with death and the afterlife. In my early studies of the teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan, I recollected an emphasis on how our minds and hearts are building an “afterlife” now. In short, our destinies also involve how we “live” after this earthly life. Whether this also means “resurrection” is another mystery I have not had time to sit with, yet. And whether or not “living” means the same thing after death than it does now.

(I had to trace back the memory of reading about how we create the Afterlife and I found it in the book Immortality by Pir Zia Inayat Khan, in which each chapter is a quote from his grandfather, Hazrat Inayat Khan, followed by a commentary by Pir Zia, and then an exercise he recommends. It remains one of the most heart-expanding spiritual texts I’ve ever read precisely because it is both so poetic and so practical. It is a a book that makes you act and put ideas into practice.

And just now I found the passage. Here’s a part of the quote from Hazrat Inayat Khan: “This is the kingdom that the soul has made while on earth, as a bird builds its nest to stay there during the autumn. This is the autumn of the soul, which is the hereafter. It passes this autumn in the world that it has made either agreeable or disagreeable to itself.”

Here’s the commentary by Pir Zia: “The world we are due to enter through the door of death is by no means an alien world. On the contrary, it is a deeply familiar place, because it is the condition of our own mind. It harbors everything we’ve ever imagined, and its most prominent monuments and landmarks follow the lines of thought that have most often occupied our earthly minds. The hereafter reproduces the measure of loveliness we have gathered in our hearts in this world.”

The exercise: “Continually ask yourself: ‘What do I wish to bring home?’ Recognize that every act of imagination and attention leaves an imprint on the landscape that will one day be your personal habitat — and indeed, deep down, already is.”)

This is such a beautiful, timeless question that needs no further commentary.

page 174, Hadith 121: “God, the Mighty and the Majestic has said: ‘I am with My servant’s opinion of Me: If he thinks that I will act in his favor, that will benefit him, and if he thinks that I act to his detriment, that will be detrimental to him.”

I feel this is a favorite of Ibn Arabi and will be explored more in depth in Dissolving Into Being by Dickson. I will return to it later, but for now I affirm there is an intimate reassurance in this Hadith, as well as an injunction to a kind of wise, tough optimism. Even a “tragic optimism” as Victor Frankl called it.

page 278, Hadith 195: “Many a person with disheveled hair and covered with dust is turned away from the doors. They have only to adjure to God, and He answers them.”

In all things, I seek and fight for inclusion and compassion for the most alienated, marginalized, and oppressed, and this message of radical inclusion was (and remains) at the very heart of the path I am on. And it’s the part that most powerfully keeps me going, above and beyond everything else.

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Three more companions….

Since I was a teenager and stumbled on a William Blake tarot deck in a used bookstore in San Diego, I’ve been fascinated by tarot cards. Not so much the “fortune telling” aspect of cards, as the richly meditative experiences they offer. The idea of the oracular image or the hermetic object; that images and pictures offer clues, suggestions, and guidance that cannot be exhausted. The closest word is “suggestiveness” — an inherent, magical subtlety that you can refer to, time and again. Over the last year I’ve explored a deck devised by one of my teachers and guides in the Inayatiyya, Ayeda Husain. I had some initial difficulties with the deck but have grown to cherish it in deeply personal ways. It’s helped me grasp the poetics of the path I will always be a beginner on.

Using this deck has helped me better understand and put into action 1500 year old Sufi ideas and symbols. The whole Sufi tradition is replete with concrete images, allegories, stories, heroes, prophets and prophetesses, sacred places, and all manner of imagery. Indeed, my initial feelings of reading my first translation of the Quran was that it was suffused with images, specific animals, plants, people, places. Very little is abstract. The metaphysics paints pictures in your heart. The spiritual vitality is rooted in earth and cosmos, body and entity.

The cards above are ones that seemed to turn up a lot for me during regular Sunday card pulls over the last year.

I appreciate that the card called Temperance in the original tarot deck is here called Sabr, which suggest, among other things, Patience. And this patience is one of the spiritual wings that each person is compelled to nurture. Another word for it is “forbearance,” which is word I didn’t really know exactly until my studies of Islam. While the word temperance has powerful implications on its own, the depth and range of what Sabr صَبْرٌ implies in Sufism feels even more powerful.

(The Angel of Temperance has meant a lot to me ever since I kept pulling this card during a particularly dark time of my life in Las Vegas. Dark as in….violence, sickness, heartbreak, poison, infestations, suicides, mass murder, a community in grief….A long story for another time. But some tarot cards that were given to me at that time became structural supports as I passed through that particularly tumultuous period.)

Among these representative cards above I’m also drawn to the Moon and the 2 and 3 of Staffs cards. The Moon reminds me of the other aspects of living in the desert, which is the state of being subjected to strange, celestial and nonhuman energies and influences. Many nights I ran the streets of the small desert town I lived in, small bats fluttering near my head and the sidewalk often the stages for the idylls of small blond scorpions. At the time I was learning to write poetry and also learning how to teach. It was all new, it all felt both intimidating and transformational. Everything I had once known was being questioned and I was asked to reprioritize my desires. A sense of being plunged into a perpetual, bewildering subconscious state as of crawling dunes under moonlight. As Husain writes in her tarot guidebook, “When this card appears for you, you are being asked to transform your heart into an empty cup. You are being led to the Divine quality of Mubin, or clarity within yourself (…) How can you open yourself to the Universe’s light-filled gifts?”I want to write a longer appreciation of this deck as I use it more. I’m also grateful to receive her teachings in other contexts too, through my apprenticeship in the Inayatiyya.

My last companion is an ancestral harbinger of sorts. I’ve been thinking about her and had a few dreams about her and she will help undertake a new project soon. Her name is Isabelle Eberhardt. Here is a biography of her I tracked down for my to-read stack.

And here is Isabelle, the young Sufi aspirant, at age 18.

What is Isabelle helping me with? A project called Estranged Majesties. Or something like that. More soon.

Finally, I’ve been getting more into contemporary ambient music, especially of a certain mystical bent. Here’s a new composition I recommend by a very talented artist, Jessica Moss. Here’s her Bandcamp page. I recommend lying down in a dark room, turning this song on and listening to it all the way through. It’s a benediction.

Dear Unknown Friend,

Bismillah Ir-Rahman Ir-Raheem.

The moon is a thinning arc again, so fresh nostalgia grows. How quickly goes the subtle magic. I’m writing on colored scrap paper by low light, from inside the last nights of Ramadan. Faintly, the wind brings flowers over the sea. A salt haze protects us from the sun. The word “heat” now implies “catastrophe.” As a counter-argument, night suggests ocean. And where there’s water there’s guidance.

Springtime doesn’t just arrive anymore: it lies concealed under anguish — which has no season, is all seasons. How do we revive spring? This is the work that the late winter moon asks of us. Green torchlight on busted pavement with the sound of wings in your head. Rustlings from the parking garage. Preparing hot plates of beans, kale, fish, berries, nuts, and rice — and then tearful invocations and verbal seedlings tossed into the shadows. The angelic is a dark tonic that lingers in the wind that shakes the palms. When I saw the waxing crescent over the bay that first night, so many prayers ago, I felt a jolt of initiatory joy. Here we get to begin a mystery, again.

We hang from this sliver. Then leap into and out of the other time-sea.

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Maybe the only mystery is that each day is an inimitable painting whose colors and shapes too quickly bleed away. Time feels contrary to yearning. Finitude is uninhabitable. Yet moon rhythmically guides the hours and winds and waves. We scarcely witness. Our profit talk fogs vision. Mind claims to acknowledge change and duration, but only when it’s too late. Even what’s too late will tend to feel right on time, so misaligned is mind.

When I resumed these letters haltingly, a third of Ramadan had elapsed, and now we have only a handful of nights left. (Actually maybe only one.) And the night of power or glory is at hand. Or was at hand. Or is pending. Not quite sure. A night I don’t claim to understand but am prepared to listen to until dawn if I must. However, a new friend the other morning made it make more sense: in this night we glimpse the deepest, most primordial foundations of Being. Therein, in that dark vigil, a rare vision of ourselves is given, is beheld, is translated. For the word is power or it is might or it is destiny. When many people ask me about Ramadan, although few do, I want to say: imagine 30 days when you’re holding vigil via varied means of visionary practice in embodied memory of an eruption from the Unseen that changed all of human history. Imagine living that story every day and night until it changes you.

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My forehead touching the floor elevates my heart over my brain — but the brain thinks it knows too much. The blessings of the month hit a wall the other night: I was reflecting on my particular hangups that spiritual work can unforgivingly uncover. What is holding me back? What keeps me second guessing? I was also trying to acknowledge the endless destruction and killing that our country bases its identity on. What to say that isn’t already being screamed. I don’t know or can begin to.

The difficult life is what we have to work with. As a seeker and a convert, it’s also that I’m constantly aspiring to belief, perpetually turning in faith’s direction. One vision of faith is that among or between struggles, we will find oases of ease. Along the irregular paths of strife, we will have alchemical bouts of change. We will commit to adventures that help us realize unforeseen beauties. Love and Mercy are constantly shaping us if we are present to them, even partially. Which is all we ever are anyway: partial wakers, incomplete witnesses.

Love? Mercy? Not so though with these new/resumed wars, here and abroad. I can’t speak for those immediately affected; but, inshallah, I can listen and amplify, share what I learn of directed rage, develop new strategies, grieve with others, learn to organize, be present and make peace and spaciousness for others. My heart hurts for my friends and teachers and guides who all are personally affected by these wars. And then I’m angry with them. For the larger ideological life that has enveloped me since I was a young boy has always been of my country and its allies, so self-congratulatory and complacent and “enlightened,” bombing places where individuals who don’t appear to resemble me live, love, dream, suffer, hope, and struggle. Processing these wars for so long, thinking it the just course of business, believing it mostly background for my flourishing. This inexhaustible ammunition that gives us our sense of being. The countless displaced peoples that give us our sense of place. The disposability of other lives enshrined in what it means to live here. Old news, yes, Old horror reinstated, too easily swallowed. But the rage always young.

So I try what prayer has taught me, having failed in other ways: imploring as a life poetics. Supplicating, entreating, appealing, enjoining. I keep imploring the nonhuman to forgive us. The light. The wind. The trees. But also: The children. My students. Some imaginable future-unfolding. Some more breathable present. Cosmos, beloved mirror of Original Mercy, forgive us. In asking for forgiveness, I must make my life, at each moment, forgivable. What can our turning back to the source teach us, too, about repentance as resistance?

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After we break fast, it’s good to look at the night sky. Thereby I apprehend the stars that haunt and compose me. They are there, above, when we take our little break: small, winking insignias we can barely discern.

And they are there in the prayers that shake my diaphragm.

And the prostrations that let blood awaken repose in the skull.

The non-human inside of this middle-aged life, older than all the stories I’ve borrowed. A specter of a cosmic child, suppressed under systems. All these categories dissolve. This personality is a fog of possessiveness and flailing. Finally dissipating.

Forgive yourself by losing it. (Your only death will thank you.)

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The paradoxical life is what is lived under the Ramadan moon. Gratefully I feel that this is the most meaningful Ramadan I’ve ever had. Nothing much eventful, outwardly, in my life has occurred. But a complex peace has suffused me in ways I’ve never felt in previous Ramadans.

Why complex? Because sometimes finding peace means learning to mourn again. Sometimes it means learning to fight for what you love with more embodied agency. Fighting, too, means refusing to lose your ancient green center to the circus of outer stimuli. Ramadan emphasizes that so much we have made and systemized in this world is spectacle and threat, poison and trap, depravity and disorientation. Granted, Ramadan also teaches us to bear witness to all of that multiplicity as aspects of the Divine. There can be illuminating mirrors anywhere. And there is magic in knowing how to bathe in their reflections.

Just as often, peace means laughing joyfully with the gifts of your own diminishment.

Yet peace means more. She is a sword of defiance, too. It also means a deepening confidence, not just in myself, but in how what I was and am — this unique, individual, though interpersonal universe—communes more seamlessly with others, all kinds of others, and in beneficial ways. There is more I could say about that. In this flowering of notes, I am more interested, for the time being, in how all that I love acquires added meanings thanks to the epiphanic lights of this holy month.

A soft, silver light of mercy, especially. The merciful is inclusive and accommodating; the merciful is the soul of the imagination. I will try to elaborate more another long night. Yours, M.

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Dear Unnamed Visitor,

I should always be expecting you. Metaphysical etiquette instructs us.

This sacred time envelops in simple disguises.

An excess of illumination disguised in silence and inaction.

What one might see as just an empty corner with an empty stomach resting in it.

What impresses upon one from that corner, after a awhile, is the luminosity of cosmic gardens. They are there, just not at first glance, or even second or third. Budding latencies, hatched complexities. As you attend with senses, some hollowed out and muted while others heightened, and then beyond senses: the room’s other layers open.

I think about rooms and what they could bring forth, like flowers, all the time.

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Distinctions become more precise and crystalline, not as rigid barriers but as loci of guidance. Choosing an empty stomach and a parched throat when filling and quenching them, respectively, are options is distinct from being involuntarily hungry and thirsty because you have no choice. Choosing to bring to life the hidden vitality of a dark corner is different from not choosing such a corner or its secrets. I want my intentions and drives to be an open poetics that I refine with others. Interdependent imperatives. What you can’t choose, perhaps my choosing can open up for you; what neither of us can choose, our ambiguities will disclose new possibilities. May we all fall into open paths of chosen guidance — and may our choosing carve light in both directions. A community is a convergence of intentions and a weaving of destinies with the breaths of human universes. Breathing intentionally while deciding on beautiful experiments together makes God more real.

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Speaking of making God more real: I stand among my students talking to them about folklore and how the first stories emerged from drawings of animals inside a cave. I am perhaps being simplistic because of limited time. They sense my energy even though I’m hungry. They sense my compassionate rawness, they are reassured by my tired smiles, but also my patience, which they also suspect is performative, ha! There is a big misconception about what performativity is, though, but I’ll save that for another time. (One thing that it is not is insincere and superficial.) The hunger makes my words seem more truthful and weighted.

We grow attuned to the fortifying powers of the Imaginary. I insist on the visionary capacities that we are born with. What’s left when all is gone? I warn them that if the Big F.U. System (Rich, White, Hetero-patriarchal Male Narcissists in Charge of the World) takes away their Imagination then they really are in trouble. More than we already are. The Imagination is our wellspring of resistance and liberation. I’ll stop now and drink more water. Always, M.

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To my Heart’s Intention,

All that I love is a lot, it’s true. Many concrete and theoretical and hesitant and misunderstood and precious wellsprings persist that my Love returns to. A new discovery is an old source. A just uncovered vista is a recollected fable. Love disrupts sequencing and introduces the resonance of montage. While I hate these unseasonable winter heat waves, at night when the city has exhaled all the day’s solar tensions and all surfaces grow softer and cooler, I breathe in an unbelievable perfume of tilled earth, floating jasmine, churned sea foam, oak and pine bark, and all manner of wet, respiring, sun-fed foliage. It’s a nocturnal and coastal spring smell that brings me immediately back to long, exalted walks as a child, looking for amazing rocks by the lake. And sensing, for the first time, that the very atmosphere that envelops my body, itself, might be alchemical.

It’s blessed to love a lot and mess with ordering so much, too. Time has actually been telling us this all along. So has the moon.

But in loving we get confused about having, too — and then gratitude starts to slip. Possessiveness is the source of evil, I suspect. Reality knows. Stewardship is the renewable source of goodness, we must believe. What I love most of all, I think/I hope, is my faith in Reality that I am building, later in life than I may have preferred. A faith that I pray never to diminish. What do I mean by this faith? I’m reaching in that direction: perhaps, the faith that I can meet Reality with an open heart whatever it brings forth. For what it brings forth, I want to believe, is always reconciled to the tenor of my heart. It’s hard to really be precise about what a heart is capable of or what its shape is. Reality helps us paint that picture, enter that unbounded image.

Faithfulness to Reality, or God, or The Truth, however we call Her, enables one to help that Reality share and disclose itself more generously. The eye of the heart widens and dilates as creation ramifies and unfurls. Witnessing as creating. Believing as expanding. Attending as disclosing. Reality is beyond all that is authoritatively deemed real. We must think of wilder ways to be “realistic.”

Help me! I want what we discover as real to be larger and more inclusive and wilder that what those with power over us claim to be real. (Relatedly: I’ve started, slowly, a lifetime study of Ibn 'Arabī so bear with me. I don’t speak of his thought here directly but it colors everything I’m trying to convey. Two of my guides on this newish journey of Akbarian apprenticeship are the incomparable Filip Holm and the wonderful Studio of Meaning. Blessings to them both!) Goodnight for now, M.

Dear lost love,

Scribbling in half-light smelling of slime. Dawn walks with a friend, by the waterfront next to the airport, a Ramadan tradition. Improbable hues of morning’s calm river. Into these sacred minutes, so much hope is poured amidst so much hopelessness. We keep wondering about the RVs parked by the runway: something that looks so haphazard and improvised next to something so intimidating and official.

I want to meditate on how Ramadan is a visionary container of hours unlike anything in other traditions that I know. Whether one celebrates it or not, learning about it might inspire a transformed way of looking at the passing hours and their hidden and apparent gifts. Yet, still, we know these hours elapse in times of systemic desecration.

Unavoidable life under pre-dawn moonlight: patches of eerie moss. Car alarms while praying. News scrolling while fantasizing about the taste of coconuts. And the shockingly large red roaches cooling off on the sidewalk by the Jack In The Box, and the underground creeks, dimly sensed.

Something about this moonlight after breaking fast with lemon water and dates and grapes, we always feel that nearness of streams and wells. Somewhere, coming closer, expectant, another lifeworld to slip into.

Love, M.

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Dear Unforgotten Traveller,

The days of holy wayfaring feel reduced by the constrictions of power and economics.

Somewhere, neither too close nor too remote, you’ll always be moving towards an evening’s encampment with rucksack, bells, and staff, a hat or beanie atop your moonlit head. Your motions are imperceptible and beguiling and disorienting at once. You will also have a pocket knife, diary, bandanna, prayer beads, coin purse, and lantern. Sometimes you will lose most of these things except for whatever fragrance you acquire between bonfires and sleeps. Edges, plateaux, and middles of places will yield wisdom for you. Haggard but glowing, you drift from station to station, some hidden, others obvious, perpetuating the Quest that remains nameless.

A life can change for the better because of a bold leap of the imagination.

You showed me what that looks like in a dark plaza as plaintive horns played.

This is also congruent with what the Real is showing.

All 50 of these Companion Moon pieces (including this amalgamated one) I’ve written over the last couple years pivot on the vision that the unbounded imaginative life-force, our creaturely birthright, finds the most adamant support in heart-centered, holistic spiritual paths, like Islam, and especially its own ancient heart, Sufism. And as well other animist-leaning, earth-centered, non-dualistic traditions that I and my Sufi friends are in conversation and collaboration with.

Art-talk and God-talk, together, can trouble some hearts, due to our conditioning.

Certain religious readers might get confused when I tell a story from the Islamic Tradition, like about Imam Ali (PBUH), for example, in dialogue with metal music or a surrealist horror film. Certain other readers, lovers of all kinds of experimental or avant-garde art and music, might bristle when I put these defiant forms into conversation with Sufi prayer, reflections on fasting, or stories of the Prophet and his Companions. My hope is to demonstrate that these dialogues are dynamic and love-driven, and in service to Reality (the multiplicity-in-unity). Moreover, faithful to Reality’s inherent creativity, I also believe that they expand the possibilities of the interconnected and collaborative spiritual and imaginative life. This feels like the only life worth fighting for.

Art and nature are soul’s double-home. But I try to avoid an uncritical celebration of art as a slew of seductive artifacts and affects to be provoked by, and outsized personas tirelessly curated to promote “art”; rather, I aspire to a vision of the Imaginal as primordial womb, ever returnable and generative; a wellspring of potentialities for the better, more beautiful, more complete life, individually and collectively — and with all other forms of life. I always start with the imaginal experiments of those that Power forgets. That Power tramples and silences. But that the Divine most tenderly remembers and holds.

The marginalized and the powerless are the ones who are walking THE saintly path, whether they themselves call it that or not. Indeed, these were the first Sufis, too: the People of the Bench, who were the unhoused and indigent wanderers who sought shelter and sacred repose in the first masjid. Such wild saintliness expands outward to repair our ailing social contexts. What does apparent powerlessness do when it changes the shape of a group of people or beings? It enables that group to become more merciful; it makes its spaces more accommodating. It demolishes hierarchies. It undermines superiority ideologies. It attempts to identify and purge the micro-fascisms inside all of us. It creates a non-possessive spaciousness akin to the breath of spring over a meadow.

Saintly art misfits, of course, includes many writers and artists and filmmakers who have wrestled with the chaos and evil of our times. (It also means single mothers and bus drivers, cooks and junkyard custodians, alchemists and activists, etc.) They must be included in conversations about the spiritual life, and especially if someone with “authority” claims they shouldn’t be. All that human and earthly power seems to do, as we have seen, is take the mercy out of everything.

But we can never take mercy out of Primal Mercy: this is one premise of the path.

Mercy is still mysterious, of course. One day there might be nobody else to break bread with except the wind whose fragrance will retain just the smallest chain of remembrances.

There you will find you. Thank you for always being in that wind, M.

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To My Future Reader,

Late nights in dim rooms, record breaking heat waves pending, all I’m holding on to are images from the sacred traditions. I can think of no more pleasantly bracing shock than dunking your feet in night-cold creek water. This is how it feels when these images arise after prayer. How is it that I can feel so vividly, so sensorially, just in my mind’s eye? Prayer and hunger might be one reason. Last night’s visit to the urban garden-mosque, whose magic I can’t describe now but which will have to wait until Eid, did make me taste an image of creation. This is the image I can give you:

A thousand distinct hands, each grasping their own heraldic tools — each unique hand, wedded to its singular tool, helping to carve out a place of sanctuary and contemplation— each finger serves a unique galaxy of melodious color — each tool borrows its shape from the oldest parables — a kaleidoscopic symphony of fusing and amalgamating and harmonizing — in service to the mosaic of Salam and Sakina.

A gardener’s poetics. A salvager’s craft. The open warehouse studio of creation.

Not without tension, rigor, friction.

Conversation salvages.

I bring art and poetry and stories, from other traditions, into this Sufi path, as is only reasonable and beautiful. Thinking Ramadan askance, I’m turning to literature that has sustained me with its askew beauty and dreamlike subtleties. Stories constructed around mysterious encounters or quests, featuring characters of companionable strangeness. In those unique literary shapes, I’m witnessing divine disclosures that have always been there, but now feel particularly radiant. A dark radiance, to be fair.

I consult some short story writers and some specific stories by them that all have the fragrance of unveiling. As far as I know, I don’t think any of the writers identify as being spiritual or religious. But like the characters in the stories that they write, the seeker in sacred time, like Ramadan, is holding moment-by-moment vigil for outpourings of Reality. Epiphanies latent in springs coiled in the most ordinary interactions, or woven discreetly through the compartments and boxes of capitalist life. Or, most movingly, in surprising acts of generosity and love, without which life would most certainly be impossible.

These are letters of associative blessings in sacred time capsules.

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Ramadan is a living allegory for the rupturing of norms.

For the overturning of power structures and superiority myths.

For the dethroning of destructive appetite tyrants and fantasy idols.

So are the stories I turn to and reread anew.

Ramadan embodies a parable of epiphanic encounter and angelic reassurance amidst the indignities of human strife.

To sense, or even feel, an angelic presence streaming some kind of blessings into our lives is a gift of the spiritual imagination. We are falling into our faith as into a marsh of cool starlight veiled by old oaks.

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But first a motif: “another world.” No other simple phrase conjures up the homesick yearning that those of us in both artistic and spiritual worlds constantly feel. But I want to start with that feeling of living in a “world” that is imagined differently from more dominant worlds. Something out of step with others in how I attend and prioritize; in what I choose to see and respond to and pause and tarry for; what inspires me; what galvanizes me. This “other” world could simply be one constructed on rules of virtue and love that run up against the rules of self-interest and productivity of our capitalist world. For instance the world implied in this Sufi sheikh’s final sermon.

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In sacred time, another world briefly holds us.

Letting the sacred month take you into its tides is imagining that the days need not blur into each other, that each minute possesses sacramental import. Surrendering to sacralized spacetime is seeing that time units are not defined by their utility or efficiency; and that any portion of earth, at all, becomes sanctified through breath, prayer, invocation, presence. And through the greenness and primordiality that our rites are responding to.

Mercifully we see that work and delight need not be opposed. They need not be labelled, either. We realize that more elemental, spiritual, and cosmic criteria are what really structure our hours. We discover that there are other kinds of practices that don’t fit into recognizable categories. More ancient ones. These actions often do not yield any quantifiable or measurable outcome. Reflection, for example. Prayer. Meditation. Contemplation. Conversation. Basking. Sohbet. We learn, too, that concepts of balance and harmony are not really human conceptions, but cosmic and nonhuman ones; if we heed them, it’s because we are willing to exceed our categories for the sake of a greater, wilder Good. If we are fortunate, we also realize that deprivation, inaction, silence, stillness, ritual, and inwardness, can often be more meaningful and fruitful than multitasking, sociability, stimulation, consumption, entertainment.

Let what we do in sacred time appear strange or purposeless to whoever is conditioned to perceive it that way.

What comes after every moment is the one hidden in the moment before.

Love, M.

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Dear Unknown Companion,

Secrecy is exulted on this path. And its sister, Subtlety. These become favorite incantations:“May Her Secret Be Sanctified.” “Lord, keep me Subtle.” Although I think I coined that one.

Ramadan can teach us the power of the Hidden, of the Secret. This is perhaps the greatest gift. For what is hidden implies a potential opening - a word that carries so much power in this path. Al-Fatiha. The opening might disclose some of the Secret but there is always a reserve of what is concealed. An essential mercy-mystery unreachable, for now, from which the light that feeds our hearts pours.

I haven’t learned much, myself, except from the examples of the powerless and the oppressed whose taqwa or God-consciousness and sense of awe in the face of oppression is the exemplary artistry of humanity. The stories of these saints fill lifetimes. The Sufi-Mystic-Muslim world I’ve been absorbed in, more so, this last year is one full of tales, vignettes, parables, aphorisms, glimpses, fables, and signs. They all bring me back to some of the fiction I love the most — stories of worlds concealed in the mundane and of moments that slip through the mesh of surveillance and management and quantification, just like Muhammad’s (PBUH) epiphany in the cave.

Of these stories, worldly, strange, and sacred ones, I aspire to create webs and linkages. All storytelling circulates through letters like these,

Read deep, and in between, M.

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Dear Brash Forest Dweller,

Nature is the knower and we are the Unknowing.

But we are always placed in a larger context of latent knowledge. The city yearns for ruins left alone and undeveloped long enough to sprout again. So the land awaits for us to be in conversation with its broken and neglected places. Some beautiful people hearken to the wind-whispers of vacant lots. They attend to the moss in the wake of leveled office complexes. They remember the unceasing forest as their hands begin to move life from the invisible into the sensory realm. Such knowing is through guiding potential beauty into sensible, tactile shape.

In the book Marcovaldo or The seasons in the city by Italo Calvino we are treated to little vignettes about city life and a man’s attempts to wrest joy from the humdrum, work-and-family dominated days of his life. For the hero, every day offers a few scarce openings into another realm of living, being, and imagining. But always something tragicomically occurs to impede or sabotage his micro-dreams. Of course, no story worth hearing is without the tragic element. Rereading this book in Ramadan has been insightful because I can see how Calvino’s ability to show us the subtle epiphanies in the life of the hero resonates with the mystic’s efforts to respond to divine signs amidst the daily task list. The mystic is the one who appears to waste time, to be unproductive, when in reality she is wresting the most light and beauty from each moment. I have reasoned during these almost 29 nights that artist, teacher, mystic, scholar are all entangled and united; they are all drinking ancient sustenance from the same source. But for now, the beginnings of some epiphanic stories I might teach my students.

The humor in Calvino is both light and incredibly melancholic at the same time, an almost effervescent bittersweetness that characterizes a certain romantic temperament. His stories always bring me back to times that feel somehow suspended or prone to rupture or upheaval.

(I return, often, in my memory and imagination, or some hybrid of both — what can this word be? — to the early days of the pandemic. Remembering that time as someone who was blessed not to undergo or witness the most harrowing aspects of it. Instead I look back and see myself mostly as a witness to strangeness/estrangement and occasional chronicler of it. My remembering isn’t nostalgic; instead, it’s curious, inquisitive, even awe-struck. Of revisiting, almost like a detective, a threshold that seems to also define everything that came after it, while also feeling unfinished and unresolved. During the quarantine months, seeing the empty freeways, getting curbside pickup (wondering if that phrase existed before the pandemic), people being able to drink alcohol in public parks, and also for a while being outside as much as possible, sitting on little patches of grass under trees. To be there, at that time, in those conditions, meant claiming those patches as temporary sanctuaries or outposts. Despite their tawdry nature, they began to acquire world-substantial properties. It was then too I thought of a story in Marcovaldo called “Park Bench Vacation.” A story about small, inconsequential fantasy of sanctuary. But in an almost absurd sense: a man dreaming of a particular park bench he wants to spend one night sleeping on to escape his mundane life.

Choosing park benches and little plots of grass: early memories of Ramadan.

Seeing the world as containing all manner of harborinng microcosms, M.

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Dear M,

Dreams: the word-idea we always reiterate.

As if it needed to be put on the table again for analysis and observation.

But the dream is observing us.

The dreams change in sacral time. Like the ancients with their oneiromancy, we incubate our dreams with incantations and prayers, with breath and music, with silence and reverberating stillness. The Reality of all, facing all possible directions, is with/in us as we fall asleep. A darkened room induces slower steps and an almost palpable fluttering of mystery. In this sacred time, the earliest morning prayers and the latest evening prayers seem to secrete lunar grottoes over the seeker’s body in its varied stations. The ritual preparations to pray are also rehearsals for the deep imagination. Water now feels like something dreamt. Sleep becomes less prolonged but deeper. And the dreams change to distill the more concentrated rhythms.

First week of Ramadan, one night, I dreamt mercifully of returning to the maqam or gravesite of the Sufi sheikh Ibrahim Baba. Pulling through his oracle deck in the dream I know he’s conveying to me an unfinished magical diagram that includes the body in ways I haven’t yet considered; death in ways I haven’t yet come near to; the land in ways I haven’t yet known; and art in ways I am only now approaching. Modes of Body, of Death, of Land, of Art — these are also the realms of Names that structure our days and carve out our journeys.

I also turn to a favorite short story collection that is experimental and dreamlike: New and Selected Stories by Cristina Rivera Garza. All of her stories revolve around the magnetic pull of the Secret — especially the Secret as it is cherished and protected by women in a world scarred and bruised and made nearly unlivable by patriarchal predators. Inside or through all these ideologies that poison our potential for peace, some dream-states, some empowering strangeness eludes control. Time doesn’t yet permit now, but there is a way of reading such stories as almost ethnographies of the estranged heart. But also testimonials of the Traveller who is a Woman, always, in the great man-made wastelands. Such stories enter obliquely into prophetic modes. What is experimental then speaks to what is theological.

What can this mean? I will read more and put these stories into touch with the immediate world around me and then let you know.

Goodnight for now, M.

Ramadan full moon, long ago now.

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Dear friend of the heart,

These last nights little else to add but a study in contrasts.

When I started to see the shape of my heart’s path, it was because I was looking at clouds as if they were writing. Calligraphy, to be exact, depicting the Divine Names of God. And the clouds would assume these shapes but then bleed into newer, unknown Names. I would be driving in the great empty roads leading to distant camp sites and watch the clouds shift into curved letters on the horizon. The ink of epiphany flows everywhere. Then, these early Ramadan mornings, resuming walks after the pre-dawn meal, I noticed a return of these scriptural clouds and I thought, too, of the Grand Mosque of Bursa, where I visited a couple summers back, in whose sacred interiors the Divine Names and other calligraphic marvels breathe radiance down upon the seekers.

Ink and clouds: an invitation to attend to the subtlest guidance.

A place now to pause and to step back into the night of the prayer room.

Into the embrace of the Secret. But first the piled-up dishes and the paperwork.

I leave you with these reminders, and these blessings, until the Eid and after,

All my love, Michael

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The morning of my departure last Monday, February 9, the 10th Urs of Sheikh Ibrahim Baba praying one more time at his maqam. As this essay gets published, Ramadan begins in the evening! So Ramadan Mubarak as well!

1. This is an essay about a pilgrimage up north, to Mill Valley and Sebastopol, and about a beloved spiritual guide who I went to honor there, along with new friends I met along the way. But with every telling of a journey that has happened, I also need to be with how the journey has resumed. Nothing is as inconclusive as travel. And the telling becomes another quest.

2. Yesterday morning in San Diego, turning the corner at the now soon-to-be demolished factory building, I observed a stretch of sidewalk that induces a mysterious sense of ease. Mostly olive-grey squares and bathed in warm shadows, whether shed from patchy ochre walls, rusted awnings, or road-bordering trees, it is uneven and weed-broken, in small yet manageable sections. The busy road it borders has a slight, undulating ascent to it. Its rise is gentle and rhythmic, creating little plateaus along the way which the sidewalk mimics on its own journey. Fallen blossoms and tree fluff fills the gutters. The sidewalk trees rise up through often loose iron grates cut with curling arabesques. It’s a sidewalk that leads to a not-too-distant park, and into three other neighborhoods. The sidewalk appears nondescript and even hesitant but is secretly a triumphant artery of multi-species connection. Its complex sense of itself came to me quite starkly. I slowed my steps before rising along with it, then let its shaded concrete guide my eyes to the thin winter clouds. A sidewalk needs to be beheld as a living part of the universe. Only then does it take us somewhere.

3. I was also remembering a morning in San Francisco when I first noticed the taste of cardamom. This was at a cafe, painted sunrise orange inside and with many plants everywhere, on or near McAllister street. Cardamom had been liberally sprinkled into my coffee. Amidst flowers spilling off the walls, I was struck by the sudden vividness of the taste. It wasn’t that I hadn’t had cardamom before, just that I hadn’t really paid attention to it, as I’m learning to. This is further rooted in a more recent experience of tasting raw cardamom pods on my tongue as an exercise in sensory presence. “The Queen of Spices,” I learn, whereas black pepper is the “King.” I prefer the queenly cardamom for its complex, somehow lunar range of flavors and fragrances. We read its profile: spicy, pungent, musky; also, citrusy, minty, piney, floral. The poems and associations curl and swirl into each other. From one focused taste of it, an associative landscape unfurls: of flowers, of forests, of bitten oranges, of steamed tangerines, of sandy cove shadows, of cottage cooking fires, of a nocturnal orchard exhaling musk.

The morning in September when I let the cardamom linger sacramentally on my tongue with my eyes closed, certain colors in my mind emerged; foremost, a silvery moss-green flecked in blue-black, as of a village being swallowed by the woods, or a kind of twilight that swarms the shore of a rocky cove. Now, to carry this taste with me the next time I find its corresponding sidewalk.

4. Getting older, I think, the hope-struggle is that a sincere and ardent and pain-and-trial tested part of who you really are, perhaps the part that gets muffled by acquired habits and defense mechanisms, or overly mitigated by conditioned reactions over the years, or goes fallow due to hardship (and inexperience with hardship), becomes, again, essential and nonnegotiable. What makes it indispensable is that without this part you would feel like you’ve acquiesced to a kind of soul-death. Ideally this part of you is imaginative-creative and courageously love-driven. It is open to the multiplicity of the universe while also rooted in an unshakable vision of unity. Ultimately this deep part of you is less about you, as a singularity, and more, really, about the Worlds that you are an integral and life-sustaining part of. A world-mosaic-self, shining through the mud.

Helping this jewel thrive means learning from the examples of others: the wonder-makers, sanctuary-bringers, compassion-givers, love-protectors of this world. Also the others that are the non-human entities all around us, contributing to what might persist as a sense of home: whether sidewalks or spices, clouds or shadows, trees or roads, fruits or flowers. So many teachers, as so much goes into keeping a home going.

5. An aspect of the heart-jewel, as I’m learning to understand it: To witness everything as alive and ensouled, and textually rich and semiotically, aesthetically layered. A book and a soul, in all things. What is alive, speaking, meaningful, and readable? The fact that all is becomes the liberating frequency. Readable doesn’t always/just mean interpretable or decodable. It can mean complexly expressive, subtly conveying. A hermetic transmission; a beacon for the spiritual imagination. It can mean attending to the semantic layers of what might seem, initially, un-layered. The scriptural-ensouled is also cavelike and transportive; dreamlike and clarifying; expansive and concentrated; womblike and initiatory.

This means feathers, yarn, receipts, lint, & insects. Those listless afternoons staring at the ceiling. It includes large stretches of purely functional roads and debris-strewn corners of vacant lots. It also means sky with its oscillations of grey, silver, and white daubs and ribbons over California freeways. The other anonymous cars too, with their kids in the backseat playing video games as field and cow and pylon scroll by. The radio songs you wouldn’t normally listen to, happily hummed to now because of the slow clouds passing over the fast, green hills. And always that feeling, especially with the windows down and Heart turned up on the dial, that the road is more river than pavement.

6. Over a week ago now, a Friday, I was lucky to take a day off and drive up Interstate 5 up to the Bay Area, then a bit more north for a couple community events. As I roamed through the radio, and another Journey or Pixies song came on, I considered the scriptural nature of the world. In the holy book, with each stanza with its own, hundreds of layers of meaning, we are called upon to attend and consider. And in many of these instances, our attention is asked to turn to what is not human. To creaturely lineages that pre-date humans. To what generously diminishes our self-importance simply by acknowledging it.

Consider these! Consider this! Attend to this! Rest your attention upon that! Learn from this exemplar, and yes, it’s something you would normally overlook.

Our appeal to attend is not simply out of creaturely allegiance, but also as a pedagogic appeal: What can these bees show me? How can I fuse into bee-nees? How can this steadfast ant enter into my becoming? These spiders architecting? These birds calligraphy’ing? These date trees and fig trees deftly harmonizing? Communities of praise. Convergences of sensation. Figurations of wild inter-being wisdom.

7. The non-human, again — the pre-human — asks us to turn away from what we have become. The un-human is the cosmic and the pre-ideational. It’s the Dark and the Fog over and within what we name, label, collate, and organize. But darkness and opacity can be compassion-bearers. A secret here. A difficult one. This reminder is within the darkly radiant gem lodged in the heart. I’m thinking of the animals and trees of my Path as I drove, that other magic Friday toward the mountain; how they subsist on a Darkness that can teach us a kind of intimate, wordless mercy.

8. But I’m also thinking of weird fiction, surrealism, art experiments, and metaphysical horror films as I traverse that great, battered road through fields of farmlands, oil derricks, corporate monster buildings, anti-Newsom signs. How is a road also an entity of cosmic processes? How are these hills harbingers of some other world that is also, somehow, right here?

9. My intention the other weekend was to attend a particular memorial celebration as well as convene with some friends I hadn’t met yet in real life. The window of time was narrow; I had to wake before dawn and drive fast and far. And I realized it was a good time to return first, as pilgrim, to a sacred locale astride a mountain. And to get there with enough sun in the day to enjoy its afternoon blessings, I needed to drive well, with spare stops, and then walk a mile with my provisions to where the innkeeper would meet me with further instructions. Innkeeper is a word that I always read as a profession both austere and intriguing. Gordon the Innkeeper turned out to wry, kind, and generous. His instructions were simply to enjoy myself and be mindful.

10. Gone only three nights, I pack a handful of books. Optimism. The amount of books I want to reread, and then, at different times, keep rereading, as well as the parts, poems, or pages in books I want to go on referring to is immense. As a Muslim & Sufi, rereading is, indeed, a central spiritual virtue, for the Qur’an. becomes reread daily and recited daily. (And now Ramadan is here and I will, again, reread the translations and try to memorize more.)

As I acquire new books, or as I make lists of the books I hope to acquire as other books are actually read, I also am acknowledging the books I want to reread. To reread them when the time is right is to again retain their unique unveilings and relive their intimacies and their tastes. Of course every rereading is a new adventure, too. Reading is an all consuming model for life. It’s not living, though, but a way of believing in life’s inexhaustibility. For reading comprises the anticipation of astonishment and beauty; and therefore, an anticipation (and desire for) knowledge that enhances life. Technically such knowledge, sourced in divine reality, is measureless, which means that reading becomes a paradoxical practice.

Yet not all knowledge, either, is worth pursuing, which is also a spiritual criterion that can hopefully help fine tune one’s reading aims. That being said, the knowledge that is worth pursuing still would fill several hundred lifetimes I suspect. My old teacher often told me: “read those books that can take the place of hundreds of other books,” referring to Jane Ellen Harrison. Yet what can be read and read again staring into a good fire with friends?

11. One book I want to keep rereading, and to especially reread it in the site-specific context that it celebrates is Journey To Mount Tamalpais by Etel Adnan. This book seems to do everything I want/need from a certain type of hybrid impressionistic text. You flip it open and find: “When I thought a bird was flying, it was the sound of water. I thought a stream was running, it was the wind. Tamalpais became a spaceship ready to take off.” For it is a book “about” the mountain I slept on the other weekend, and have slept on twice before, but also about the world of shapes and signs infusing the mountain; the changes in politics and the forces of history pushing against and into and out of the mountain; and the artistry of perception, the phenomenology of beauty that the mountain demands from its acolytes. A landscape can become the centerpiece of a life affirming philosophy of sacralizing vision. So it is with the mountain and the work of Adnan and now the piecemeal work of honoring Adnan, the mountain, and the colors and rhythms they both give.

12. The mountain remains largely unexplored by me, save for the summit, but the Inn I have learned to love. This is my third time staying here; a different innkeeper each time. One thing I know about the mountain is that it contains, as Adnan writes, nuances of green and strata of fragrance. From the patio, spices of all this ancient complexity wafts in. This trip, for the first time, I sleep within the inn, itself, instead of the outlying cabins looking out at the water and the misted pillars of San Francisco. I like small little garret rooms that seem to fold over you. The image of inn as ship is perennial, especially in this one that is over a hundred years old and gas powered.

This night at the inn a shared birthday party is in progress and I make friends and introduce a sweet guy in a metal shirt to the musical label, Flenser. Everyone I’ve met on the mountain brings charitable exuberance into the semi-communal space. We also enjoy the fire inside the big room, warming us as well a the old oak furniture. I tell a new friend online that this is the place where one of us needs to organize a gathering or a retreat. A versatility of friendships flowering at this slightly rugged and discreet inn. Making my salad and beans in the beautifully sturdy kitchen, among gregarious party planners, I allude to the magnificence of the tea kettles and the oven range. A woman who works in a kitchen agrees with me. Later we are drinking tea and admiring the fire, again, and talking about different neighborhoods we’ve lived in. Later some of us go outside and lie on the picnic tables and look at the stars.

13. It seems we’re all waiting for the same thing: which is the miracle of the pre-dawn morning and of (finally) affirming that we are celestial voyagers skidding along above the cloud line. Beholding this aerial sea from the chilly prow of our patio, with pine canopy islands poking through, becomes an Image that you might, alone, come here for. It is an Image that is not exactly in Adnan’s book but more in the ramifying appendix of it she allows me to live. When the sun emerges through the whitecaps, like a radiant, slow-spreading fan, then the Image becomes new again, and ever more difficult to convey. MashAllah is what I repeat on my chair, beholding the brightening sea of morning.

14. One slow, fire-warmed night and a tranquil morning with good people on the mountain was a big gift. I can’t overemphasize the serene ease that rains down while in the patio rocking chair, witnessing this old green world tumbling and terracing down into woods, water, cove, cloud, and horizon. But this serenity wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful had it not been shared with others, bearing co-witness with me, all of us bringing our yearning hearts to the occasion.

15. Then I went for a one night stay in the town by the river, Petaluma. River towns have their peculiar magnetism. A fog immediately creeped in with a sense of suppressed histories and industries pulling at the buildings and welling up from the ground. Old railroad tracks seemed to be everywhere; old piers collapsing into the river, too. I sat by the river and drank coffee, oddly unsettled, wondering what I have been overlooking or not saying or not piecing together. This was my life and this was a river: the two suddenly seemed analogous, yet also worlds apart.

Watching the light paint the current with a metallic glaze I wondered about the simultaneous sense of movement and decay that a river evokes. And how the river-town becomes an Image that instigates a kind of hopeful-pained thought of migration and escape. What is migrating? What is escaping? It is impossible not to gaze at a river and not imagine yourself on some patchwork vessel coasting down it. Escape: versions of yourself and also versions of stories you’ve heard, stories you’ve internalized. Yet nothing actually flees, for the river seeds new life forms from the slop, mulch, residue, and detritus. The mountain makes you see stars and the river makes you see your own feet. Both are prayerful places. Yet I wasn’t expecting the river to make me think what I thought. To pray the way I did with coffee at hand, pages fluttering in the breeze, and late afternoon light faintly blinding me.

16. The next day I met my friend Rose for the first time in Sebastopol! We had talked before on the phone, through voice notes, texts and had seen each other in zoom gatherings but this was the first time we had met in real life. She has been such an inspiring influence on me during my faith journey as a Muslim convert. Her vision of the spiritual life as an embodiment of Rahma, or mercy and compassion, continues to enrich and strengthen me. And just this last weekend I joined the first session of our Rahma Ramadan Circle that she has run and hosted for four years now. She had initially told me about the event up in Sebastopol, for which I’m extremely grateful. It was also nourishing just walking with her and sharing parts of our journeys while also discussing the challenges of finding and creating the community you need.

Later that day I was to meet another new friend and inspirer, T., a person who I had only just recently talked to, and whose love for Ibrahim Baba has added another layer of beauty to my quests. Indeed, they co-created an oracle deck collecting Ibrahim Baba’s words of insight, wisdom, and curiosity on multiple intersecting subjects and worlds — a deck that I was able to procure that day. Their work now is another accompaniment to my own mosaic.

17. So we all gathered that afternoon at the cemetery and I sat within a compassionate, welcoming group of celebrants and journeyers on this blended path. I listened to both Quranic prayer and the Kaddish prayer recited lovingly along with music, and then we all took part in scattering some rose petals on Baba’s shrine. It was incredibly moving the love and ardor expressed to honor this man’s beauty, wisdom, and living legacy. I had never before made pilgrimage to a maqam to celebrate the urs of a Friend of God before. There’s immense barakah here, I thought and also a joyful promise, renewed with others, some known, and others to be known later, to return in the years to come. Afterwards, we went back to a lovely retreat center and sat in a circle and made remembrance and prayer together, ate food and drank tea and shared our reminiscences and our reasons for being there. All of it was so grounding, tender, and so gently reassuring. I stayed at the retreat center that night too before driving back to San Diego the next morning. The three days and nights: a lucky reminder of what has become, again, essential.

18. As I said, the journey resumes and transforms in surprising ways.

Yesterday, I had an unexpectedly lovely and deep conversation with a relatively new friend in an old garden space, hidden in a large urban park. The garden space, itself, resembled a kind of mysteriously moody enclave one might find in a sacred place of gathering. Staring at the dark blue pre-storm sky over tall pines, we shared our mutual and cherished complexities. And indeed I felt that such complexity was something to cherish. My friend also generously helped me hold these intricate facets of myself up to the light and witness them as real and wonderful. But it has always been hard for me to embrace the full mosaic of what I am and what I am a part of. I spoke about this trip to them and how I keep returning, again and again, to this polymath, complex ancestor who I never met but whose smile, whose joy, whose warmth, whose inclusive exuberance I felt the last time I prayed, and whose presence will color and infuse me the rest of my life: Dr. Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajajé — or Ibrahim Baba —the queer theologian, HIV/AIDS activist, multi-religious scholar, multi-ethnic artist, ritualist, and spiritual leader. Yet, so much more I think you can say; and so much is in the cards, some pictured below. All the mixities, as he would say, all the fluidities and complexities shining through.

19. The mosaic-magic of a single human. A while ago I wrote about him: “He one of those rare individuals who was able to bridge wildly different realms and worlds while demonstrating how such ecumenical labor helps heal the artificial divisions and barriers we’ve made. The blending and mixing, too wasn’t undertaken idly either but with a rigorous, scholarly appreciation for the traditions he was living in and learning from. Through astute scholarship and linguistic skill, he embodied the energies of different religious traditions, including Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Santeria, Islam, Judaism, and the Chishti Sufi tradition. Rather than applying the word “interfaith” for himself and his spiritual companions, he insisted on the far more radical term, “multi-religious;” instead of enacting and reinforcing socially constructed barriers between the traditions of religion, the practices of art and performance, and the studies of sexuality and eros, he brought these modes together, and in ways that helped empower and educate marginalized groups. Perhaps even before I knew his name his influence has moved me.”

20. Last Ramadan, or so, I also wrote: “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.” This statement finds me again, and resonates ever more fiercely this year.

21. Towards the end of our time together in Sebastapol ended, Baba’s son, Issa, who led us in prayer and ritual remembrance, gave me a “rose from Baba,” as we were sitting, sipping tea, talking, and eating a sweet grain and pomegranate dish which was, I believe, a version of the Ukrainian ceremonial dish, kutya. The rose I now keep here, on a table at home, with the oracle cards and all the small lights, notes of readiness and anticipation for Ramadan and the sprintime. More to write but for now, some images from the memorial event and the cards, themselves, new companions. I will end this essay with a mysterious sign at the bottom.

An image of Ibrahim Baba during our dhikr ceremony.

22. It heartens me too that Baba’s Chishti Sufi path also interweaves and infuses the Inayatiyya Sufi path I am on. This is a longer conversation and exploration; for now, I cherish these resonances and know more knowledge will come from them.

The whole pilgrimage too brought to mind a part of a love poem by the great Ibn Arabi that is often quoted online. It is also mentioned in an anthology of essays about Baba as being a favorite of his. But I was thinking of a newer translation of it by Michael Sells which I love for the concision and compression:

My heart can take on

any form

For gazelles a Meadow

A cloister for monks

A temple for idols,

pilgrim’s Ka’ba,

tablets of Torah,

scrolls of the Qur’an

I profess the religion

of love. Wherever

its camels turn, there

lives my faith.

At the same time I consider these words on a website that memorialized him:

“keep your heart open and joyful; let your eyes scan the horizon for the next amazing, life-giving opportunity–and take it; use your hands to be of service to someone; let your mind stretch to include new ideas and new possibilities. As you do these things, you are honoring this irreplaceable man and his irrepressible spirit.”

Cards from the Oracle Deck and the rose.

23. To end with a mystery to which you may examine more on the internet. But this time, driving home, I thought more about it.

This sign, near Lost Hills, I think, on the side of the 5. What does it mean? Who was Tom McCleod? Why did he sleep there? The “investigations” on the internet seem quite preoccupied with identifying this person and providing some kind of history for them. But only a few people have even mentioned the mysterious pole-mounted bicycle that is close by it. Certainly the bicycle and the sign go together. What they mean I won’t begin to speculate on, although I have some ideas. Now I might consider the next part of this quest, as the sacred month begins.

Walking along Lower Haight, SF, New Year’s Day, 2026

1. A Stranger Under A Tree

San Diego. Going outside, before 8 a.m., I welcome the cool wind rushing across the littered pavement after I loudly shut the gate: last exhalations of winter. Then I try to embody each footfall and each rising smell. I focus on each gust of coolness across my face. Gradually, I honor the loosening of limbs, the more unimpeded blood flow. If you listen just right, a great distance is making an appeal. The buildings (barber, locksmith, restaurant, condo) brokenly reflect aspects of the sky; many are improved by the sky. Some reverberations tilt you higher: a light-lacquered blueness has amassed that we only receive fragments from. Plane-sounds always. Trains, after. Broken paper-things and plastic-things flapping down gutters. An outburst of fiery greenery by the fences and down the cul-de-sacs startles you. Often I prefer striding on one side of the sidewalk compared to another, but couldn’t say why. Or it has something to do with the play of shadows or how a serpent-like plant straggles disobediently over a wall. Mornings have their reservoirs of simple world-newness.

Still, there is weariness that pervades. An intense January kind. More like a restless, worrisome distractedness — and coupled with a helpless sense of wishing for any kind of collective improvement. Now, especially maybe, with the doubling down on fascist escalation, sociopathic power systems, and punitive cruelties. A weight lingers in the heart and soul. This is true for those of us who keenly feel these centers of their individual and shared beings. Even if we collapse heart and soul into one messy, empathetic-anxious orb of compassion, we know that this heaviness is multi-layered. It reaches deep and extends far; it affects all of who we are and who we want to be. Rather than feeling emotions for the sake of a greater wholeness, it can seem, instead, we are becoming fragmented and unmade by them.

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Intensity of feeling is how I’m wired, anyway: to feel deeply and widely and to yearn and pine intensely. I was born into an excitable persona of curiosity, desire, and enthusiasm. My drive has been to want to know and make and enliven and help and appreciate and inspire, all at once. An alembic of verbs suggesting, collectively, a zealous, inclusive, imaginative concern or interest. Carrying all this intensity alone can be wearying. But also a privilege. The difficulty is how to channel it wisely. Spreading yourself thin out of excessive interest leads to diminished attention and carelessness.

For starters, we try to remember through what avails us. Remembrance occurs in a storm. It is the eye, therein. Something in us tries to remember what this is all really about. (It’s not really about leaders or powers or countries, though we are certainly subject to them, must question and challenge them, and otherwise engage with them our entire lives.) Of the many quotes and pieces of wisdom that I keep close to myself, one, that helps me remember, is by John Keats:

Call the World, if you please, the vale of soul-making.

Was his point to rectify the gloomy idea that the world is a“vale of tears”? Thankfully he doesn’t say vale of “happiness” or “joy,” for if making a soul means anything it means working with the hardest of what life and death has to offer. Still, this must be done with delight and joy, too, I think Keats believes. Vale of paradox, then.

Through my years of teaching English and the Humanities, I’ve brought Keats’s idea into the classroom, in various ways. One obvious way is through changing the advertising cliche, “Just Be Yourself” into the more, perhaps slightly Calvinist-sounding, “Make yourself.” Yuck, though, after all. After two semesters of English comp, I threw both simplistic-sounding ideas out. Instead of just torquing tropes, I then presented what I thought was a more comprehensive vision: that what we read, what we write, what we research, what we talk about, what we sing, what we doodle— indeed, what all this multimodal, endless discourse unearths, reveals, amplifies, ramifies, and refracts — helps us make our souls. The making is the key idea. Incompleteness, the greatest adventure. Not original at all, but hopefully helpful to those who had never considered such ideas before. Or, instead of build or make, one could say: carve, sculpt, mold, shape. The particular verb depends on personal preference. Of course so does the nature of the noun or verb or adjective under consideration: soul.

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What is a soul? someone has asked in the back of any classroom.

(Good question! Is the soul in here? Is it out there? Is it a thing? Is it a feeling? Will I get in trouble talking about the soul because this is not a religion class? My old professor said that Richard of St. Victor said that we are inside our souls, like walking inside bubbles. The oddly shattering Pixar film Soul gets a few things right about it, I suspect. Maybe a soul is more of a mood? An ambience? Some students suggested that we might not understand “soul” but we “get” what it means through experience, like, for instance, if someone is described as “soulful.” You know it when you see it. (The eyes that have loved and suffered and forgave and wandered and tried! I prefer the hands, another said.) We know the phrase: an old soul. They’ve lived, they’ve suffered, they’ve lost, they’ve seen bad things, they are wise: Congratulations?)

But really it’s the vulnerability and ferocity in a worn-out but stylish stranger leaning, with a postcard in their hand, against a rain-slogged cemetery pine — or it’s when two things that don’t seem to go together do get together — another shock! — and convey something astonishing and kinetic in the unlikely encounter (we can call that “poetic” too?) — it’s that particularly haunting music or layer of sound-images that induces a mix of melancholy, nostalgia, desire, and exhilaration.

What is soulful might actually be what is poetic; and the soul might be the event, never repeatable, but happening, again, all the time, that reconciles different kinds of energies into what can be called, beautiful. If one is present and attentive. Maybe. If one becomes the event. Each of us knows it when we are in it or it is in us. Maybe not enough people with influence know it, though. Soulful dies in power.

2. Corazon

A couple decades after hearing that quote about soul-making, I discovered the Sufi conception of “the heart.” I learned that the word for heart is used 130 plus times in the Quran. The Quranic heart refers to a deeper emotional, intellective, and intuitive knowing and feeling. It is an ancient intelligence that cuts through ideations and rationalisms. This Quranic heart is taught and stirred and revived through receptivity to divine truths. The entire Quran, then, is God speaking directly to one’s heart.

Many afternoons on my balcony, gazing at the park’s palms, paths, and green patches rushing up against the brighter, coppery bay water, I reflected on what it means to know with and through the heart. In that moment, the small little balcony, protruding into its corner of cosmos, felt like a heart. The root of the word, heart, in Arabic, indicates “turning” and “changing.” Often this is implied when we turn away from the fleeting distractions of the human-made world to face more archaic and divine eminences. However, because the heart is poised between different worlds, there is a turning to and fro, a pivoting between realms. A weathervane heart.

We move between eternity and finitude, between what perishes and what endures, freighted with crisscrossing transmissions from all these realms. And the heart, most arduously, moves between what deceives and what accords. Consideration and scrutiny is undertaken. This turning involves discernment and reflection, curiosity and forbearance. It is a life’s work: turning the heart; attuning the heart. As the heart embodies its divinely-given choreography, the soul flourishes with and among others. This is one hope we can carry together. One hope that carries us.

In my early classes on Islam and Sufism, a traditional phrase kept returning to me, and calling to me: that Sufism is the practice of “polishing the rust of the heart.” I was unmoored and destabilized by this phrase (it’s hard to explain how or why, without also getting into so much else) and after one class, where we discussed it for a couple hours online, I gently wept in the spring sunshine, feeling the idea before me like an angelic wind blowing across the water and through the trees.

The soul expresses what we love. The heart does too. They operate at different frequencies, index different embodiments. Sometimes these loves are at odds, or one Love serves to refine and alchemize other loves. All are vessels of Eros. They are individual and collective and unfinished. The Sufi psychology is, of course, more intricate than this. But that’s for another elaboration.

When heart and soul coincide, whether in us or out in the world or worlds, we really sense that ancient current of visionary astonishment that we are always heir to. A subterranean channel of primordial wonder and cosmic imagination that is our privilege — our covenant — to protect, cherish, revive, and reimagine.

All the friends we don’t know yet are there, too. And all the arcana we dream about— all the secrets of our transformations and turnings— are finally uncovered and spoken and given new life.

3. The Universe and Food

Soul bends hungrily towards the labyrinth of this world. The heart is the vessel of the criterion, if we keep it polished. It’s also, potentially, the most capacious thing in the world, lest we forget. We do. Then there is what surrounds us and what includes us; what our souls are also made of and pass through and are shaped by.

One of the great soulful and inquisitive and imaginative writers of our time, Samuel R. Delany has had the habit for several years of posting wonderful short bursts of writing on his Facebook page. It is here I find my third counsel for January. (Really all are counsels for all months, but ones that, now, in distraction and weariness, I turn to).

A few years back he wrote:

“One of the most amazing things that ever happened to me, shortly after I got married, an artist (…) told me to spend 24 hours in Grand Central Terminal; so I did. It completely changed my life—because after about seven or eight hours I began to realize something: there were lots of people who were . . . living there. After thirteen or fourteen hours, out of boredom, I had started exploring the place, and discovered there were whole areas of the terminal I had never seen. (My father, who had worked there when first he had arrived in New York as a Red-Cap, had taken me to the Oyster Bar as a kid—we started by coming in through a back entrance.) I had oyster stew [milk, butter, and oysters]—and had shone me areas of the Terminal I never would have seen if hadn’t been there with someone who knew the place. On and off through the years I really enjoyed the place.”

I think of this advice given to Delany, and his own epiphanic adventure of enacting it, at least once a month. I remember a summer day in real life when I met Delany, himself, at Grand Central and he took me on a quick tour that included getting a hot dog. His many books embody this adventurous mode of beholding, attending, including.

A Grand Central phenomenology of sorts.

If I’m traveling anywhere or going on a long walk of some kind, I recall this imperative to truly attend to the universe disclosing itself to you at every moment. Of his many wondrous books, I think especially of a shorter novel about New York, Atlantis: Model 1924 which to my mind is one of the most beautiful prose works of an American writer. It’s also one of the essential books to read before walking around New York City. But recently I also remembered it when I was staring at a famous bridge in another famous city that I once lived.

4. The City on the Hill(s), Again.

My heart is still alight with hill breezes and tidal-green memories from a visit to San Francisco over my holiday break. I have written a lot about my visits to this much-loved city. A city I lived in for close to a decade, a city that both beautifully transformed my imagination and distorted my sense of reality too; a city of irresponsible and melodramatic youthfulness, yet a city we imagine we might love to grow old in, too. Or, at least, older (and wiser).

Dec. 2025. A corner I enjoyed very much. Fire escapes…my first idea of a city.

A city where the most dizzying adventures and friendships and loves and discoveries of my life occurred — even when most of the time I was slightly aloof, slightly distant, more than a little preoccupied with worries and thoughts and (bad) habits. For in that alluring and beautiful City, it always felt some other City, hidden within it, was just out of reach, coaxing and tantalizing, befuddling and deceiving. (I’ve written a long essay about this concept of the “other city” through the lens of the novels of Julio Cortázar and the art of Giorgio de Chirico. I’ll share parts here one day.) Maybe San Francisco confirmed for me a persistent condition of metaphysical homesickness and spiritual yearning that colors my soul.

Now it is a city too you can never really return to, but only hope to visit as, if you’re lucky, more and more of a wide-eyed, receptive stranger. The strangeness and, even, estrangement we bring to places adds to their layers of meaning. And the possibilities of meaning’s permutations and resonances. The stranger places become to us, the more we can visit them with a penchant for playfulness and improvisation. It’s ultimately a renewal process for both person and place.

The city that you love is Imaginal and Processual and Potential.

The person that you are is too.

It’s here, not here, over there; under and beyond; obliquely-proximate;

over those hills you can’t yet see, yet, transportable, clandestine, smuggleable;

always fragmented, latent and inchoate, seeded while, still, dormant.

A city; a person; souls, hearts; the Imagination surrounds; endless Airs.

So much of any city goes unwitnessed and suppressed: infrastructure, systemic injustice and inequity, grids of power and resources, shit and waste and effluvia, kitchens, hospitals, prisons, alleys, tunnels, pipes, sewers. Loving a city, however impossible this is really to do, is an ever-renewed origin for learning to love the hidden, unromantic, messy details that sustain any complex context. I obsess over the difficulties of loving a city because I obsess over the flaws of their orchestration. So much of what is poetic and soulful is squandered because of economic (i.e., & racist, bigoted, classist, sexist, et al) priorities. Gentrification and monoculture, the tyranny of profit and exploitation, that mutates into worser and worser forms. The flattening, oversimplifying, narrowing, and siloing of our experiences as interpersonal, creative, dynamic organisms. Especially in the current paradigm of fancy restaurant-bedroom tech cities tailored for the rich and powerful. So half-imagined cities are where we live, perhaps forever.

(I need to research this but I think it was a former (?) mosque turned, partly, into a parking garage? Very intriguing — and beautiful, ornate facade. My own convert relationships to mosques is complex/complicated but the architecture and the mysticism of them constantly calls to me. I also like that, technically, anyone can open their own mosque.)

What has made SF stranger to me over the last couple years is choosing, when I visit now, to stay in an area that usually either encompasses or skirts parts of the Tenderloin, Nob Hill, and that blended area, the Tender Nob. Is this a real estate term? I’m not sure. These are areas that were relatively unfrequented by me when I lived there, save for a few favorites. Here are some notes towards a larger Grand Central Station Philosophy.

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Some notes from 5 days and nights on the edge of Nob Hill:

—I love the lobbies of these old hotels and apartment complexes at Christmas time. They give Shining vibes and exude dusty-green, decadent, sepia-washed ambiences. I think there is an archival-antique-melancholic-transitory mood of old hotels that can’t be conveyed in one word. We need this word, or we should strive towards it in our art and love. One foyer for an old apartment building had been vacated and the empty mail slots through the window appeared a mustily scarlet velveteen. A vestige of a ruined filmset; the lost film of a vestigial inn.

—One night, Alan and I met at a long-treasured favorite hole-in-the-wall gem: Tú Lan. When I lived in SF I went there often and it featured in many of the epistolary poems I wrote circa 2004. Back then, though, you could still sit at the counter facing the cooks. Lots of noise, heat, fire, proximity to everything. I think when they closed briefly though they had to eliminate this feature for health and safety reasons. The food, however, was just as fresh and tasty as I remembered and the street as colorful and dynamic, too. It was the perfect place to go before a concert.

—Sutter Street. On the corner is a Yemeni restaurant I forgot to try and a Polish place across from it. Also forgot to try. Walking it’s all stone and brick apartments and people standing on stoops or exiting dark side alley gates. Winds are blowing, and the trees are dancing, rain is spattering down lightly and cooly. People are drinking free coffee in dim cozy lobbies that still have their Christmas trees up. And garbage or objects often are obstructing the sidewalk. Goods people are exchanging also crowd the spaces, all suddenly removed or shifted, or kicked into the gutters or shoved in trunks.

—I stumble on a tiny sandwich and rotisserie chicken spot next to the little grocery store. It’s open late, the chickens constantly cooking. The menu is large and so are the sandwiches. Such a generous, affordable, and robust meal, and such a small storefront you might just miss it if your phone hadn’t told you where to look. I like that a small, nourishing gem is tucked between residential buildings. In the grocery store, next to the fruit and yogurt and trail mix I pick out for my hotel fridge, I see a “7-Up Cake” and wonder: what and why? I congratulate myself for stocking my little hotel fridge with snacks and mocktails for new years. Small acts of self-congratulations.

—We all have our little, sometimes eccentric pet criteria when it comes to going places. What side of the train to sit on; what to pack; what time to visit a museum, etc. One of mine is food-related: it’s always wise and practical to seek out a kebab/ falafel shop, kiosk, or stand in whatever city in whatever country you are in. And indeed I found one a few blocks down from my old refurbished, half-boutique hotel on Sutter: excellent falafel and hummus, and gregarious locals eating within.

—Nob Hill and Tendernob and Tenderloin are also enticing, I think, for a prevalence of old-school diners and greasy coffeeshops, open late or, in some cases, 24 hours. Greasy, warm, cheap, and dependable; busy on Saturday and Sunday morning, and often refuges for drunk people and hungover people and poorer people and tired people and working-at-odd-hours people. Visiting this city and walking this city as someone who now no longer drinks: another fascinating index of impressions.

The Goddess of Democracy statue in Portsmouth Square

—I love Portsmouth Square, the park in the “heart of Chinatown” that feels like’s its situated on an elevated outcropping. Though, to be honest, as much as I claim to love it I can’t recall a time when I’ve ever walked through it? I walk this time, trying to remember what I notice. Part of my own attempts at a Grand Central philosophy is trying out, when it’s safe and feasible, as many public restrooms as possible (easier yes for a male.) Not just using them when needed, but also noticing and appreciating the upkeep and maintenance of them (or lack thereof) and even the art work and stall writing in them that sometimes is at odds with the cleanliness. This most universal yet somehow unseemly act has its temples and wardens. We should learn more about them, honor them, work with them, write about them, support them. I check out the one in the park and am struck by the admiration that two tourists seem to have for the relatively unblemished quality within. We all use it gratefully, just short of high-fiving each other on the way out. I make a mental note that it’s a good place to relieve oneself during a long walk. Many of us also keep such mental maps while journeying. What is a city if not, also, a topography of toilets?

—I love walking to North Beach from the top of Nob Hill, from Grace Cathedral. Up there it’s all wind bending back trees, stones emanating a kind of green light, and the mood of soaring monumentality. But it deliberately sends you rollicking into the dense black and blue canyons and plateaus below. I never have grown tired of the bracing winds and atmospheric treehouse vibes of SF. There is also something mysterious about the cascading gulches of office buildings and apartments and the way they are layered - stone and brick, glass and steel — against the backdrop of sky and water. Several cities, at once, seem to be entangled and germinating in some deep, primordial mud. To love a certain version of SF is to love an archaeological imaginary.

What does this mean?

—So as was my penchant when I lived there, I walked many exultant hills and slopes on New Year’s Day, despite the drizzle and cold, (luckily) still mostly fit enough to relish the steep hills and the wet, winding mileage. From North Beach, I go to City Lights, where I wander into a very unlikely nerdy-esoteric conversation about Zen Buddhism and occultism with an experimental musician. Within, I find some books, of course. Indeed, two books in particular, both of which I’ve been seeking. And another, by a dear, deceased friend that I knew would be there, waiting for me.

(Some books I discovered at City Lights. Poignantly, I purchased my friend’s posthumous collection, finally published by City Lights.)

Then I find myself seeking the hills by impulse and I’m ascending the back, rustic, foliage-shadowed steps up to Coit Tower. That’s when I get a message that the annual New Year’s Day City Walk undertaken by members of the Order of St. George’s Horse is underway and they are now in Lower Haight. And could I walk 3 and a half hilly miles in about one hour? That was the question. At the same time, another dear friend I hadn’t seen in years would rendezvous with me on the way! So off I went, euphoric.

(I am now a member of the beautiful fraternity of pilgrims and pilgrimage-enthusiasts, The Order of St. George’s Horse.)

-My journey that New Year’s Day was exhilarating and inspiring, crossing several neighborhoods, mostly in rain, drizzle, wind, occasional peeks of glorious sunlight, stopping at a trusted bathroom or two, catching up with my dear old friend David at a cafe, and then meeting members of the Order of St. George’s Horse for the first time, thus initiating a fruitful bond and ongoing collaboration. Their guiding concept, that pilgrimage is a sacred concept that can link like-minded spiritual adventurers is a beautiful one that aligns with many of my own projects. From their website: “At its core, the OSGH is a community of like-minded people devoted to sharing our experiences and expertise walking the world’s pilgrimage roads. We understand friendship to be at the very core of spirituality; religion is merely the history of humanity's friendship with the metaphysical world and the beings that inhabit it.” My Muslim-Sufi path is, of course, steeped in pilgrimages stories and obligations and I hope to bring some of these living ideas into the larger spiritual community of OSGH.

-My overarching reason for being in SF that week, though, besides seeing loved friends like David and Alan and meeting new friends, the OSGH, was to attend two consecutive nights of seeing the elusive and legendary musical group, the Secret Chiefs 3. They were also opening for the also-legendary metal band, High on Fire. Both nights, Dec. 30 and 31st at Great American Music Hall. Those two nights in the rainy Tenderloin were ecstatic and soul-expanding. I had loved the SC3 for over 20 years, I think, and hadn’t seen them in about as long. And the lovely people at the merch table had some rare vinyl so I gave in. Glancing at the inserts, I was struck by the hidden story of my life that they revealed; by how an old love can become witnessed in a new light.

-What is this band? Foremost they are the imagination-child of the polymath musical genius, Trey Spruance. After watching them two nights in a row perform their complex, rocking, and mystical blend of Arab-Sufi-surf-metal music (apologies if this fails to capture it!), I realized that, subliminally at least, their music was my first exposure to Sufism and Islam. Those early CDS of theirs (pictured below in their vinyl incarnations) included many Sufi and Muslim insinuations and inspirations and tonalities that no doubt seeded something in my imagination. Certainly a longer exploration is due here, but it’s humbling how gifts - in this case, the gift of a particular kind of music —circulate in one’s life, in almost secretive ways, only to occasionally return with an epiphanic vitality you weren’t expecting. Was it here, in these liner nights, that I first learned of the legendary sword Zulfiqar of Blessed Imam Ali? And learned about the Hurqalya? And felt the rustlings of a path of the heart that was awaiting me in the future? A clip from night two, up front:

The records and the images….

—Lastly on the evening of New Year’s Day, in the rain, I attended an immersive light and sound show at Grace Cathedral called Aura. I had bought a ticket rather impulsively, and went there not knowing what to expect, and especially not expecting another 700 people in line! The experience, itself, was beautifully reassuring and, as one woman said, an optimistic way to start a new year. The immersive experience, itself, was all of us becoming steeped in a universal creation story unfolding, through light, sound, and narration, on the cathedral walls and ceiling. If anything, a reminder of what is at stake, of what has always been here, of what our obligations are. And of what we must fight. This creation, this cosmos is here, appealing to our kindred natures. Saying more feels needless. A few photos from it below.

5. Ecstatic Bodies of Language

Back from my trip, starting a new semester, facing the news and the fears and the horrors — too much to assimilate and make sense of. So I’m not going to try, right now, except to acknowledge I want to keep being a better resistant, citizen and community protector.

Wandering those five days in SF and coming back here, to wander, as I prefer, up a slight incline of roads to Balboa Park and thinking about atmospheres and ambiences. Qualities are something that can’t be priced or sold. They are our very souls. They compose that curious convergence where noun and verb, place and non-place coalesce; where memory and imagination become indistinguishable. Moreover, unlike power and possessions, titles and status, qualities and ambiences make us feel alive in very ancient ways. I begin to think about a phenomenology of ambiences which must certainly already be a book or article. But too many books now haunt my bedside table. I’ll sit with this concept and instead of theorizing it, I’ll let it enact itself in what I already am undertaking.

It occurs to me too that these qualities seem to emerge form that secret channel of awe and mystery that I constantly believe is at work in all our lives. A place, or non-place, a barzakh, a wellspring, where language and signs become ecstatic vessels that we can embody and that can also guide us through these dark times. We don’t just enter into these vessels, we help foster their emergence. Reading poetry with students; listening to music in the evenings; having phone calls with old friends; eavesdropping at cafes; cooking while trying to focus on the melody of breathing; walking past old buildings: we are always within this river of Eros or Spirit or Reality or whatever we can call it. But we forget. Remembrance of awe is the compass, then. I had more to say here about Ibn Arabi, Will Alexander, and others but will pause. A long walk and some cooking awaits and then a conversation over coffee with a friend. And then lessons and discussion starters to plan for my students tomorrow.

Yesterday was my father’s birthday so I begin by saying Bismillah, and also happy birthday! to him, a wonderful man and father, guide and companion. Lucky and blessed to be his son and so blessed to spend the holidays and his birthday with him! I think of this lamp from Morocco when I think of him, too. Here we are, two sons of Light, listening to music in winter darkness, making new memories and keeping fresh fires lit with the many beautiful memories we’ve already made.

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Late work nights in the fog is where winter begins. Magical feelings arise that can come from walking in a foggy city at night. An atmospheric intensifying. But also uncanny recognition: I’ve often felt that the soul, if it is “anything,” is composed of a kind of fog, so it feels like homecoming to be in vaporous conditions.

I was strolling downtown a week ago one night, headed to a doom metal concert. As greenish fog began clotting around the office buildings, I passed the row of bail bonds shops, each with their own thin, glittering Christmas tree visible through their bright windowed facade. The scene suggested a possible lyric in a Tom Waits song: “Each Christmas tree in all the bail bonds shops is skinnier than the next” or something. Similarly, it could have been a scene in a Denis Johnson book. The amusing irony of those Christmas trees was one aspect of what I saw; suffering and need, the deeper aspects. That’s what thinking is: failing at grasping what is there. Or failing at knowing what to do with the pieces that are perceived. As I passed the last of the fluorescent-lit glass doors of the bail bonds shops, its plastic tree nearly obstructing the entryway, I also wondered if I hadn’t rightly appreciated all the gifts I had been blessed with this year. Overlooking, too, is thinking. Then, I corrected myself, for I hesitate to think in terms of years (growing each year since my conversion more smitten with the lunar calendar and with seasonal cycles.) Each season, then, had brought its gifts and this winter month has been, perhaps, the most abundant. And it’s only really beginning. Thinking and walking. Modulating and deepening. Eventually I made it to the show and had a blast, one of many good nights recently.

A gift can never really be owed one. A gift might seem to come about through some effort, perhaps, or some teamwork, as bosses and boards like to emphasize. As with many topics, I begin with one thing, like gifts, and veer into another realm: wonder and awe. The connection feels obvious, although I’m mostly playing.

For a gift to catalyze some kind of transformation — which is to say, for a gift to be real — its emergence and reverberations must happen within the province of the Astonishing. We might call it the Epiphanic, too. With it, comes an expanding of perception. The deepest breath you take in the course of a morning hour might become this gift. Similarly, how you interact with another person might be the epiphany they didn’t know they needed.

So, ironically, these are the gifts that we most overlook and take for granted. Ours is not a country where we are taught to be attuned to astonishment or receptive to epiphany. Largely we are taught to overlook, take for granted, belittle, diminish, demean, disempower, and disregard.

Reflection then, or as the Sufis call it, Murāqabah, can also be seen as a deep examination of gifts/giving (whether obvious, subtle, invisible, or potential) in our lives and communities. I take some creative liberties with the word. In the Sufi conception of it, we are called to guard and watch over our minds and bodies, so at the end of the day we can take stock of the day’s thoughts, words, and deeds. It means, among other things, being vigilant against irregularities that impede our spiritual journeys. Sufis knows that life is a complex, ever-unfolding gift, but not without thorns and traps. For living is the ground for difficult spiritual struggles that last a lifetime. I read that the ancient Arabic word it comes from means one who watches the night sky looking for guiding signs. Our minds, too, are kinds of nights, alit with signs and ancient lights. And the most propitious signs are often the gifts that aren’t always obvious at first.

Given the abject brokenness of our worlds and the soullessness of our so-called leaders, how can we remember and act upon even the most obvious gifts? Where are they? Where is giving? The givers? Where is the generosity we are made from? They might not seem to be there at all or only virtually or in potentia. Sometime little gifts, like presents or cards or letters, are signs of deeper, less tangible gifts. The smaller the gift on the surface, sometimes, the vaster its implications.

The vow and the venture is that there is always an indestructible energy-ground of giving somewhere. We all emerge from this source, try to nourish ourselves and others from it, add to it, protect it, honor it, and eventually subside back into it at the end of our lives. It may be barely discernible underneath all the overt darkness and relentless loss. But my faith, or rather the faith I’m constantly regaining, tells me: it is a a giving-force-origin, a primordial generosity, imperishable, timeless, ageless, foundational. (Call it Allah, Dao, Nature, Cosmos, et al. But recognize it, or let it recognize you.)

I know little, except I know that it knows me, and it calls to me ceaselessly. It is all of what I am already, though my limited psyche can’t contain all that being and knowing. And it is what we can enter into, through need and supplication, time and time again, like into an underlying ocean of music. For it is there to steady us, buoy us, help us navigate and reimagine and reorient, and especially when almost nothing is left. All the Dead that have given us what we are and what we love is in it, too; their voices, so many melodic, restorative waves keeping us floating. I say all this as a slow epiphany given to me from others. From study, from teachers, from dreams, from friends, from art, from land, from love, from listening, in the best ways I can. To say it is one thing; to live with it and to live it, is another. The vow, the venture, the covenant, the labor. I say this as an epiphany that has only just begun disclosing its wonders to me. Each moment, another unfolding. Each hour, a teacher.

(Within the smaller, intimate event space of Voodoo Room in the House of Blues there is a permanent outsider art exhibit. I would like to learn more about this art.)

Many useful analogues exist in Islamic mysticism: sadaqa, or voluntary charity. Even more so, sadaqa jariyah, or “flowing, ceaseless charity.” A beautiful concept often linked to the image of a well built for a community — of a gift that gives and gives endlessly, even after the giver is gone. When I first began my conversion journey, right at the start of the pandemic, I read a few gems in a short, but heart-expanding book on Islamic philosophy called “A Thinking Person’s Guide to the Truly Happy Life” by Prince Ghazi Bin Muhammad:

• The Quranic idea of happiness means “uninterrupted giving.” It’s something that is nearly impossible to achieve in this life, but we aim for it.

• On the relationship between patience (sabr) and happiness: “After all, patience is a kind of generosity towards destiny.”

At this slower end of the year, despite all the hectic bustle of holidays and obligations and spending, I think of the patient, glittery mornings after the rain; I think of the wind that swirls and blows and eddies without needing anything from us; and I think of the steadfast promises woven into what a morning is, and is supposed to feel like; mighty, majestic Aurora in her soft ancientness and consistent outpourings of light. And how the cool winter air allows for more measured steps in sync with deeper inhalations. It’s a subtle, ever-renewable abundance and it’s asking me to stay open and attentive and forbearing and compassionate.

The darkness that occludes the giving-force is where our reflections must take us. Art helps us get there and beyond there without harming ourselves needlessly. So does faith. So does love. And so does winter.

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Loud, dark, experimental, angry rock music has been a passion since I was a teenager. It is one of the first, most enduring Gifts I’ve received from the Universe of Strange, Avant-Garde, and Rebellious Art. Later this Universe came to be populated with mostly Queer artists of some kind. This Art Universe keeps evolving and welcoming and consoling and empowering. This Universe will always be a home for me, one cozier than most.

I love many kinds of music, but there is something particularly satisfying, uplifting, and cathartic about certain hard rock and roll, metal, goth, and industrial and all their many noisy, dark sub-genres. Live music has given me so much spiritual abundance. Loud, passionate, rock music, performed live, among a sweaty, writhing sea of fellow enchanted lovers of music has been sacramental for me. Very little compares to it.

Over the last year or so, my good friend and frequent spiritual mentor, Joseph DePage has introduced me to specific sub-genres of metal music I wasn’t as familiar with, or perhaps had overlooked, such as doom and black metal, drone metal, sludge metal, etc. There are some painful cliches about people in their 40s ceasing to listen to new music. Joe has gratefully helped me resist this trend.

All this love of dark, noisy music might sound either unpleasant or strange to those with certain religious or mystical leanings. This is a longer conversation that has to do with how our beliefs and traditions can threaten to sequester and minimize us instead of opening us up to the divinely-disclosed multiplicities. This Vast Earth, borrowing from Ibn Arabi, doesn’t exist in its miraculous, intricate expansiveness to validate our narrowest, most closed-off versions of ourselves. Indeed, it exists to destroy those idols. One of my goals with Companion Moon has been to bring seemingly disparate worlds together, not out of some kind of heretical provocation, but out of a religious respect for Reality and a deep need for verisimilitude. This is what life is really like. And at its most realistic, life can seem heretical to any system imposed upon it. This is actually our cosmos made of many intersecting worlds. Once we realize that they are intersecting, then more gifts can circulate and more wisdom can be embodied.

Joseph is also a Catholic deacon, a brilliant letter writer and orator, a source of tremendous goodwill, humor, and kindness, and a friend to all poor, marginalized and under-served people in ways I can only keep aspiring to be. The music for him, as for me, immerses us into a world where we are given transformed feelings and expansive sensations. It gives us a home within a sanctuary space of fellow misfit art-lovers. He would likely chide me for overly complicating the experience through flowery words.

But I think he would agree that the music and the community it creates is ecstatic. Most importantly, not an individualist ecstasy but a communal one. As well, it is an ecstasy that doesn’t come about through spiritual bypassing and avoiding reality with its intrinsic pain, struggle, failure, and ugliness. Rather, an ecstasy that honors all of the many worlds that are, and gives room to honor and work with this diversity of expression and entity. An ecstasy hard to articulate unless you there among others, sharing in a strangely liberating darkness.

The nocturnal, ponderous, funereal aspect of the music is also faithful to Reality. We can honor the dizzying pervasiveness of suffering without being hopeless; we can sing and even laugh about the inevitability of heartbreak, loss, and decay without being morbid or cruel. Visceral art helps us regain a steadfastness, a spaciousness, a surprising lightness, too, and our navigational courage which this Vast Earth asks most of all from us. Of course, enjoying the darker kinds of art requires, as in all matters, discernment. Some musical acts we must eschew; some forms of expressions are actually toxic and dangerous and not at all liberatory. But for the groups we have learned to love, and the communities that they both nurture and emerge from, these musicians carve out an inclusive, mysterious ritual-space while weaving incantatory rites that allow us thrive off oddly liberating dark energies.

Heavy metal and rock music communities can be places of inclusive warmth, shared empowerment, and collective joy. Mystical communities could learn a lot from them. I find my spiritual meanings where the gifts of the numinous most powerfully are present. Often this happens in “non-religious” spaces, like rock concerts. This has been my experience ever since I started going to live shows. The intensity of the music not only reflects the urgent struggles of our human worlds; it also creates a portal into other ways of sensing, knowing, and relating. This is what musical ecstasy does: the emotional and mental strife of our comrades carved into vertiginous sound-scapes that invite us into a new, dreamier, and spacious dreamtime. And yet it can be painful for me to write about my appreciation for music. For my love of music hasn’t yet come with the ability to play any. Plus: ecstasy and joy evade commentary. The best approach to appreciating music in words is through poetry and fragment, paradox and allegory. Although I can enjoy reading reviews of albums, I’d rather read about what inspired the artists to make their music, too. In any case, to love loud, dark music means loving a mystical aspiration for dissolving and dispersing with others.

Dearest Joseph introduced me to The Flenser musical label and community of musicians, all of whom create “dark music,” in whatever ways you can imagine that. I saw two bands on the Flenser label in December alone: the “ecstatic black metal” band Agriculture perform at the intimate space, Soda Bar and this last week, amidst the gathering fog outside, Faetooth, a fairy-doom metal/doom gaze trio (pictured below).

Seeing Faetooth and a couple other doom-friendly bands at the intimate and beautifully-curated Voodoo Room in House of Blues the other night in the fog was a beautiful, joyful few hours shared with about a 100 people. One of the fans in the audience kept shouting “We Love You!” at Faetooth between songs. The band smiled at the raw sincerity; we all got closer, we swayed, we drifted into the alternating gloomy sludge and slow melodic chords and alternatively howling and dreamy vocals. Their Flenser-label mates, Agriculture, self-described “ecstatic black metal” band, put on a show a week before at Soda Bar that was even more intense. the band’s set. It was transcendent, which is a dangerous word to use, and requires some explanation but not now. This is a band that grew on me, especially with this new album, “The Spiritual Sound” which is, indeed, spiritual, and with wild guitar solos, howls, screams, pleas, and rollicking, jubilant yearning. Dark music that is soul soothing and stirring at once; music that extends the heart in communal directions.

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Another wonderful event this month was visiting for the 2nd year in a row the annual Yule party at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. This is a place I obsess over and which has quickly become a permanent landmark and refuge in the map of my imagination. (Some images and objects from and inspired by the museum below. Rather, some talismans from their gift shop.)

While I didn’t know anyone at the party, per se, I mingled with strangers and even, momentarily, stood across from a tall, grandfatherly man who looked like a world famous German film director, Werner Herzog — and it turns out, it was him! Regrettably I didn’t speak to him, but sort of acknowledged his presence with awe, as he sat in the corner of a little corridor among friends.

I spent a lot of the party in the museum’s now permanent Andalusian-Moroccan mystical space called A Veiled Gazelle, sitting in the sacred confines and listening to a quartet perform gorgeous instrumental music. Three times now I’ve prayed, quietly in my head, in this place, struck by the exquisite reproductions of Islamic architectural motifs and the breathless evocation of a mosque-like enclave. Last year, in this space, I listened to A Hawk And A Hacksaw perform Arab-inspired music, and this year there was instrumental music of a more classical and medieval bent, performed throughout the party’s 3 hour duration.

Not much is disclosed on social media about these yule events, and I was so absorbed in the music, that now I can’t recall who the artists were. One of them was named Josh and I think the group might have been something as simple as Josh and Friends. But I’m sure I can find out, maybe. They played a series of medieval, baroque, and choral-instrumental tunes on a variety of mostly string instruments. But also a kind of dulcimer, I think. With the help of their music, a meditative, mysteriously cloistered and theurgic space was created. A feeling kept speaking to me as I sat there, swept away by the strings and the mystical impressions in the room, all enhanced by little candles burning on each of the walls. The feeling said something like: this room and this music is actually a part of your mind you don’t visit often enough. Or if you do, not with the focused devotion it deserves. So in 2026 and beyond I will more deeply apprentice myself to the intersecting of other languages, harmonies, visions, and images that take me deeper into my boundary-less, borderless faith.

What did this mean? I’m still reflecting on it and will continue to be. It meant, though, that my mind — or a part of it — was awaiting a deeper commitment to its own (and not own) othernesses. In the swirling music, in the Arabic poetry on the walls, in the quotes by Ibn Arabi, in the geometric shapes, in the amber-lit serenity and the sense of a fountain beneath us sustaining our comforts, a vision of renewal for all of us, each entered into in our own ways, was given.

I basked in that sacred space with others, including some 20 something dashing intellectual types that reminded me of me and my friends when we were that age. Although these young people were perhaps better dressed than we ever were. Towards the end of the night, when they were outside and exalting over the evening I told them Werner Herzog had been there and they got as excited and jubilant as my friends and I would have been, too, two decades ago. It was a touching moment of meeting myself and my dear friends from the past, now transfigured in the present.

It makes sense that Herzog is a friend and patron of the museum. In his own words he is a partisan of what he calls “Ecstatic Truth.”The museum certainly embodies this paradoxical, semi-mystical vision of truth-telling and the curating of oddities and experiences. One of the most gentle and immersive exhibits seems almost to be directly related to his groundbreaking movie that I’ve loved for many years: Fitzcarraldo. I can’t say more except that opera and, perhaps, forests are involved.

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What was the night like, in a museum, after hours, with a select few, fellow nerds?

Saying select sounds elitist; to qualify, we selected to be there, by being members, like Werner Herzog is a member. Magical, yes. Those who know, know. But none of us know! The Mystery of what is there and what is meant by what is there, is more vivid in the after hours nocturne. In this museum, especially, one knows that the Enigmatic has been carefully curated and amplified. Conditions are ripe for its unending flowering. Wandering among exhibits I’ve looked at many times over the years: letting new light pour from them. Letting old memories grow new offshoots. The prospect of curious delight. The prospect of growing ever more curiouser from and more delighted by things, feelings, impressions that aren’t really done justice through logical, linear explanation. Curious joy/joyful curiosity as perpetual remedy. One could call it “the strangely beautiful” and the “oddly harmonious” or one could sing the praises of Nuance, as Thoreau might. Somewhere, in the translation of The Bezels of Wisdom, the voice of the greatest Sheikh says: “All existence is an imagination within an imagination.”

This is a mysterious replica of an even more enigmatic object. To understand more you’ll need to visit the museum. It’s what one might call an “ethnographic curiosity.” Or it’s a prank.

A lunar current surges through the museum space. This time I spent several minutes taking in a rather large globular model of the moon behind a glass case. It was almost too spectacularly detailed to move away from. No photos, but I bought this print of a drawing by an astrophysicist.

Likewise, the museum’s new permanent exhibit, A Veiled Gazelle, speaks to a deepening Sufi sensibility in the museum. A conversation with a museum curator at the end of the party yielded an intriguing invitation to offer my own thoughts on this exhibit in some form. I will see where this leads me.

Finally, an ornament from the Yule Party. This ornament is a talisman from one of their most famous and immersive exhibits that has to do with trailers. You need to see it to understand. Please go there!

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It’s time I close out these reflections, for tonight.

A friend was commenting online how the time between Christmas and New Year’s can bring with it in a kind of morose lull. Certainly I’ve felt some inklings of this, but I’ve also drawn from the memories of this month in rejuvenating ways. I haven’t elucidated all of them either. A few more:

• I threw my first house party in 6 years — a Yule party, in which I got to show off my beautiful fragrant tree replete with a brand new Sufi-Muslim Star and Moon tree topper. The party was truly inter-faith and inter-generational. Ages 24 through 78 were all in attendance and laughing uproariously. Friends who hadn’t hung out together in years were magically reunited. And the demonic parking in my neighborhood wasn’t too much of a deterrence. It was a glowing, euphoric, tender night in which too many cookies and too much joy competed. There is a magic to hospitality and to organizing gatherings and seeing how 20 odd people in a cozy, dimly-lit room will bring forth delight. I hope to throw some other seasonal parties in the near future.

• My administrator at work told me we had some money to spend for a special class I teach. What do you want to do with it? A month and a half ago, I said: let’s take a bunch of seniors and some other 11th graders to the San Diego Zoo right before the Christmas holiday break. Someone else said it couldn’t be done in such a short window of time. Never! they said. I’ll show you, I’ll show everyone, I retorted in my head. So I spent a couple weeks doing the endless paperwork, following up, checking boxes, and generally engaging in scrupulous administrative type work that my brain tends to reject. Then we all went to the zoo: 60 students and 8 adults and had a blast, after which I said: I can also do this kind of hard thing, too. My first field trip I planned. Not the last!

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Last thoughts for today:

Rather than ruminating about the gains and losses of the year, as if it were a self-contained, measurable field of enumerable, categorizable events, I will toast it for what sacred time it brings me closer to. I will salute it for being the soft, ambiguous winter pause that is happening about a month and a half before Ramadan.

Ramadan, the sacred season that always sneaks up on me. Ramadan, the month of transformation, too that rises above all others for me. For it was during Ramadan a few years back, my life changed like it’s never really changed before. That’s when conversion began. However, that was just a beginning. And the next one will be too. Many Christmases have passed, all of which knew, in their green, dark hearts, that one day I would also feast on the light of Ramadan.

So I’m gathering bruised hope and spring-like resolve. I’m leaning on memories like on old friends. And I’m leaning on old friends like gods. Everything that happens has some kind of potential. Friendships are intrinsic to walking out the door. I’m treating the darkness as potentially quite frightening but also mostly explorable, as long as I go forth wrapped in guidance, in patience, in generosity. And as a student of the Inayatiyya, I’m also drawing succor from the words of Hazrat Inayat Khan, who in the volume entitled In An Eastern Rose Garden, writes: “To mystics, faith is the only power that works through the whole creation. They do not mean by faith a belief in a certain religion or dogma or ceremony or book or teacher; they mean trust — trust even in the absence of reason.”

A very consoling pilgrim I met during a particularly solitary three to four hours of walking in the woods and without seeing any other people.

It is incredible to me that over ten years ago, with gracious funding from my graduate program, I set off on a month long amateur spiritual exploration of England. One part of that journey was walking the famous (and famously unused) pilgrimage route from Winchester to Canterbury (made famous by The Canterbury Tales, sort of.)

I spent 8-9 days walking about a 130 miles, getting lost a lot, asking for help from strangers, getting welts on my lower back from an overly-heavy backpack, and staying in very old, quaint inns at night along the way (for I wasn’t hearty enough to do wild camping.) Indeed, the trip was meant to be fairly cozy and comfortably athletic (despite one 22 mile walk day with a 40 pound bag). And through it all, an unusual sense of peace and lightness filled me. Of course, that’s to be expected!

One other miraculous consequence of such a month-long privilege was that I realized that the specific books I had studied that year with my amazing mentors, and the beautiful land I was walking through with those books reverberating through them, and the other poems and prayers and reveries in my head all cohered into a transformed version/vision of me. It was a version that felt like a turning, a flowering, a clarifying. And a version powerfully prophetic of later versions and visions, like this one that I’m living while telling you this.

What transfigured self shone through then? A questing-self beholden to an ongoing vision of pilgrimage, of pilgriming, as a way through and with life. Of the pilgrim-concept as an adaptable poetics of engagement and learning. An idea that has come to envelop so much and to clarify and reveal so much.

A book slowly arose from that trip and also from related trips. A book I’m trying to do final revisions on. So I’m sharing parts, now, from a revised journal of that long walk that is also a conversation with the “guides and spirits” along the way. All photos are mine from that walk over a decade ago.

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1.At my surrogate origin, Winchester Cathedral, I wore all the nerves of wedding day, marriage forever pending. From the future the wedding existed – a guiding image of union, of bees, of flowers, honey, head-dresses.

Now: cold, Gothic, empty interiors.

Grey, grizzly morning. From the outside, the gothic lines were stark, while within someone in the wings played gloomy organ music. The kind yet overworked vicar welcomed me, surprised that I’m doing my long pilgrim’s walk alone. They gave me a pilgrim passport and encouraged me, as I had heard to get it stamped at various shops and churches along the way. You might not see many people, he said.

What is the pilgrimage for?

Commemorating the death of a man. The ampulla or small leaden flask was an integral part of the pilgrim ritual. Once Beckett was murdered, a holy friend or companion was sent with a little vial to collect his blood and brains. Hence, the collection of martyr blood in small vials becomes a sign. A sign for pilgrims. Wayfaring with the blood and vital essence of another. The blood was said to cure a woman who was paralyzed. The blood was said to heal blindness. Thus the leaden bottle hung round the neck becomes talisman, a vector for miracles.

No talismans except this green-gold unfolding England.

The lone wayfarer without headphones, a working GPS, with limited technological distractions along the way. The wanderer’s heart flooded, every hour, with images of past loves now revived. I never want to be saddled with too many objects that I might have to think about. Never one to wear a watch. The woods and rivers we’d rather focus on – branchings of the mind but different minds, too – wearable gems for the eyes.

6. Naturing never witnessed, only swallowed up by—

Wonderful/horrifying sensation of feeling – of knowing! – you are backtracking.

The familiar gruesomeness of that same tree, that same vine.

Circular errantry: dream-logic. Comparing your footfalls amongst all the clouding flies with the little line by the water on your map. then discovering – a tree talisman, a shining hieroglyph in the woods – the distinct yellow arrow of PUBLIC FOOTPATH. And even better, when it occasionally arose, the emblem of a Green Shell. at first you can be consoled that the little walkway under the trees leading out of town is the right way…and then the right way disintegrates.

7. My Pilgrim Passport remains unstamped.

All the stamp pads, in churches, shops, and inns are dried up. Abandonment is harmonizer. I begin my walk with a more fruitful idea of what it means to abandon, to be abandoned. Vision depends upon neglect; being kicked to the curb, left in the lurch, tossed off, deposited. How much must be forgotten so what’s truly neglected can knock?

(Three of the books that informed/accompanied this pilgrimage.)

8. Early afternoon’s blond glow. Silken river and I strangely in sync.

Then — as the years outpaced these moments — the conversations between river and path became, itself, another friend to lean your voice on. Then I was moving like ancient water through city noise. Really moving, as if I suddenly understood motion and the colors she instigates! All movement is through the body of Spring – no matter what is dying and grieving, as I have not begun to. Primavera, eternal-sibling season, more than winter, more than fall – Florentine summer in England, and the June bug’s carapaces are teal and brass in the barley-breeze – winged coins of May clouding my beard –the month when Love hits a crescendo.

Over the shoulder, I read the book: “Lichen./Lion’s shin, oak-limb, tomb:/all acquire/a hundred year’s/skin (…) and this lovely phrase “An aerial green, white berried.”

(Three others that were always present — Johnson’s book a book about walking in England and such sublime, earthy poetry)

This is June, and between two red gates are written the sunken prints of wanderers, thieves, and the faithful. Bewilderment, crime, business, and faith: same stumbling at alternating tempos on down-snaking avenues. Who is to say who has the most faith, when they all rub shoulders on the same rough road? Filled with maps that I don’t need-And my heart? My heart is pending.

9. The thief and the wanderer and the bride, the priest and the drunkard and the serf are the chorus. All their histories spectrally accompanying us. The fox’s tail in the foliage – a glyph of future romance. Can foxes get lost? I get so easily lost on the streets I claim to live on. How long does it take until we claim to live somewhere? Maps are crushes which are lovely to look at but unstable and unreliable. And then there are those people who are also maps that help you lose your way. Instead of technology, I have hardy, crafted paper tattooed with gorgeous approximations. All the Vicar could provide at the beginning was a very rough, hand-made map, almost a love letter. He seemed embarrassed but then we all seemed embarrassed not to have reliable coordinates. Maps are art brut tattooing. Lovely and intricate ordnance maps swell my heavy bag.

14. Waters recede into red-and-yellow layered pastures – ground is all fast convergences and dispersions – submerged in my own footfalls I scarcely register the slippages until a lone, charcoal-filigreed tree in a gold, crow-dotted field strikes me with its fiery solitude – stop to take photos, of course – evidences of thunderstruck combinations – My own solitude rather mild by comparison – What, alone, do I think? Have I begun to understand my own contrasts? –

15. Slowing the breath, thoughts follow, start to bend and pulse like branches, gifted with a fragile blossom or slime mold. The coincidence is musical, not auditory. If you love, and you reverberate love in every corner, shit is no detriment. Beholden to the cosmos in a cow’s eye or a painter’s hands overflowing what I can tell about any whole—which is already almost nothing.

And why write when one can walk, scrawling the way with chatty Boots?

16. We who love words, the great romance is with silence.

Which hasn’t happened yet. The courtship is interminable. The hush I’m finding as I move, still human, yes, as I hearken to what I could have been, the hush is all the books I ever read in their original timber. Still unable to exceed or quiet myself. Even among all these un-sortable branches tending toward quiet. The wood-world is all leaf, wind, pebble, rustle. Blossoms luring us in into wordless roaring spirals.

17. Winds and streams with their subtle harmonics. The currents undergird the wind with velvet coolness. A maple yellow hush muffles the mind. Or reopens it in unusual ways. Some minds act viscous, others twist like rapids, and still more flow in unhurried streaming over crags and gulches. I want to track the minds I loan to these meadows, these tawny hills and gravelly roads, minds I haul like ballast along these ancient ditches, along these ancient *harroways* -How I love this word.

Minds that were loaned to me by other fields, nearly resembling these, by other minds that moved like fields over me. Minds that yearn for half-hidden paths; or ones that needs obvious paths.

Psyche is a maze of grass.

20. Today’s trail is hair-raising and hinter-landish. An obstacle course but more improvised, contingent. We are deep in sheep country now, my darlings. The need to say We as if my Bag and I are now conjoined. But I’m already carried in the immense rucksack of voices and guides. All my bag can aspire to is but a fraction of your scavenging vessel. But more than the Bag: the Sky, and her reverential Grasses translated as Clouds. These are the sky’s fields for they shine with Her spring tints.

Earlier this morning I wrote: “The Heart is a burden lashed to the Back” – and I wondered how the heart/the soul is a gift and a burden. To grasp this must be an athletic encounter – thoughts now muscular – as in Artaud, who I can’t imagine enjoyed having a body, but lived dreaming of ways to exceed it.

Thinking: mourning our inability to become trees.

21. We know that they communicate at all levels: terrestrial, chthonic, celestial. That they are as rhizomatic as they are arboreal. Their root-world is poem-work roving across all distancing, discoursing. Any tree is Hekate, the Three-World Navigatrix, where Three is an unmeasured but disciplined “open relationship.” Leaving, a verb of intricate entanglements. Mind dapples in the wind.

(These three prose books by poets were the most formative. To think about them in dialogue is a longer essay. Each book is a wonder and an exploration of what it means to journey, to excavate, to pilgrim.)

To any place bring a mind as occasional as the leaves, the chalk, the yews, and the streams – along rhythmic paths hugging salt-edges – a grove on my right clustering up a round auburn hillock – realize memory as myth, fiction as food– glance into the moment only as it sinks – into tints of cabbage, bronze, oak, and quartz – the alchemy of this passage or corridor – I live somewhere – on falling foot and sweating back, driven by chatty heart, gossipy lusts, penitent mind – near the sky yet not quite in it.

How close we’ve come to certain souls!

How close I’ve come to my own, which is not mine. You want to believe at every moment there is joy in not having a soul but being had by souls. All intimacies embryonic. Now, here, down this unfurling trench, into Leaf’s ever-widening mouth, ever more branch-cradled, our proximities are immeasurable –

(given a quick glance: all is leaves)

My mind is a guttering candle cupped in a gathering breeze; she gathers my thoughts into the shapelier flames of Others. What is that sensation crouching between two oaks? Looking like the color of two minds blurring together in urgent enigma.

A question persists: Is there a real Pilgrims Way or is it really Saint Swithuns Way and North Downs Way? Might I be the first to do this as I am doing? Each Way overlaps into each, until the other recants its identity. Often, the Pilgrims Way becomes a ghost under a highway or a hedge. Certainly one trail is better mapped out than the other; one more distinct than the other. For each you will know by the emblems: the green shells of the peregrine, and the green arrows too. Walking I remember the poet Bonnefoy looking at the paintings, reading the Egypt book, haunted yet eddied onward by the Phantom of Presence, by the navigational backcountry always directing him and always hidden.

28. But for the birds that mingle with the branches and blur with the leaves, and the smaller mammals I cannot detect in the undergrowth, I am alone (yet accompanied). I yearn for mysterious gates to slowly, furtively unlatch. Or at the least, to reach their thresholds and linger long in the delayed (decayed) fantasy of opening them. The slow timbre of gates is exciting, like the pulsing click of a compass on a sparklingly clear night when the Milky Way flows overhead. An interior gallery of heart, I want to unlatch, as if I sense, have always sensed an opening there, an embrasure – such words are the dowsing wands for sensations that are prophecies. The verbs that reenact this journey begin to sound strange again. The Way: constant and unerring, even when missing or just hearsay.

36. Doubts about whether we are taking the “right way.” To apprehend The Original Way. There are Originalists and Contextualists out here. My motives are transposed onto this Pilgrims Way even if it’s not the right one. I love that the “original” route conceals itself, unravels from the main route. It persists more as legend than route, having succumbed to construction, to modern modes of erasure, concealment. The legend tugs at the soul. Some village was built over it. Some shop now sits on top of it. The Old Road is not there anymore except in rare, indiscreet edges or scraps. The feeling as I take to the wavering chalk ridge is that down below me, perhaps behind those tall black-green hedges is the more authentic way; or a more rarefied path that always accompanies me, and that, occasionally, overlaps with whatever more pedestrian way I’m on. For the book says this can happen: a fact I only register later, after the original way has torn itself back into hiding and secrecy.

37. A half-concealed path always accompanying me and that, sometimes, I might walk on: this image is a comfort, as much as a lantern resembles a friend.

This comfort echoes my astonished reading of Bonnefoy’s Arrieres-Payes, his celebration of the perpetual hinterlands that he is always seeking or apprehending. The Hinterway, then, is my version of this vision: a trail that is very old and very storied, that has been anointed by the feet of the strangest of wanderers and outcasts, infused with the expectations of glorious quests; the undisclosed passage that forever haunts whatever path I’m currently on; not that the actual path I take, by choice or circumstance, negates other, untold paths but that a few of them, like the Hinterpath once in a magical while overlaps with them.

We want to journey in such a way where the subtlest paths seek us out. Give away all books save five, keep one sturdy iron pot, one rugged knife, one satchel that can hold only trustworthy and time-tested things. And then set out towards the roots of the situation or forest or meadow. A problem is waiting, so are friends and codes. The knife need only be symbolic, whereas the bag and the pot will be put to daily use. Wear the kind of jewelry that will arouse the curiosity of swamp sprites. Write down only the names inside the names. Entreat moss and bees and foxes and moles. Surround yourself in contrasting fragrances.

38. Initiate of Apprehension.

You taught me that the skin’s strength is in its infinitesimal mosses, her finely woven grains. Apprehension is precise: meaning first to grasp and to seize; but then it seems she began to mean something darker, to be grasped, to be seized. Subtle winds.

39. Chapels along the Way.

Holy interruptions: chapels and churches – cresting hills – little benches with ruminative men and women drowsing on them. Between stone and stained glass dwells another silence, a heightening of nature’s buzzing quietude– lens to feel silence more – the word “between” or “betwixt.”

40. Contrasting hues.

Sea-undulant cornfield. Inkblot birds on quill-shaped branches.

In the gloom of the old chapel, among the crooked head stones, nearing twilight, autumnal black birds huddling in grim rumor. And I’m reading happy prose about God and Her treasures she has given us. The labors of the Ecstatics: like Thomas Traherne, 17th century metaphysical poet, as my mentor said, a strange precursor to Thoreau and Dickinson. His prose poem masterwork, Centuries of Meditation reads as if it was written on a long ramble through England.

Reciting Traherne, thinking of Hilda, smelling San Francisco, conjuring every lover.

Divinity explained in the lingo of desire: insatiability, treasures, ecstasy, bouquets, fountains, gardens. So innocent: “To make the best things most frequent” and the best things are really keeping to the way, giving attention to the paths, contouring passages for others. As well Traherne’s ecstatic theology necessitates others: Images, Companions….” Want being the parent of Celestial Treasure.” Reading Traherne in dusk cemeteries, writing in the margins: great beating of wings in the trees at twilight, edges of the graves sharpening, not wanting nothing else but air and light. “Every morning you awake in Heaven…” pg. 124 “diversity of other persons.”

41. Merstham to Sevenoak. For two miles I walk slowly, breathing deeply, because I’m out of water, although I probably could have begged water from the man in his yard. Living in cities makes me reluctant to ask a stranger for anything. That’s another way to heal a city: not be afraid to ask for water and to give water. But I do not. The couple at the train station confirmed that I wouldn’t be able to get a train. The bartender, as concerned and conscientious as everyone else I had met, called me a cab, while a long-time regular, Gordon, who lives behind the bar, bought me a pint of ale. His friend said: wow, he hasn’t bought anyone a beer in over ten years. It’s because you’re a pilgrim. Disruptions can be met with a cool heart and insolent gratitude. Demanders and interrupters can be met with magical nonchalance. The walk to Wrotham notable for a glorious overflow of Fields, with luminous indigo clouds terraced on the sky, deepening the sky’s reach and range, Sky reaches you, finally, the endless umbrella.

A word so evasive it makes room for loving.

42. The Bull Hotel is 500 years old. The bedroom is heavy black oak, panels of cold boulder, part dungeon, part brothel, temple of strange rejuvenation. Legs remember ruffling fields with their little gates for mouths. They forever repeat, but they are each different, infinitesimally singular, each field mothering its own precise galaxy while still closely resembling the one in the adjacent field. So many sunken lanes of flies and mosquitoes, but then: ruby-red butterflies curlicuing in the air! The Bull Hotel is a place to love old feelings.

43. Childhood ghosts are inhaled.

When the weedy crest goes violet by the hidden sun, a familiar musk arises. I remember this night-smell from my roving jaunts as a scabbed-knee California boy. Somedays it feels my life reaches a peak when I’m breathing in moonlit trenches where mold and celery and camphor grow – and it is hard to keep a record when your mind and your feet are outpacing each other. Seminal affinities. One is full of leaves trying to flower, the other full of wings straining a carapace. The skin effects of the word, sensational: my intestines stir, shoulder blood dances; baseball field webbed in moonlight; humming coyote caverns; the boulder labyrinths of a coastal, misfit’s kingdom.

Another fable tells us that the yew trees indicate the location of a pilgrim’s route. They are planted to signal a path or way. More thorough evidence suggests that yews just love growing there, as pilgrims might love walking there. If love doesn’t intentionally show us a way to somewhere else, we still follow what we intuit, which turns out, in the end, to be love—

Land sensational with insects and blossoms. Prismatic cloud-paints. Exalted by the ancient word Sensation its refusal to become an idea – moods and impressions exist that pass through a body from the outside & from the Inside’s Outside -– as if each hill’s color, and each nerve’s eye, augurs a changed feeling and a charged impression – this valley contaminates me with color alone – warm yellows and cooling purples. Emotions. I sometimes feel are less ancient than Sensations. They sometimes feel like manufactured feelings – not the immediate inscape gifts of land and cosmos.

58. “Waymark posts” where signs are. Fingerposts: tall posts with fingers indicating the direction. “A chevron in the relevant color.” Oak Fingerposts. Some are in the process of being “signed.” Stone milestones along the road, like tombstones, engraved with distances from origins and distances to destination. An exit becomes an incantation. In Alesford there are four tea rooms and five pubs; River Itchen possibly associated with Celtic goddess Ancasta. A lone inscription testifies to the existence of this goddess.

The name is ancient and the meaning unknown.

60. The Way is actual and walkable, and the way is also a diagram for other actual events and passages. Allegory and actuality all mixed-up, imbricated, contaminated: this is why it is good to walk, even if it’s just your mind or your heart that’s walking, while your feet and ass are idle. When I looked at my pocketful of flint I thought perhaps this is it, all I can take from this journey, all that must remind me of what I had moved through, listened to, and felt astonished by. And slowly, when I got home, when I found new homes, the flint will flee from me into the soils and gardens of other moments and movements.

As it should be: rocks and shells held firmly only to fly.

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End: In the Cathedral, I arrived, “completing” the journey and I made it for Evensong.

Canon Clare greets me, embraces me, and, because I am a pilgrim — how I embarrassingly present myself as such!— she leads me to the normally barred underground many hundreds of year old crypt chapel dedicated to Mary, and before the Blessed Mother, she prays over me as I quietly weep (not so much for me, but for the Dead I love and loved) and in her prayer, the part I have never/will never forget: “May you tread lightly on this earth.”

Remembering, as I leave, and as I always begin to leave, Traherne: “Your enjoyment of the world is never right till every morning you awake in Heaven.”

Part One: What is this? How do we go? What can we bring?

It’s ok, we’re all tourists anyway, we’re all just passing through, my friend once said, on a magical day in Bolinas, when I expressed some concern about being a tourist. It was the way they said it, and the context in which it was said that made it feel true. I miss them and wonder where they are now.

That life is a kind of journey is a common assertion. Just as often, it can land as a cliche. The so-called beginning and end of this journey are mysteries though. Many other mysteries modeled on these primal ones intervene: Love. Suffering. Victory. Loss. Desire. Failure. Betrayal. Reversal. They can all seem, in their own particular ways, like births or deaths. So where is this journey of life going exactly? It’s not like any other journey that we can compare to. Except that all (most?) journeys are contained within it.

Then there is the incomparable silences of the nonhuman cosmos. The slow or sometimes abrupt dispossession and dissolution of all that we care about. The overwhelming awareness that cruelty, evil, and our collusion in harm and destruction knows no end. The fact that once we are bereft of all that we thought defined us, there is still something unnameable and immeasurable that enfolds us. Sometimes, too, a cloud of intimate witnesses. Blessings bloom as mysteriously as trials. A great Hush outlasts all.

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To “travel well” is one of the goals of the Sufi training I’m undertaking. A Salik, or student of Sufism, also means traveller or wayfarer. The question we have sat with these first few months is:

What should we bring on our travels?

(Some suggestions so far: Laughter and tears, in abundance! Certainly some choice words, songs, images, signs, objects, and symbols that have made impressions on our hearts. Memories with their guidances and poignances. Our will, fortified by discipline, hardship, and wisdom, and made merciful by compassion. The companionships we have cultivated and the great loves we have co-created. A calmness of mind, an openness of heart. In the Sufi tradition, it is only the human heart, and not the mountains, galaxies, or oceans, that is capacious enough to contain the magnificence of God. Or the Real, if you prefer.)

As for the art and books and songs that we love and return to throughout life, they exist in physical forms so we can refer to them, again and again, as reminders and invocations, meditation tools and healing incantations. Our lives become libraries and museums and concert halls; likewise, our souls. Traveling well is curating well which also means sharing well. Above all, remembering well. Ideally, after enough time spent with aesthetic treasures in their physical forms, they create angelic sibling images inside of us. Angelic in the sense of beneficent guidance. (Although actual angels have been on my mind lately. Not the ones you might expect though.)

My love for visual art, despite my inability to create much of it, was renewed during the awakening of my Islamic spiritual path. And not only the art, but the harmonious presentation of the art in one’s home. The home becomes an experimental site modeled on the sanctuary. A home is where the imaginations of others can enter into dialogue with the home dweller’s own Imaginings. Thus a home is partly inspired, thankfully, by the art and visions of others, as is the self, as is the communities we enter into. The prophetic saying, God is beautiful and loves beauty, applies to every facet of life. We are all of us called to and implicated in this adage.

So a vivid joy over the last few years has been going to Michael’s Art Supply store where I work closely with a framing expert there to choose the frames for my art prints. (The fact that Michael’s exists in a ramshackle, seedy, quasi industrial part of town adds to the charm of going there.) The three different framers I’ve worked with have all been intimate, uplifting aesthetic collaborations. I imagine it’s similar on a smaller scale to working with an interior decorator. In deciding on mattes and frames, we volley suggestions back and forth and I defer to their expertise while they appeal to my personal tastes and aspirations. In that amiable blending of opinions and tweaking of details, new layers of beauty are created. Perhaps, too, there is a vulnerability in sharing the art you love with a stranger. Are they now no longer strangers? I hadn’t really ever thought about these things until a couple years ago my oldest friend Chris insisted I get some art framed. For which I’m very grateful.

Recently, I finally got four prints framed, two by the artist Nabi Haider and two that I purchased at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. All four prints speak to my deepened sense of Sufi Muslim mysticism. But they also speak, generally, to my love of beautiful images as signs or reminders of primordial truths. And yet, now looking at them I also recall the wonderful conversation I engaged in with the Framer that one afternoon several months ago.

From the museum: “This image of the Museum’s Tula Tea Room is one from a series of highly detailed graphite drawings by architect and author Mark Primack. Most of the drawings in this series are based on found images—often from antique postcards—of sites and subjects that support Mark’s theoretical work. They are drawn freehand, without grids or other graphic aids, working from right to left. Unlike others in the series, Mark’s drawing of the tea room is taken from a photographic panorama he created in 2010. The drawing is reproduced here as a metallic duotone, alluding to the original graphite surface, at original scale.”

Having art in my home lets me pause and converse with ancient apprehensions shaped and reimagined by fellow seekers. They are there, for as long as I live there, as companions and reminders — which, as species of gifts, are the most essential ones we can receive. One day, someone else, Inshallah, will inherit my art that hangs in my home. How many times by then will I have conversed with these vivifying images? For now the art is one way I speak to the Reality that has no Name but that speaks to us in innumerable Signs, “both in ourselves and on the horizons.” The fact that the Real not only speaks to us but nudges us and goads us is a daily reassurance that my art gives me. At the same time, guests in my home also enter into relationship with the images on the walls. So meaning circulates and new signs and stories emerge. A detailed yet shadowy image of a tearoom may, itself, inspire a moment’s reverie over a cup of mint tea. The sign then is of an oasis.

Yet a sign isn’t always or even usually a myth or a story. It’s more like a poem, maybe, or a prayer or a talisman. An eruption of redemptive meaning through an orchestrating of energies. A sign indicates a possible or proximate meaning, or points in the direction of something else. A sign acts more like a suggestion or a direction than a command, maybe. The Sign is Guidance while the Myth is an Order. Maybe. There is also power at play in signs, but a flexibility and a malleability too. A person can paint an arrow on a tree and you might follow it, despite not knowing who put the arrow there, why it’s there, or where it’s taking you. On the other hand, you might follow something else that doesn’t look like an arrow at all. Money, I suspect, is both sign and myth. An oak tree might embody a myth, but not all oak trees do.

Perhaps something beautiful, like an oak tree or a cloud, is a sign of Beauty, which, as an archetypal concept, is itself a sign of a deeper cohesion that may at best be nameless. Often a sign might merely point deeper into its own referential substance. The more of the crow that you mull over, the more crow-meaning is revealed. The same with one’s house, or romantic partner, or best friend, or favorite wilderness, or one’s community. Each a fountain of inexhaustible meanings, each meaning a sign pointing to other ones. (I should probably think, too, about how signs produce sensations. Another time.)

In some cases, signs are symbols but not always. The signs mentioned in the Quran are often exemplary objects and entities in the natural world that contain many layers of meaning. Even something as small as a gnat, as the Quran states, can be used as a sign by God. I ruminate about signs not as a literary critic or a semiologist or a philosopher but as a writer, poet, artist, and mystic. In most of these, a beginner. My concept of signs perhaps amounts to a loosey-goosey animist-Hermetic approach. Really, though it’s Sufi/Quranic/Islamic and maybe it’s just closest to the kind of mind that loves reading and making poetry and yearning, hourly, for what is beautiful.

This lovely print from the Museum of Jurassic Technology is a more artful, Islamic-inspired rendering of their famous aviary roof tea garden — which is one of the most serene places I’ve ever been. Unfortunately I’m uncertain of the artist and the print no longer seems available on the website. I will investigate further when I’m back at the museum.

I discovered Nabi Haider’s art work on Instagram and I have to say that has been one very valuable use of the social media platform.

The first print of his I purchased is a celestial incarnation of Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, PBUH, cradling his famous sword Zulfiqar. He was the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and, likely, the first male to accept Islam. The second print I bought months later, is of Imam Husayn, Ali’s son, (peace be upon them) and the great martyr and symbol of resistance to tyranny: in this picture he is in the very midst of being martyred as a paradisal garden sprouts from his severed head. The adventure of cruel death becomes a prayer of magical flourishing. Both Imam Ali and Imam Husain are warriors, unmatched for their courage, nobility, mercy, and wisdom. They are also spiritual beacons and, in the imagination of many believers, cosmic forces. To many Muslims they are heroes and saints in a contemporary world that feels devoid of such human luminaries — especially the kinds that stand up to fascism, fanaticism, genocide, oppression, and capitalist nihilism.

From the artist’s website, here is a lovely description of this painting “Oasis”:

Imam Hussain is referred to as the “Prince of Martyrs,” (hence this equestrian portrait) as he embodies grace and divine beauty even in the peak of human suffering. In Karbala’s harsh desert wasteland, the gruesomely beheaded Hussain becomes a wellspring of Paradise, a garden oasis which millions find refuge in every year during the Arbaeen pilgrimage—to rejuvenate souls deadened through indifference to injustice, to weave through pale, dry earth as a vine twisting with pain, grief, anger, righteous indignation, hope, beauty, and more beauty. The shahid—the martyr, the witness—not only lives eternally; he also renders life unto those who feast from his garden. He sprouts with twelve pomegranates: eleven of them carrying the bloody tears of his mother, and one of them still a bloom, yet to ripen. The seventy-two lost that fateful day of Ashura become adornments, delicate blossoms embroidered into his royal gown. Wherever Hussain wanders, his sky scatters the rains of clemency. The noble steed Zuljana, though his eyes are blinded with the blood of his master, dutifully carries on forward into the realm of all possibilities.

Heroism, wherever the idea arises, comprises a range of both fantasies and virtues. Thinking about it requires discernment. So do terms like “warrior” and “nobility.” There is no escaping ideology. So we try our best to get to what’s sincere and life-affirming through poetic, ethical interventions. Saintliness, despite its own ideological baggage, is maybe a more apt way of thinking here. Here is a lovely meditation on Imam Ali’s own saintly attributes by my friend and teacher, Omid Safi.

When first learning about Islam, what I immediately loved is that heroism in the tradition is based on loss and sorrow, restraint and patience, mercy and clemency, tenderness and empathy — as much as it is based on physical strength, self-defense, martial skill, risk, and courage. The virtues on the battlefield, then, are refined by the virtues one cultivates in all other areas of life. How one treats one’s loved ones is a precondition for the nobility one might demonstrate in battle. The ardor of romantic love, as many of the prophetic stories have shown, becomes a template for friendship and general magnanimity — and vice versa. Most significant, though, is the way we treat strangers and even adversaries: it seems that from this supreme test of virtue and beauty all other tests and quests emerge.

Each virtue alchemizes others. A fuller heroic picture emerges, then, where all the divine attributes are blossoming in collaboration together inside a human soul. For Sufis, saints and prophets and “friends of God” are those eternally present beings who are kaleidoscopic exemplars of virtuous excellence. While no longer in this earthly world, their energetic presence endures in our spiritual cosmologies. They act as both myths and signs, transmitters and embodiments. In another prophetic story, Prophet Muhammad PBUH explained the reason for his existence: “I have come to perfect excellent character traits.” This Arabic word for excellence also implies beauty. So we are back at the source: to make beautiful as praise to the most Beautiful is one of our purposes. But also to know Death, to learn from Death. To die before you die. This, too, is the labor.

Both Imam Ali and Imam Husayn, peace be upon them, are spiritual figureheads in Shia Islam spirituality. My inclinations, lately, are leading me to learn more about Shia Islam, while also recognizing that all these traditions are woven into the same expanding tapestry. The horrific violence of Husayn’s martyrdom, happening after his loved ones were killed or enslaved, is remembered and honored in the biggest annual human gathering in the world, the Arba’in pilgrimage. Ali’s legacy is that of a noble, courageous, loving, and deeply wise “friend of God,” who was also a fearless yet just warrior, a compassionate and diplomatic political leader, as well as a transmitter of esoteric truth and spiritual insight. He too became a martyr in his 60s while praying at the mosque. These saintly figures show us that a meaningful life is a composition of the most varied attributes of both beauty and majesty, including ones that seem to be in opposition.

I love the cosmic and generative energy in these works. The fantastical and celestial colors and tones of these paintings bring exuberant consolation. They suggest that humans, despite what happens to them, can be and already are involved in elemental and cosmic processes. Indeed, the heroes and saints revered by Sufis have deeply personal relationships to the worlds of animals, birds, trees, and mountains. Towards the elements they are friends and collaborators. Their individual deaths as humans are but a redirecting of sacred vitality into a cosmic ecology.

These paintings also encourage pondering the use of color — i.e. the wonderful blend of colors in the painting and how the framer and I chose frames and mattes to complement them. If colors are signs, they are in the cosmic and celestial register of signs, along with certain kinds of music. A topic for another exploration. I also love the textured frames we picked out for them, as well as the mattes which compliment the colors in each work. Color and texture, light and shadow adding to the depths and resonances.

From the artist’s description: “Maula-e-Kainat: “Ali Ali nazar aye jidhar jidhar dekha”— “Wherever I looked, I could only see Ali!” The above Urdu verse—popularly recounted in Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwali “Shah-e-Mardan”—is a reference to the Prophet Muhammad S.A.W’s night journey to Heaven, where the figure is claimed to have witnessed Ali, his spiritual heir and closest companion, in every nook and cranny of Paradise. Such was the love of the Prophet for Ali, to the point that the shape of Ali lost its physical, earthly bounds, becoming one with the Universe, the Kainat”

Sufism for me is the most comprehensive and inclusive guidebook for traveling well through Life. Adventure and conflict are central to how Sufis conceptualize life. They are not there to be transcended but to be met in the wisest ways. Yet sometimes wisdom and beauty entail sacrifice and annihilation, as the saints have shown us. The straight path shapesshifts into a labyrinth. The forest alters into a desert. But we have a string of beads with us to help us not get lost. When all is gone, we are left with prayer, a poem, a breath of pure sincerity. And the enveloping and responding sky.

I always pause on that troubling word, adventure. We seek it and we recoil from it. Usually we want adventure as a game and not brute reality. What is worse: boredom or risk? No telling until it happens. Adventures come unbidden of course. The adventure that life most certainly is as an always-ungraspable, ever-shifting current of contradictory, unstable forces. Never mind the pain of loss, of physical and mental suffering, of disorientation and dispossession, of betrayal, jealousy, disease, and misunderstandings; these are all stations on the way, we can tell ourselves. Easy to tell if telling is all we’re here for. As charged experiences they are to be mined for wisdom and told about later. Telling of them in the heat of the wound, the sense of adventure is lost and only agonized perplexity shines through. Yet even here we must sense the heart-expanding adventure: we must tell the poem of the event, the prayer of the encounter, the incantation of the moment. There is much ambivalence in these thoughts. They are beginnings.

My life makes more sense and brings me more peace when it unfolds as various quests and journeys. All of them are mysteriously (or playfully) related to each other, no matter how disparate they may seem. And all are beholden to a unifying vision of a Sacred All Pervading Reality. (Or God or Dao or the Real. In prayer, I say Allah and the 99 Names, too.) Travel is the norm, then. And traveller’s metaphors work for every situation. This is the ideal personal cosmology that I often fall short of honoring. Within this ideal frame, though, brokenness and errors are stations along the way. Purposelessness is redeemed in imagined adventure, even if it’s only taking place in one’s solitary room at night. For in a room there are books and songs. There are unquenchable signs. There is always some attempted description of infinity.

Part Two: Wayfaring and Questing via Poetry (Tentative Notes)

We return to certain poems as we do to certain paintings: to receive the spiritual sustenance they contain which help us be “children of the present moment.” We also enter back into poems as if they are sanctuary-spaces and even temples or mosques made of language. What then does poetry include? Signs, symbols, or myths? Yes.

Moments, harboring those ideas, and more (not ideas.)

Quest-surprises, hidden in moments, seed-seconds.

Any moments, in a certain light or angle, illumined by awakened subtlety.

Instances & what/how they include at all levels of being and un-being

is what I think when I hear “poetry.”

Assemblage-collision. Encounter-ache. Observation-unfoldment.

What they include in/at all strata and with/through all energy.

Poetic language resonates with the concrete vocabulary of journeying. So a “river” or a “cloud” in a poem has a tendency to find its way into an actual afternoon we are ambling through. Relationships between the read and the real. The word “afternoon” has already accumulated the autumnal spices and valley tints from thousands of poems. The world is already poetic, or pre-poetic, and written poems are how we acknowledge this heritage of beauty. We are here, always, in poetry, an art of the unfolding day and the deepening night; poetry that is also fieldwork in the esoteric and the invisible. I think we believe that poetry can achieve more than it actually does in this world dictated by money, division, and abuse of power. But we keep going because we know there are resting places worth finding and sharing.

Poetry is aspirational theology.

These are some books of poetry that have been close at hand during the last couple years and have jolted me into thinking about living, traveling, prayer, and sign-making/sign-reading in new ways. I offer some brief appreciations in anticipation of an anthology or breviary of poems that are paired with paintings or buildings.

The incomparable Fanny Howe died over the summer leaving a body of work I feel I’m only beginning to truly explore. Here is a hard-to-find book, Night Philosophy — a title I’m envious of, for the Night, for me, has been an almost inexhaustible compendium of signs and allegories and stories. This hybrid collection brings together, in an orchestrated fashion, parts from other books, including the prose poem “Bewilderment” which is also an essential poetics of spiritual wayfaring. Central to this specific book, in heartbreaking and rebellious ways, is the figure of the Child. The child who reveals the lies of the adult world of power and cruelty. The child who nests in the hidden night, it would seem, suppressed and submerged by the dominant forces that keep the world burning. This is an experimental gathering of suggestions and provocations; it is also an entreaty to think, again, of innocence as a horizon and something we can still protect.

The Lyrics is a collection of 6 long poetic sequences that are each enactments of spiritual discernment and reflection in certain places of repose along a journey. Howe’s Catholicism imbued most of her writing and she was always referencing her spiritual mentors, including Simone Weil. The first sequence is called “40 Days” and seems to reference the duration of a retreat in a monastery or other place of worship. Howe’s mysticism is political, agitated, messy — and defined by stark contrast and renewed struggle. The peace of a monastic retreat is in dialogue with the calamity and decay that defines so much of life. This is why she is so reassuring and so wise to me. She never turns away from the cacophony of the world. Her solitude is always in transit and with others, the strangest kind of others, too.

Pierre Joris also died fairly recently and I still feel sadness at his passing. Seeing him online often, there was also something deeply wise and beautiful in his face. Although I never met him, his books, especially of poetics, have shown me how the poet and critic can be a pathfinder and bridge maker among different linguistic, religious, and cultural worlds. Joris was at home in German poetry (he was a famous translator of Celan) as well as Arabic and Sufi literature. He brought these disparate contexts together into a vision of “nomad poetics” which I’m tapping into again for a new project. This thin, beautiful book borrows from the mystical poetry of the great Sufi martyr and mystic, Mansour al-Hallaj. Inspired by the 40 spiritual stations that Hallaj describes in his obtuse and cryptic poems, Joris’s poetry enacts a hybrid journey through each vertiginous station. The resulting text entails a co-creation of a Traveler that blends the Self of the writer and the Self of the long-dead mystic. In their colliding tongues and visions, new poetic constellations emerge. The book is a model for how the Dead voices can be revived in our poetic experiments. Just a quick glance at these stations makes one wonder how these states of being and perception are undertaken in our own peculiar creations/quests.

I remember when I first read Jean Valentine. It was an unforgettable moment that had that angelic quality to it, which is also evoked in the cover of this book, The Messenger.

My friend K. Prevallet had shared a Valentine poem, “Sanctuary,” online, and as I read it I heard it in my friend’s reassuring voice. The poem evoked so much of our friendship and our shared imagination of spiritual vision and community. Valentine was getting us, showing us a new light on what we are/can be. With Valentine’s work, I first felt that language comprises not just signs but also voices, textured with noise and interference and insinuation. But voices that are contained within real, enfleshed Others, both proximate and remote. A swirl of witnesses and gossipers. The language of voices is pointing, always, otherward. So the page is shared with a complex lineage of interlocutors. This brings reassurance, as well as ghosts. What is it about conversation that can immediately soothe the heart? Here again, a strange community persists. The title, Sanctuary, is a sign-word I’m always returning to, attempting to make with others. Vocational-word that sees me.

I am humbled by the life and work of Lucille Clifton, a poet I’ve been late arriving to but whose words have floored me again and again. Finding it hard to speak of her in anyway that does her justice, I will say that the intensely vivid, visceral economy of her poems feels like the kinds of revelations that would descend in stages of a difficult series of quests. These are poems inked in the fire of stars over a canyon of glittering sand; they are also the blood epiphanies of a visionary struggling to build and shape sanctuary with others in this violent, patriarchal, predatory world. Her poems call upon many exemplary mystical and political figures and martyrs. They are furious and prophetic, cutting and tender. I will teach them, learn from them, and refer to them, always.

Diane di Prima will always be a spiritual sibling-heroine for me, a mother of the heart, a wily polymath of mysticism, eroticism, poetry, and activism. I’ve written a lot about her and more is on the way. For now, I’ll say this weird little book, Dinners and Nightmares, I love for its earthy matter-of-factness, jagged humor, and childlike sincerity. These too are spiritual parts of the journey. Food and the accidental hilarity of it. Eating and the chaotic beauty that might come while eating with others. I’m also reminded that Sufism/Islam also comprises a very intricate and intimate poetics of food and nourishment so when I read poetry, now, I especially love seeing references to eating and feasting and hunger and sustenance. More on this another time.

These two books make me miss my old, beloved teacher Donald Revell who I haven’t spoken to in a long time. He introduced me to both of these poets during my graduate schooling in Las Vegas. Levertov he introduced me to as a religious poet that I could learn a lot from. And I did, and continue to. Foregoing commentary I want to present her long poem that I’ve photographed in its entirety from her Collected Poems. This is the encapsulation of the spiritual journey of life, the pilgrimage that is the source for all others. No better example. Read slowly and return to it often. A life poem.

Her many other poems are lush and beautiful guidances but this long one is the Salik’s journey as temple, as mosque, as sanctuary, as grappling with signs. A message of it? That maybe we all need to relearn the alphabet, whatever that means to each of us, at whatever station we are at and whatever challenges and gifts confront us. How this is done is the work. Don also taught an entire graduate poetry workshop using Robert Creeley as model and mentor text. An aching, poignant quality of understated sincerity, musically conveyed, colors Creeley’s poetry. In this, he is unrivaled. Don wanted us to know it and feel it. He was Creeley’s friend; he learned from him; they loved each other. His poetry captures the ardor of moment-by-moment encountering. The bewildering gift/affliction of mortality. And the music of striving. Perhaps the tender yet sly smile of Creeley on the cover also adds to the poignance.

Heroes

In all those stories the hero
is beyond himself into the next
thing, be it those labors
of Hercules, or Aeneas going into death.

I thought the instant of the one humanness
in Virgil’s plan of it
was that it was of course human enough to die,
yet to come back, as he said, hoc opus, hic labor est.*

That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking.
This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil
is dead now two thousand years, yet Hercules
and the Aeneid, yet all that industrious wis-

dom lives in the way the mountains
and the desert are waiting
for the heroes, and death also
can still propose the old labors.

(Commentary: *Aeneid, 6.129. When Aeneas asks the Sibyl, a priestess and prophet, how he might visit his dead father in the underworld, she answers that the descent is easy, but to return -- “that is the task, that is the labor.”)

I can’t read this poem out loud without remembering the lecture Don gave us about it and the shattering emotional energy we all felt in the room that day. I think it was the same day when Don said, as a gloss on the poem, “In real intimacy, nothing is missing,” which I’ve repeated many times in my head ever since. What I can say is that this poem goes directly to the heart of what I was trying to say about heroism and saintliness. There is a gathering of exemplary guides across space and time. And the land itself implores us to take up our noble tasks. Our death and our labor are inextricable.

But even so, there is nothing I can add to it. It is one poem I will keep taking with me.

Part Three: The Cry of the Threshold and the Silent Life

We are here at the end of these considerations. I end with a place of sudden peace.

On this journey we strive to harmonize action and repose; to embody rhythms that honor our needs for movement and labor and our needs for rest and contemplation — as well as the many blended states in between. Earth knows it before we do. We forget, always. As we try each day to remember to find the rhythms, Signs emerge as guides. A poem can be a Sign. Art, too. And places. And what places are made up of, like doorways and passages and mesmerizing walls and serene corners.

One warm, summer afternoon in Istanbul, two years ago, we were told to remember the twists, turns and unique markings of the marketplace alleys. You will get lost, we were told. We were looking for a hidden place of sacred repose. After many smells, much noise, and sweaty jostling, we encountered the dim, discreet horseshoe-shaped doorway. Such a doorway beckoning on the side of the crowded market-alley is a sign of a threshold. Not just any threshold. But the one that discovers us and invites us into a soothing type of contrast. This is how the world writes poems for us.

Up the dark passageway to a second story landing, we found the courtyard of the famous mosque, Rüstem Pasha. A fragrant, spring-like silence filled the spaces, despite the roar of the hot market just down the darkened stairs. Here is a place of repose in contrast to the teeming world below. These opposites that are here to kiss each other in poetic provocation.

Here we are with my fellow travelers taking in the unbelievable, heart-softening, soul-ventilating beauty of the mosque. Just moments ago we had been along the marketplace alleyways of the bazaar overwhelmed by the sensual melee of spices, foods, shouts, laughter, babies, cooking smoke, and seekers. A light joy and delicate contentment descended here that I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Another image of my dear friends. What an incredible, inspiring, loving group to travel with! What open and compassionate hearts that helped me grow and become and keep growing and becoming! MashAllah!

I returned, later, alone to sit and pray. I returned one more time after that. I enjoy returning to places that have seemed to have sprung directly from my imagination.

On that last visit, a man slept next to me, his back against a pillar. Nobody cared. He looked happy and at peace. This is a place of restoration and renewal, concealed like a seed in the chaos of city life. A deep oceanic hush pervades the enclave. A place that eludes being written about but can be written towards, alluded to, evoked, suggested, and hinted at. A poem without words, except on the dazzling tiles: these old, sacred incantations to the One. Here there is an intimacy that is complete for as long as it lasts, until you descend back into the bustle. But the remembered intimacy endures.

I include this place as a living, constructed poem in this attempt at a three-part essay draft. For its beautiful and pacifying attributes act as striking contrasts; the place is kin to the kinds of poems I seek solace from, and the kinds of journeys, trials, and stations that compose a Life. I imagine a breviary of sorts where journey-poems are complimented by places and images. A personal book to both memorize and take with you. Perhaps to give away. Memories to bring to blossom again in other lives.

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Over the last couple years, as part of my discernment and studies as a murid, I’ve been studying the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan, via his own words and through the writings and teachings of his grandson Pir Zia Inayat Khan. One passage from a just-released compendium of lectures by Hazrat Inayat Khan, In An Eastern Rose Garden is what I want to end with because it captures, I think the spirit of these attempts at an essay or a gathering of ideas and inspirations.

In a lecture called “Silent Life,” he writes:

“It is the surface of the sea that makes waves and roaring breakers; the depth is silent. So the depth of your own being is silent also.

And this all-pervading, unbroken, inseparable, unlimited, ever-present, omnipotent silence corresponds with your silence, like the meeting of flames. Something goes out of the depths of your being to receive something from there, which comes to meet you; your eyes cannot see and your ears cannot hear and your mind cannot perceive, because it is beyond the mind, thought, and comprehension. It is the meeting of the soul and the Spirit.”

I imagine these two silences, this meeting of flames, a lot lately as the winter months come faster than I anticipated. The image is profound and awe-inspiring. For silence has never seemed so pregnant as of late. When night comes, and a general quieting of things descends except for the trains, I reflect on life’s relentless fluctuations and recurring strivings; and how amidst the cascading distractions and instabilities, there is always, I know, a reachable repose, a kind of watering place in the shade, a mosque above a market. And a requisite threshold that cries out to us. Perhaps reaching it feels rare on certain days, but it is always traceable and, eventually, discoverable. This is the faith that is our birthright. This is the primal language of making and sharing, of poetry and art. It is what we are born to never forget so we remember together, and build our lives with these reminders.

Last summer I briefly revisited a beloved place in my heart’s spiritual geography. Indeed, I went there after a wonderful retreat with friends and had an intense, bug-and-sweat filled night at a remote cabin processing all the gifts of the initiatory week beforehand, before revisiting the artist colony I stayed at 9 years ago. Woodstock is the town I am speaking of, nestled in the Catskills, and famous for a musical festival (and yes, we know it didn’t actually happen there, in this exact town).

Upon Overlook Mountain, overlooking the town, an old experiment endures in new forms, small and inconsequential, perhaps, in the larger, longer view. But a place where, one summer, I began a lot of the creative and spiritual work whose tracks and paths I’m still following: Byrdcliffe Artists Residency. There for one month I immersed myself in feelings of old growth forest spirituality, imbued with the witchy, the hermetic, and the animistic; as well as feelings of a paranormal companionship which eventually grew into the book I’m now trying to get published. In short, an obsession with ghosts, and with the voices and stories that haunt our minds. Like Spicer, maybe, I took my mind to be a radio of sorts. Perhaps the night forest was the biggest transmitter.

I took some of the notes from that month and fashioned them into a kind of hybrid-essay-ghost story, that is in that book, and that is “all true” in the most poetic sense. One or two more parts need to be added. The photos below are all from the cabins, studios, woods, and spaces of that summer 2016 residency. All the while, this song by beloved Roky Erickson plays on repeat as I revise.

The same fire lookout I climbed this last summer 2025 and in the summer of 2016.

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Airs of Byrdcliffe: Ghost Summer Notes

1.

Greeted by a lover of horses and the band Ween, the vivacious caretaker of this wild art place, said to me: “This place is haunted but let’s not talk about it.” I managed to ask them what they meant: the buildings? The woods? The mountain?

Something like that, they said.

But then we really did agree not to talk about it. Of course, everyone else was already talking about it, including the three writers who I met at the residency. They were all highly sensitive to spectral phenomena. Not just the buildings, someone else said (which are ominous even on their own) but the moss and the boulders and the trees and the crumbling stone walls in the forests.

What were those stone walls for? What had they been for?

You will need to find the man who knows about the cairns. Although he is sometimes not taken seriously. Here in the Catskills and in this simple, rustic old farmhouse, I feel the vibrations of islands. For it begins (always) with what is underwater and what keeps returning to us as subconscious source and archaic angel.

2.

Late May, I’ve just arrived in Woodstock, New York. With about twenty other painters, writers, sculptors, and musicians I will live and work in a hundred year old former Utopian art colony on a forested mountain. A community of old sheds, cottages, cabins, workshops, former barns, and studios. Some are in ruins or disrepair or just very ramshackle; some have been partially restored by new generations of artists. I’m here to revise everything I’ve said about islands, poetry, and love. Much obsessive research remains, including delving into several volumes by H.D., like A Tribute To Freud, Helen in Egypt, and Trilogy, and other books by Leonora Carrington, Yves Bonnefoy, Dion Fortune, Gustave Sobin, Ronald Johnson, Lucille Clifton, and Kaja Silverman. Each book becomes a supplement to memory, or a perverter of it, it’s hard sometimes to know the difference. And perhaps making peace or playing at being at peace requires that we use research to refine our memory of things. Then only the half-fictive, semi-dreamt voices remain. A catalyzing truth instead of a stultifying one.

The kind of room that pervades all the many stories we choose to recall and reenact.

Fiction as a theological force, too, because of all the fantastic tales that accompany you into the thick of things. To be in a room in the woods among ominous trees and sinister breezes. What might be allowed to happen. What unlistened-to-corners of Psyche are given new permission to hum and warble and tell. The books in their oaken spirals of world-making, favorite pages that we leaf though again and again, as under the sheets with a flashlight (never necessary, only affected). Trees and books and wind-voices: Faith & research, antiphonal greens of the night-colored sanctuary.

The passages and corridors of White Pines were all exactly like ones I had dreamt before ever setting foot there.

3

Haunting means a lot to me, because logical, linear spacetime doesn’t align with how I think and feel. Certain places, people, and events cannot be exhausted, even when they are gone or deemed “finished.” I’ve always lived the conviction that everything and everyone feels innately infinite.

We’ve visited this place in wardrobe dreams. So much creative freedom in saying “we,” especially when there’s only one person in the room. My small second-story corner room is strangely familiar, as we mean when we also say uncanny. This is the kind of room where the deep and subtle events unfold. To come home to a place that is both chillingly weird and sensually consoling. There is a narrow, trapezoidal window facing the woods. It seems to frame an imposing cluster of trees. I am high enough off the ground to watch the tumbling roof of leaves and branches rush off into the horizon. My stomach feels electric with the knowledge that this place is oversaturated with spectral densities and chthonic energies. Even if it’s only my sensorium in its imaginative excesses. Spiritual-romantic drama tends to happen in these types of rooms. A low-ceilinged, dim, second or third story room. Just as often a corner room, because you don’t want to be hemmed in by other rooms. We want proximity to the liquid mysteries of the night. This is where I will sleep and daydream when I’m not writing in the scarier-looking buildings.

The art colony began as a romance of privileged dreamers. An experiment, noble in intent, and meant, if it lasted, to be for everyone, everywhere. Which makes it, of course, utopian. To make an art of life could be, should be everyone’s gift. But the world is too hard to make it so.

As I’ve stated and restated: This place makes me want to seek out ghosts. But a place so obviously haunted-looking is probably not the best place to find a ghost. Either to see one or at least feel one: I wonder which is scarier. Or if fear as I’ve imagined it will have anything to do with it. Better: the room promises an encounter with the “accomplished Guest.” This Guest might already be the Host, so mutated is our etiquette. To master hospitality, then, is to make home with others in all possible worlds.

Also a form of navigation.

4.

Between brisk jaunts through the woods and quiet mornings in my cabin and the loom room, or on firefly-lit strolls into town, I return to this (evasive) art of navigation. A highly complex artistry I’m bad at but will devote myself to. It’s time I start practicing things I’m initially bad at.

And I can think of no other words, except Beauty and Love, that indicate all that life and death require of us. Navigation? An archaic energy-skill that connects as intricate root work far-flung places and times, reduces harm and wound while increasing healing and forgiveness, brings the distances into focus while patching rifts, alludes to effortless flow and unstinting fighting in the name of justice, not gain. Knowing what is West in the dark, which direction the wind is blowing, why those trees are crooked, what this patch of earth will yield, what the mushrooms portend, what the clouds over the mountain might signify. To know the crossroads and the nexuses and the suppressed sanctuaries; to drink deeply of the genius loci, wether in ancient mountain woods or 7-11 parking lots.

Mythic paranoia as well, as if I need these places to be connected, however loosely or fraudulently. I need resonances and affinities, especially when they don’t seem obvious. The Old Island undulating its stones under the woods of the Catskills. Woodstock as Cornwall of the Hudson. The unifying serpent spine of granite and coral stretching across oceans.

The alluring wet green woods of Overlook Mountain. A photo I never tire of.

5.

The woods of the mountain move ancient and fertile. Among the trees I am using my ears almost as much as my eyes. You train the ears to respond to rustling and swishing and susurration. It’s the silken sky language blowing eternally beneath human ones.

Writing becomes an uncanny art of listening to what seems neglected and too subtle. Whether images or rhythms from lives that preceded mine, or inklings of a deeper harmony that syntax only tries to mimic, this primordial listening of the body entire is the only way that writing makes sense here. Especially moral sense. Why moral? How these trees watch me, I think, must come from a deep and abiding sense of rightness, of harmony, of goodness. Some might laugh at this. A tree is good, though. This is another kind of island in the woods. This island spine reemerges in select places. There are whole hermetic sign systems about it. Across fallen logs and shattered stones, we roared through the matted pine corridors, lungs and limbs outpourings of the drenched mountain’s wood. Moss and mist in contiguity in those tight, emerald galleries. Every facet recollects us; you photographed moss, boulders, mushrooms, dewy petals – the symphonic array of rain-given colors – refracting the collage of our nerves. The forests are collections of apprehensions, like our brains at certain times of the night are an anthology of scrambled codes.

6.

The nights here pass thickly on the wet, jade mountain as openings seems to form in the mind. I am coming close to a confrontation with something darker than this room. Awake now past midnight and the winds are screeching and whistling and the dense woods tremble and moan. Those tall trees facing my window are swaying in such a way that they appear to be concealing some animals that I cannot name. Not surprisingly to anybody, and a fact almost too obvious to laugh at, a film crew will start shooting a horror film in White Pines, the large farmhouse-studios, so other arrangements for the writers will be made. Luckily, the supervisor secured an unoccupied cabin in the woods called Wake Robin a couple hundred feet off a dirt road, and thickly mixed in with the trees. I’ve just now spent an afternoon sitting at the desk inside it. A mostly blue, squat cabin with a brown roof, slightly askew, the foundations sunk in the humid wormy earth. Within, empty and smelling piney and cool, creaking floorboards, bare robin’s egg walls. A nearby creek cannot be heard here, only a fan inside, birds, thick and rustling trees. A cardinal, rare and momentous, dashes like a thrown scarf through the trees.

When they were shown Wake Robin, the other three writers immediately declared their refusal to use it. They would make do elsewhere. Their reasons? It was unquestionably haunted, they told me, laughing at my inability to see, to feel, to hear, to know. I who had always wanted to feel the supernatural, to sense or see ghosts. It had never happened to me, only loaned words, atmospheric paranoias, and too-subtle sensations activated by a romantic imagination.

Not yet. So I had full use of the cabin and I didn’t really feel afraid. Not at first.

One of the unsettling embrasures in Wake Robin that suggested ghostly activity when my friends beheld it.

7.

As I sit in my empty cabin, pretending I’ll be able to withstand the incursion of a ghost, at least in the way that stories and movies have made me imagine it will occur, I’m also shaping memories into new forms. Somebody is already green and insistent in these pages, begging me to pay tribute to the times we spent together.

That timeframe is an amulet. And one that was full of magical material.

Things: I am not called to think about them, I am called to think with Them. Then to entrust these thoughts away from the thinker. The Material Realm is unrelenting, and it wants to blind us. The Good demands we become experimental archaeologists of the Is and the Was, whose vitals are blended. To hold a forgotten thing like the eyes of a flower in the face of a beloved -- knowing that those eyes are unfocused until you look into them.

Was it a flower? Was it an eyeball? Was it the face of the moon? A continuity of islands in how, like conventional surrealists, we conflate and blend phenomena.

8.

In my small, eerie cabin I am remembering the oddest details I can’t place: cherished boots. The sweated-on leather. Perhaps the now deceased person who haunts these other pages. Socks too, how I would hold them to my ears. I love watching my new friends take their boots off after a hot mountain ascent. We love the respiration of the freed and wriggling toes. Somebody taught me to cherish the musk of ecstatic movement, no matter the identity of the ecstatic. Of turning the sensual bouquet outward into other forms, too. I loved the scalp sweat that tasted so electrifying in the room’s dimming blues. Excitement in the the musk of grapefruits. We loved the window’s placement against the city’s gathering murk: lunar cinema. This cabin too, a theater. How you clean your sea-splashed sunglasses on your torn Joy Division t-shirt. And I love the copper dish that cradles them when you’re not wearing them. On this mountain, each You remembers a different romance.

You and Yours, mingling in branches.

I love that everything I love is so easily misplaced.

But the dream always dizzyingly reorients us, a maze of mirrors and windows.

The Loom Room: a living artifact of utopian art-dreamers.

The dream last night awoke me feeling the outside wood converging into cryptic messages. I keep adding to the notations: seek the hills of any situation, but also the fertile ditches that ease one’s descent. In the plains you encounter bare, un-helmeted power and blossom. The Groundless breathes Weather from three directions: the Underworld, the Earth, the Heavens. Hekate’s artistry is emotional agility and spatial wizardry. She is the goddess you loved most, possessing the skeleton key of navigation. (Later I learned about Al-Kidr who seems to share affinities with Hekate.)

9.

During the day, nobody dares disturb me in my ghost-filled writing cabin. At Wake Robin, last night I crouched on the patio among a confused settling of insects, dust, acorns, and bark. The whimper-thrush of trees and wind overlaid all. I keep believing a vision or feeling of an apparition or specter would be a gift. For a ghostly encounter would confirm something about the Otherworld. Or confirm something about “This World” as being a bridge or a doorway or simply, comfortably, cozily, part of a lager, more sprawling house whose rooms we can’t always visit. The God that keeps building rooms onto Her house, rooms within rooms, cellars within parlors within passages.

Wake Robin, the “haunted” writer’s cabin.

Meeting a ghost might rewire certain parts of my brain and imbue my faith with awe-struck discipline and heart-expanding gratitude. Though I might not say this to people who have actually seen ghosts. Many people I know, most of them atheist or agnostic, have seen them. They either want to tell me about them or don’t want to mention them. Did it change who they were? Not really, they said. Wake Robin – a bird and a state of attention – a place where my words regressed to their infantile days in moss and rock and feather and spore. Then, reemerging as other words imbued with phones, memes, rumors, letters, lists. The forest glen became the office cubicle. The child learns to live and grow up into a too-quick mind.

10.

The secluded cabin: a subliminal radio. Shelter as resonance. Nesting as nexus of transmissions. The centerpiece of so many horror films. At twilight, silver vapors pushing dark green wood down. The pines and oaks look cut off at the waist or at the knees, depending. Peace of my lantern-lit porch. Sitting in the warm dark, fireflies swarmed, air dark yet glaucous as if with a powdery waxen sheen. A sleeping porch, they call it, to ease the body closer into night. My friends were likely correct: right where the bathroom dipped, a deeper, more resonant darkness murmured or trembled: perhaps some young oak has been walled off there, still pulsing, still pushing sap into the enclosing walls and foundation. I sense a loving presence – for love is nothing without the alien. Which is a statement that sounds poetic and final, but unrealistic to put into practice.

My notes begin to accumulate images from my cabin séances: black dogs, copper keys, bows and arrows, gardens of dismembered statues, torch-lit caves, and a festering green light that sometimes darts and sometimes flows – but always lures. My empathic earth, all this resonant flesh showing me that writing — that language, poetically played with — is a veil for sinking. If we must become detached from the already-goneness of our desires, let many other things, once insubstantial, now magical, catch us on the way down.

Wake Robin at night.

11.

Every day after my cabin mornings, I am in the woods, wondering about the stone formations off the trails, between the trees. (For some reason, I forgot to photograph them.) Cresting a hill, the formation appeared– a craggy boulder sitting in the topsoil with a rock wall sinuously trailing behind it like a tail. The tail was wider at the ground and peaked at the top and extended about fifty feet behind the boulder. If you followed the tail’s tip a couple minutes through the forest, you would come upon a nearly identical formation facing the other direction, its tail pointed at the tail of the first formation.

There off the trail, winding through the stone walls, a figure in a black hat. Was this K., the man with the theory about these formations? The rogue archaeologist? His belief — not accepted by the mainstream archeological community — is that they are the remains of a tribal civilization that existed in the area before European settlers overtook the region. Romanticism; a fiction that can fill a life.

12.

The man begins to recite from this book: Everyone has their personal inventories that betray a hidden community. There are almost twenty different sites in the eastern Catskills containing rock formations such as cairns — circular stacks of rocks — both large and small, massive curving walls, rock chambers, and “serpent effigies.” I won’t belabor you with details but these demonstrate proof of an ancient civilization with an advanced cosmology. A hermetic sense of the world. They monitored the star’s movements to create alignments between landscape features and man-made monuments. This civilization tracked the path of the sun during the equinoxes and solstices and the location of Thuban of the Draco constellation, according to Kreisberg, and created monuments correlating to these heavenly bodies. They built stone effigies of turtles and snakes and marked the location of underground waterways with cairns.

There are always countenances that precede ours.

But the rock walls and cairns in question do not align with property boundaries, and do not seem to serve any functional purpose. Many of the Catskills cairns, including some at Lewis Hollow, marked areas of permeability in the ground, K said, places with underground springs or rivers not far below the surface. The purpose of marking areas was not to locate water sources for irrigation or drinking water, for the Catskills are dotted with lakes, making the scoping out of subterranean water unnecessary. No, this was part of the native peoples’ religious beliefs. I have found it is in my destiny to revive an ancient religion concentrated in these stones.

Like many ancient peoples, the inhabitants of the Catskills viewed existence in three plains: the human plain, consisting of the ground we stand on; the underworld; and the onion-layered skies above. Placing the cairns at areas of higher permeability helped them indicate an area where there was less of a barrier between the underworld and the land of humans. The “serpent effigies” are reconstructions of the constellation Draco. Water brings us closer to the other worlds.

13.

In the forest surrounding Wake Robin, strange entirely white stalks had bloomed overnight. Another sign of a haunted earth. Ghost plants, or Indian pipe, these ghastly white plants lived as parasites and not by photosynthesis. They grew so quickly and so obscenely. I crouched by my painted stone face and took photos of them, as well as the orange newts that scampered over the rotting logs. The word is a refraction of one grey-green rock stained with T-shaped pink lichen. Held aloft the branch-light makes the pink almost white. Moving painted stones around into faces on the ground, stirring up leaves with a stick, sitting on a lichen-splashed boulder in the sun watching the Joycean dappling of the leaves, growing vigilant for cardinals – a red feather reconnaissance. The tensions from listening to my mind and the woods at the same time, sitting among chorus, wandering green and dark, stroking silken tufts of moss, tasting wood wind with wet bark: an orchestrating of competing and contrasting rhythms. Moss is lovely for it conjures delicacy, smallness, consoling intricacies of the micro-laced world. The word fine is beautiful for it means so many layers. Subtle means finely-woven, of speech, embraces, fields, or garments.

14.

Web-laced mahogany rays sliced by coal-dark branches. The rotting stump I sit on to move stones while also washing my eyes in the “dancing coins” of canopy light. Every forest is Joycean, by default. Everything Joycean is also Beowulfian, Homeric, Sapphic, Vedic. Every tree ramifies ancient songs. If I’m lonely, I also remember that this feeling must be impossible. Simple things recall me, like stones and twigs, awake yet reposing in sun-dappled shadow. This forest is vintage; her beauty, alchemical. I’m not sure the forest could inspire a mistake. Trees are already home. Birds and the lights they dishevel are never alienated.

15.

Bachelard: “When we discover a nest it takes us back to our childhood…to the childhoods we should have had.”

The next day, in the swampy woods, the greenness after the storm is profound, luminous, heavy; new moss and lichen spread across the wet bark while glistening, orange newts scamper over the rocks. The jarring arrival of orange, via newt, via lichen, in these otherwise green and silver and brown woods! Orange becomes a variation of green in these hothouse mountain conditions. Something moving among leaves startles me. I had that uncanny experience of the Scottish “grue” – as poet Helen Adam calls it – when, for longer than I thought necessary, I inspected, without understanding or identifying it, a rhythmic, twitching movement on the ground. At first I didn’t see the source, only the crushed leaves and fallen bark pulsing all on their own. Then, after gently moving a leaf away, I saw it: a black, bulbous horned and pincer-prodding beetle-type-creature the size of a baby bird. It was really that big – and vibrating and expanding its body towards some glutinous, fertile ends. My revulsion upon seeing this creature was unusually disorienting. Shivering, I ran off, fast enough to trip on a log and fall. The forests, secreting, writhing, having been fed voluminously by the storm, testify to cosmic forces of replenishment and renewal in spite of the ever-naïve predator-pedant human.

The Green Man followed me on the mountain: a prophecy of much to come.

16.

Walking at night, with no streetlights and no flashlight, and forest growth reducing our statures, the darkness of the mountain engulfs us. It is night of a disorienting degree. My friend and I observe that it is impossible to describe the dazzling hue of the moonlight on grass. Colors seen from space stations. If a quasar had cartilage. If silver-amethyst is a vapor. When moon glazes the clearing at night, its only cinders, traces: phosphorescent ash. Photographic negative hues. At twilight I hope to see the hem of a hunting cape flash through the trees or hear the panting of a black dog. We keep imagining the times when caravans went by night merely by the radiance of the moon. What did we lose thinking we needed more?

Something has been following us since the blessed islands. Or the islands have shifted and kept pace with my quests. Wherever I go, some ancient neurosis follows. The desires of my guides and companions are for a Magic that is the culmination of all other pursuits; something none can possess or master, ever, but might possibly graze, or have it graze me, a unity-through-multiplicity that can be bathed in without water and brought to blossom in any situation. On the summit, red oak, red spruce, balsam fir. Mountain, the theater of these invisible flowers. Some have called this magic, navigation. Many magical texts are couched in seafaring metaphors.

17.

An unsettling event happened the other day on the mountain. I might even call it shocking. I can’t think of any other event that I’ve witnessed to compare it to. It happened on the same day I tripped in the woods while running. My head came very close to meeting an upturned and jagged spike of wood that would have caused serious harm. Somebody else that day slipped in a creek and hurt her head. An eerie, anxious electricity in the air we later reported to each other. Mischief is natural, a part of the lymphatic system of nature. That afternoon, I decided to ascend the very steep road towards the summit of the mountain upon which sits a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery. The monastery, itself, is directly right next door to a Christian Orthodox Church. It seems that there was a conscious recognition that this mountain, like so many others, is sacred terrain, and conducive to various sacred rites in hallowed proximity. On the way up the mountain I saw a “Fire Investigation” truck driving fast towards the summit, and, maybe before or a little after, I smelled something burning in the air. When I got in sight of the trailhead parking lot on top, right next to the Monastery, I saw a police car and a Fire Investigation car parked in front of some other cars. As I got closer I realized something strange had happened: there were four cars parked close together by the Monastery sign, and they were all in varied stages of charred demolition.

The one car, a VW sedan, parked closest to the monastery sign was a completely incinerated husk of a car, blackened, melted, stripped by flames and reduced to a skeleton. Where the engine once was, the Fire Investigation man quietly and carefully investigated, trying, I assumed to deduce some kind of reasons for whatever had happened. The other three cars around the exploded car appeared as if parts of their fronts and sides had been semi-totaled and all their windows were shattered, too. An orange-robed, friendly-looking monk from the monastery calmly watched the investigator, as did a very befuddled police man.

Everyone locked in expectant silence which made it even more unsettling. I couldn’t understand what had happened but a pedestrian nearby explained that somehow, after the family had parked their VW and gone hiking towards the fire lookout tower several miles away, their car had exploded. The orthodox priest speculated that maybe when they had claimed the fire tower they had actually seen the plumes of dark smoke coming from their exploded car thereby fulfilling the original purpose of the tower.

But there were no fatalities? I asked, uncertainly. None, she said. How did it happen you think? I asked. Well it’s possible it could have over-heated, someone said. But does an overheated car simply detonate like a bomb? It didn’t seem likely. Faulty wiring, then? So, I asked, the family is out hiking and doesn’t know yet that their car has exploded and that’s it also wrecked the three fancy cars around it? No, she said, they have no idea. And I can’t imagine how they will react when they get back.

18.

What happened when the family came back to find that their car had accidentally exploded? Perhaps they learned, to their shock and horror, that it wasn’t an accident. Or it was half-an-accident. Or simply a mystery that one day they would forget. More probable, I was told by a local, was something in the weather and something in the car’s wiring had encountered each other in combustible fashion. I’m not sure I understand this explanation but maybe it suffices?

We imagine one of the Tibetan Buddhist monks or an Orthodox priest volunteered to drive them somewhere safe and far away from their now mutilated carcass of a vehicle. They knew of a retreat space where this couple or family could recuperate and maybe, at some point, laugh at their good fortune. For they were not inside the car when it exploded. They were walking towards Echo Lake. Their strange tragedy is a time that has little to do with the Fabled Islands. Yet still it is a memory we associate with islands hiding in the Woods. Perhaps it is a memory we have of idling on the threshold, as, in their case, the threshold separating the moments when their car was un-exploded and after it exploded.

19.

Always the “researcher,” a life blending piety and paranoia, would I ever finish this book? A book which must contain all the undreamt places that kept accumulating in the submerged universe we were born to protect. Rather, each moment, more facets and corners are dreamt, so how do the words keep up? A book I had brought with me, but had forgotten, seems to present itself on my little desk the morning of the day I heard a voice in the cabin. A real voice. The book: Flesh of my Flesh by Kaja Silverman.

A book of critical theory, but written in restrained, slow, anecdote-driven arguments, with the clarity of a journalist, the eye of a film critic, the totalizing vision of a theologian. Succinctly, although incompletely, I can say the book is “about” the philosophies and storytelling concerned with unifying analogies, especially concerning humans and our sense of being and finitude. The cover painting: Gerhard Richter portrait of a woman tilting her head to the side. Her expression is awe-filled, complicated, insinuating, and strange. The theme of Orpheus pervades the book but more importantly: the theme of the “marginalization of Eurydice.” In Silverman’s oracular ensemble, one woman stands out, someone we hadn’t known until reading this book: Lou Andreas-Salomé, the Russian-born psychoanalyst and writer, who was affiliated with Nietzsche, Freud, and Rilke, among others.

She says: our similarities must be acknowledged without smoothing out our differences. Finitude is the call that we can’t but respond to: the Other’s Death. She returns to an emphasis on retro-vision: “a redemptive power to this kind of looking — the capacity to make the past happen again in a new way.” When we turn around and embrace the ‘partner’ we have repudiated, she writes in her book on Freud, “all the vanished people of the past arise anew.” Thus, “Everything derives from the same Flesh” as we are fused in an “unfinished universality.”

20.

The most recurring incantation in all her writings is that “everything in the world is connected to everything else. She calls it in a disarmingly simple way “identification” To identify with someone or something in the Salomean sense of the word is not to transform the imagined other into an image of oneself, but rather to feel one’s togetherness with it in an ‘unfathomable totality’…It can be affectively registered but it cannot be thought.’

From a letter she wrote to Rilke (could as well have been written by us): “Word for word I could have repeated to you what you said to me as a confession of love: ‘You alone are real to me.’ With these words we were wed, before we had even become close friends. And we became friends hardly by choice but rather through a subliminally consummated marriage. Two halves do not seek completion in each other. But a surprised whole recognized itself in an unfathomable totality. So then we were rather like primal siblings, before incest had become sacrilege.”

Above all though, I learned about Eurydice, how she is more important than Orpheus, braver, wiser, more of our primal mother than anyone. She knew something that haven’t been be yet able to hear and to understand.

And that voice at night? Concurrent with the lit-up eyes of a raccoon or some other animal between the trees? I haven’t yet been able to describe it. Maybe it was her.

21.

The journey of retreat always ends, even as the places and voices still haunt.

What rhythms from long ago do I need to let overtake my words, contort them, and make them move in ways that are, at first, unusual to me? Or must they begin in the body, my body always a supplement to land, sea, and air, as this cosmos is the home of all the words that came before us and we are merely borrowing? Another’s life choreographs new movements in your own. Not finishing anything would be the proper courtesy I owe all subject matter. The more I leave unfinished the more movements are given to me. Completion is a capitalist illusion. Especially when everything is witnessing through me, seeing how their own unfinished lives are still birthing new blossoms. I write to experience an ever-expanding siblinghood and friendhood. I write as an art of waiting, delaying, tarrying, or dallying.

Here, basking in the confrontation of discordant colors and their hidden melodies. So I remain curious and apprehensive and whimsical at the threshold of a threshold.

The Woodstock forest colors were always an astonishing interplay of bronze, orange, blue, green, and black.

Green light, sanctuary, Sufi Retreat

The question of where to go persists.

It begins inside one’s head, enflames the heart, and then ramifies through the eyes. The outer options are weighed against inner yearnings. Yearnings themselves are manipulated by what is loudest and most available. Two months since I’ve been here. Much has happened within.

It is autumn, technically: a time to begin an inner spiral, to carve the dark yet bright jewel, to sink into opaque waters. I walk down to the cul-de-sac’s end, right by the train tracks, a day after the brief but heavy rain. A memory of jacaranda blossoms or trumpet vines in flower climbing the fence here. No longer. Just trash and gravel and animal droppings. You wouldn’t necessarily choose to loiter down here. It’s not beautiful by design, only, in places, by accident. Sometimes people drop notes on the ground; these notes get snagged in the fence, some last desperate attempts at transference or synchronicity. That quick rain was an event that now feels distant. In its place, a bright, dry glow that makes the mind feel overstretched and delicate. So much goes unnoticed, unremembered. Be careful what you notice for it will be what you remember.

What if I choose to remember only what is unremarkable?

Perhaps there is a minor kind of redemption involved.

A cul-de-sac literally means the bottom of a sack.

**************************************************

My classroom is strung with lights and we watched the trees shaking outside in the wind. These are the days of rewatching Over The Garden Wall, agreeing that allegory has never been so tenderly and humorously played with. It’s always October in here, a student says. Yes, but an imaginary October somehow more unburdened from the accumulation of unsolvable crises. I spend a great deal of time in this room imagining ideal seasons. So the walls embody my treasured art, style, and rays of guidance that I hope connects me with those that are very different from me. “Teacher” feels inexact lately; curator or archivist more accurate. Everyone loves a dim, relaxing room with fairy lights as the weather turns momentarily wild outdoors. I’ve also incorporated my blue teapot into certain afternoons with the film club. Turns out they like tea and that preparing tea for others gives me pleasure and imbues the atmosphere with more serenity. I can’t think of anything that needs to be shared more with others than that.

Wind Advisory, my phone told me. The wind is advising me. The skies speak. I’ve always felt this. Each hill lures me nearer a nurturing, yet receding incandescence. Peregrine. Paraclete. The signs on the horizon.

On that day of rare rain, I waited awhile before driving home, not sure which gas station to go to. Following various gas stations on a map can take you afar afield: one way to get to know what nobody thinks is worth knowing. To make unusual memories in strangely ordinary places. To wonder where the hills here are.

**********************************************

Autumn, you are the time of delays and tarrying.

And yes you are largely imaginary at this point.

My childhood imaginarium, expressed beautifully in the film version of Something Wicked This Way Comes that I recently rewatched. A thin book Thoreau wrote about autumn leaves that sits on my shelf and I’ve yet to read.

The hours between summer and now have honed a vulnerable, yielding, frustrated, fragile, persistent subject. I’m mixing these attributes up more than usual. I believe I’m reflecting what is being shown back to us. Often I believe my sensitivities are my greatest strengths. Often I think I have failed to learn the codes of this world. Out of step, not in the know, the hidden curriculum too hidden, illogical to a fault. All of me containing many minds, large and small, some less necessary than others. Some that frankly don’t belong to me and that I’ll get rid of soon.

How I am “supposed to be” rubs up against “how can I not be what is coming through.” We are the indeterminate sum of the passages that flow through us.

This is the time of the grown-up adult heart growing late. An old clock in a dark room, dried flowers, a long neglected newspaper. A silvering and purpling to every cloud. Every breath an unspecified love letter in tatters. You are always late arriving, and never without colossal pain for the world. It never makes sense; it is always deafening; here we go, disoriented, rudderless, eddying along the middle.

As we age, grossly while also maybe gracefully, the world begins to feel older, too. We are deceived though. For our birthright is to believe in a simultaneity of worlds. Our fitra. Not just to believe but to know bodily and heartily. A convergence of realms. Imagination’s kaleidoscopic nomadism. Along the ruptured asphalt, some strident green coaxes us back to a shaded glen, a secret oasis. It’s a rumor or a dream or a letter. A melody or a blemish or a scent.

What tries to speak the longer we stare at the wind-eaten fence.

******************************************************************

Cities and forests, confused. A swamp-punk aesthetic. Green always.

I used to fixate on the word verdigris. This was in Oakland when I discovered that I had a romantic fascination with the industrial, warehouse aspects of cities. I still do, but with, hopefully, a more critical eye towards class, inequities, and flows of resources and energies. In San Diego, these last 7 years, the Midway or Sports Arena district has come closest to embodying that industrial hinterlands type of place that is all at once fascinating, gloomy, sultry, shabby and mysterious. My most recurring dreams involve these kinds of city spaces.

And yes, copper imitating moss.

This is incantation of hybrid aspirations.

Later, I learned viriditas - a Latin word for “God’s greening power.” This is the word of blessed Saint Hildegard von Bingen. A word of alchemy and magical ecology, of a mysticism rooted in ground, soil, trees, wind, and birds. When I look at the castaway matter blown up against the cul-de-sac fence that encloses the train tracks, I consider that this space is also land, in the sense of sacral earth, cultivatable, love-seeded, hallowed/hallowing, and sanctuarial ground. Not just some uselessly, demarcated edge space for a largely economic ordering of life. To see the sacral, sanctuary potentials in unremarkable space, an initiate’s eyes are needed. I aspire in that direction, to go back to that lost sense. To claim a sense so lost that I can’t honestly say I’ve ever used it.

Not just land, but labor and creativity, too; an initiate sees the greening potentials in all sorts of actions, be it custodial work, cooking, perfumery, hemming, dusting, rebuilding damaged homes, making, mending, curating, preparing tea. And in the labors of death and decay that are all involved in those actions, too.

These are the hours of radiant, vibrant decomposition, emblematic of reinvention. For greenness is paired with blueness. The dead are winged and wet. Another way that the sky speaks with droplets on our shoulders. Always listening for the sound of running, gurgling water, imagining I’m striding above underground creeks. With attempts at orientation, you realize how little you know about the earth you are situated upon. The ecological gets lost in data and reaction. To un-obscure the seething web-mother of green and black and yellow and blue. Other colors too. Everyday now I’m training myself to live inside a color. To know it more intimately. This is part of the Inner School that I’m working within. We learn that inner and outer are curiously interwoven. The cosmic as miniature. Color as doorway. Initiation.

*********************************************************

A favorite spot, a cafe, where I’m quickly becoming a recognized regular, has a shaded, Moroccan-style courtyard in the back with an enclosed meditative stream of running water. Perhaps anything that even slightly reminds me of Morocco I come running back to. Here I will drink some espresso, talk to locals, read, take notes in my travelers notebook that my wonderful friend Jeff inspired me to get. The high, silvery tones of the courtyard and the birds above, the flies below. This cafe is attached to a small hotel. The multiple embrasures and walkways, all inviting bay breezes, evokes the mood of a relaxed yet conspiratorial crossroads. All these passages tuned to the persistent coursing water, which is remembered while working, that soothes the over-stretched, hyper-vigilant thoughts. Always these days remembering the speaking heart-wound and the orange and rose mosaic of Fez and Marrakesh. Sacral places, sanctuary way stations, more than others, that carry me and channel me, even here in San Diego.

************************************************

This between-time of August/September has been spent acknowledging my overloaded brain and my over-burdened heart often incapable of not reacting to every small or big thing. For so many things stir the heart and the imagination. Always the battle to be kind and forgiving to myself, to let myself believe that, for right now, and now, and even now, that life is a miraculously coherent blessing.

To say that and not only mean it for myself but to help mean it for others. And that all blessings are also imperatives to fight, invent, reimagine, green.

Transformations and initiations are underway, while others await in some still undisclosed field of gift and trial. Some are just common gifts: for example, getting older in September and reckoning with what it means to enter a later part of middle age. Befriending death and its wisdoms. Befriending decay and its nuances. Befriending the alterations and modulations that come with time. And the awareness of the challenges the body has held on to and the ones that it can and should release. Believing that love is always the constant melody, the uniter of all possible worlds.

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In mid-September, I was remembering a day this last summer which will be recollected as one of the most important of my life. A very subtle event happened then. It remains vital and powerful, especially because of how the day-to-day distractions and anxieties try to blunt its reverberations, try to render it unremarkable.

It was a day when several friends, old and new, gathered in a multi-use, multi-faith sanctuary space on a tree-covered hillside, in the muggy East Coast heat. We were on a Sufi retreat. It was an abundance of mutual uplifting and soul-making. We had been together for several days, deep in reflection, shared meditation, discourse, eating together, prayer, wandering, walking, bonding. That afternoon and evening we sat and remembered divinity together in a circle. What does this mean?

This means, partly, that we sang and re-sang sacred words, joined together, mingling our breaths, our intentions, and the ardor of our annunciations. Our individual conceptions of God are united in this collaborative poem. Breath is the aesthetic anchor.

Then we paused. Eyes lit up. Smiles wide. Hearts expectant. Some of us were ready. Our guides and teachers were there. And a great coming together happened, more spontaneously than usual. The subtlest, tenderest, most loving moment of mirthful humor and tender, holy welcome. An invocation, hands, smiles, tears. A transfiguring convergence of hearts, so rare.

What is called an initiation. The living, communal vision of what initiatory means. Devotion’s sharpening. Community’s deepening. Past and present mutually supporting. Future embryonic. Letting the dead speak through you. A rarity shared that is also a vow. Then sitting afterwards and praying afterwards, together. My friend leading the prayer, her Quranic recitations incredibly, painfully beautiful.

The earth suddenly achieving a new familial closeness. Never not aware, for it was talked about and we sat with it all that week, about the machineries of violence and brutality that we are all complicit in. Yet a fierce, defiant joy alongside that. An ancient courage as seed. All the greenness that will come from this, even when we are no longer here to witness it.

From the roof of that sacred space, an auspicious green ray struck the stonework within. I didn’t consider the word auspicious then but am hearing it now. Etymologically it means “observing birds.” Something so unlike us and so capable of what we can’t conceive of but what we often dream of: the spacious allowances of the wild blue sky and the freedom of the heights and the angelic prowess of flight. A mode of perception defined by the interplay of feathers and branches. Climbing the sky and painting the sky. From what falls in one’s flight, the terrestrial realm is greened. Along the way are hills that give us brief tastes of the Auspices.

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On this path I’m walking, we read from Hazrat Inayat Khan’s book The Inner Life:

“When should one become an initiate?

When you feel inclined to know something different from the knowledge that is taught in the world. When your heart begins to become more sympathetic than ever before. When, from within, you feel a seeking for something which you do not know. When your sense of justice begins to judge yourself before judging others. When all opposites, such as good and evil, right and wrong, friend and foe seem to you drawing nearer to each other.”

Later he addresses the question: “With what objects should one take initiation?”

& answers:

1. To realize the self within and without.

2. To know and communicate with God whom the world worships.

3. To kindle the fire of divine love, which alone is worthwhile.

4. To be able to read nature’s manuscript and to be able to see into the world unseen.

5. To learn how to control oneself.

6. To light the torch of the soul and to kindle the fire of the heart.

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Right before all this happened, right before I entered the sanctuary, I encountered a noble frog, a totem-friend, almost bronze-green. Frogs always find me, in-between wayfarers. A love-glance from an emissary of a peculiar kingdom. Those who know me know that frogs and I have had a rich history. So another chapter was added.

The days passed in visions of commitment and renewal, which can feel all too easy to accept while on retreat. Our worlds remained themselves, while being remade and remolded anew, hourly, daily, by crisscrossing cascades of forces. Atrocity and cruelty dominant. The ever-increasing temperature of money which sets all the world aflame in fevers of scarcity and exploitation. Majesty and stillness and tenderness, too. To be tender among unimaginable pains. A darkly humorous enthusiasm spilling into the darker feelings. To take this gift and transform it beyond the place of its giving.

Back here now in San Diego, I’ve begun to learn from other teachers. The time has yielded a rich cry from me to keep learning and greening. What is around us now is horror and violation. What is in charge is abomination. Those who want to deprive us of any wisdom are in control. So a need begins and seeds others. Another earth is kept alive. Some of these teachers are intimately connected to my initiation, others working in different but related contexts. Many teachers are needed and many initiations and explorations, breakthroughs and convergences are needed, too.

What can initiation mean now?

Initiation is rooted in words for “beginning” and “entrance.”

All meaningful events or actions feel like doorways or origins. They need not be definitive or determining or rooted in linear logic, but can still contain those sensations of creative boundary crossing and magically expanded perception.

Inspiration and intuition are kindred forces to initiation. This, for another essay.

When I think of initiation I also think of alienation. Both have to do with beginnings and passages. To begin in the world feeling out of step with the world — and wondering whose “world” it is that we are adjusting to, being molded and broken by, and becoming compliant to.

To arrive late and in the wrong place, to feel too much, and to feel too differently. To think and feel in ways that are counter and alter or askew or oblique; in the process, to become marked and labelled, mocked and silenced, reduced and diminished. In these differences, one is initiated, albeit often brutally, into another world; into a universe of insights, apprehensions, intuitions, and perceptions that are rare and magical — and also rejected by the dominant system-upholders.

When I think of the wisdom of being alienated, I consider the strength, bravery, and beauty of the most alienated and marginalized voices. These are the voices that taught me Islam and they are the ones on my Sufi path I strive to seek out, as well. These are the writers and artists and musicians, often queer, who have shown me that radical world-making is still a way to live a rich, full, magical, spiritually-empowered life. Now as I try to build upon latent organizational and activist tendencies inside of myself, I turn to marginalized voices for guidance.

So a month and a half ago I signed up for an activism and organizing training course called Be Cute Stay Dangerous organized and run by Mx. Yaffa. Please visit the site and read more about the program and ways to support their work. I’ve followed their powerful and inspiring organizing work for the last couple years now, mostly on Instagram, and especially in the context of Palestine/Palestinian Liberation and also in the context of Queer and Trans Muslim empowerment, community, and celebration. All of these issues are urgent ones for me. At the same time I know I can learn a lot more about how to talk about them and fight and advocate for them.

While I couldn’t attend as many of the Sunday sessions as I wanted to, I’ve been reading and learning from Yaffa’s books and podcast, as well. The initiatory energies that come through their work is rooted in a radical vision of collectivism that is very much at odds with the world I grew up in. Their style and humor, analysis and eloquence is compelling. Trans Palestinian Fabulousness! as their instagram page announces and which makes me so happy and inspired to read and consider.

The collectivist ethos, which is so much at the heart of the Muslim path I found or that found me, is a supreme challenge to so many of our capitalist-imperialist-colonialist-commodifying conditions. Every condition we adjust to breeds its own set of reactions. And caring for/with others, working with others, sharing with others, building resources together can make many of us react a certain way. It is a challenge that humbles me and enlivens me and that I will spend the rest of my life working on and towards. I find this collectivist vision so beautifully conceptualized and also made accessible through Mx Yaffa’s writing and teachings. So much to say as I slowly study a lot that I missed or haven’t had time for due to work mostly. Suffice to say the wisdom and exuberance and courage I’ve gleaned from them has helped me realize other ways of being-together and relating-with. Which is magic and resistance all at once. More later on Yaffa’s urgent, beautiful, and necessary work. At some point, I hope to build it into a longer essay/curriculum on Civic and Ecological Engagement. When I write about such topics and “teach” them, it’s also to encourage myself to learn them more deeply, to put the theories I love to read about into practice that require effort and difficult, and to let the practice, in turn, beautify the theories.

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A few more thoughts before I leave tonight.

Alienation and initiation. They are interconnected concepts. Each bears different meanings and cadences. They are worth studying and worth analyzing in individual contexts and also in groups and communities. Being alienated for me is often about not understanding how big systemic and ideological things work or why they keep working in the ways they seem to when they actually appear broken and destructive. If by working we mean persisting, enduring unquestioned. The brokenness of the world is both by accident and design. Order and disorder can both not make sense and sometimes for the same reasons. What makes sense, deeply, viscerally, is my spiritual path, yet it is also the hardest sense sometimes to embrace. A real spiritual path — or for the Muslim Sufi hermetic animist student that I am — means pursuing justice, love, creativity, and beauty for oneself and for the world, at the same time. Both must happen together. A simultaneity of greens. The work is difficult and sometimes feels impossible. It is collectivist in nature, but also must involve a collection of individuals willing to work and love and live in relation, in communion, in mutual aid and compassionate openness.

A green lamp for the study-bedroom.

Often an alienated seeker believes that what must truly be sought is not what is most often talked about or prioritized. In this case, they seek initiation into these other realms of the unspoken, the under-represented, the under-prioritized, the subtle, etc. I’ve always believed in that “something more” or in that “always other” feeling. It’s a way of being, pushed into the margins, suppressed by the patterns and systems we’ve complied with and grown up in. My privileges contributed to this yearning, which has often been disruptive. For to always want something more becomes its own pathology too. Yet overall it is a call for unveiling and for deeper witnessing and for more healing attentiveness. This desire is syncretistic, bringing together as it does so many ways of knowing that seem, on the surface, to be incompatible. The more I learned and wanted to learn about art, eroticism, altered states of consciousness, political and social revolution, and poetry and literature — the more I wanted to learn about spirituality, religion, mysticism, and the esoteric. No contradictions or rather the contradictions were in flower together. The seen assisting the unseen and vice versa.

New layers to the room.

Final thoughts on green. Finally.

Here are two books I’ve spent a lot of time with the last 5 months or so.

Sarah Jaffe’s wonderful book I finished a month ago and I’m still trying to put together the words to celebrate its furious tendernesses and its poignant layers of listening, imagining, and testimonies. One big idea I took away from it is how her justice-driven testimonial journalism, for lack of a better phrase, is also fueled by initiatory motivations: to be initiated into the struggles and lives of those who might struggle and suffer and desire in ways that at first seem mysterious to us. Until we listen to them, help tell their stories, and help them transform their stories into acts of healing resistance and community-making. I want my future Civic and Ecological Engagement class to also include this book.

Her book was both consoling and empowering to me as it surveys a time — this pandemic-trump hellscape era — in which some of the most meaningful events of my life have occurred. She beautifully interweaves her own journeys into grief and uprootedness with the traumas and injustices we are still living with and among; we cannot anymore separate what burdens us and wounds us as single selves from what inflicts harm and dehumanization on larger groups and communities. More to say about this book and especially how it engages in some subtle and powerful dialogue with Dreaming in the Fault Zone — a very different book, in some ways. And as beautiful. Both are concerned with a poetics of radical emotion and politically-engaged sensation. The communitarian potentials of poetic, justice-centered feeling. Awkwardly put, yes, but a note here to elaborate on later.

Another thought I hope to elaborate soon:

Many of us have been initiated into finally caring about people that don’t look like us and act like us. This might seem very far from the esoteric illuminative nuances of what we think of as mysticism. But what happens to be called mystical elapses within a webwork of subtleties encompassing an ecology of other entities and forces. Any mysticism worthwhile will enable someone to act in a politically rooted way. This might sound confounding. And so I must sit with this thought until I can elaborate.

And sitting, to keep remembering that slant of green light. That turning of a corner into a secret season. That abundance is a quest and a fight for what the earth holds deepest in her heart. Which is us, and whoever is next to us, without anything at first to hold on to.

Anila Quayyum Agha: “All the Flowers Are for Me", installation at PEM, Salem.

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I’m starting an occasional series called Talismanic Life. It will be all things related to curating, archiving, art, museums, magical objects, charms, amulets, animism, and also occasionally horror/paranormal themes intersecting with the other topics. So here a few jotting about Salem and related ideas. Many of the unlabelled photos are from the PEM in Salem.

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A few nights ago, I read an email from a young man I once vaguely knew in a different city. A poet and curator, he also identifies as an archivist and in the email he was promoting an event celebrating the life of another artist who also was an archivist. In both instances, I recognized this word as meaning a form of art that is also a form of cultural memory in practice. The deep vision of community, of the living and the dead, emanates from the word archivist — a least when the word is also paired with artist. I admit, too, to wondering: how does someone make a living doing this?

Archival art: one’s chosen art becomes an expression of a living, communal lineage; the crafted work directly references, celebrates, riffs on, and interacts with the artistic and cultural milieus within which it is rooted. It is true that all art wears its temporal and stylistic influences. Perhaps it might not be as obvious that art and literature are modes of political/historical knowing and cultural remembering. In some cases, we cannot remember unless an artwork unlocks a memory or initiates a line of recollection, which is sometimes partly imaginary. Or speculative.

Speculative Memory then. A useful term, possibly.

For example, the literary arts of Samuel R. Delany comprise for me a set of tools for understanding other histories, for excavating the multilayered present(s), and imagining liberated futures. Many verbs and adjectives are deployed when we consider what this art is asking of us. A simultaneity of spaces and times, within which life’s unfolding accrues more facets and possibilities. Another, unique example of this kind of imaginary archiving-as-art is the book which I’ve written about here before but which I will be returning to: Everything For Everyone. (I will add too that this is one of the most vital, inspiring books you can read if you sincerely want to imagine better worlds.)

In terms of music, I’ve been thinking a lot about my enduring love for Hurray for the Riff Raff and how their music is so evocative and poignant while also culturally, intellectually nourished by living archives of cultural resistance.

When I think of archival art, too, I also imagine the preservation of documented experiments in perception and meaning making. Do we want to understand and embody life in different ways? Is it possible we can change the contexts and orders we find ourselves in? Let’s dig in the archives to find out how. Let them out.

One definition of art is that it makes us remember images/forms (imagined or not) of the past in order to preserve/perpetuate images/forms of a present and future. This is an inelegant, flawed definition, but I’m grappling with how time, testimonies, and historically-informed imagination all fuel archival artistic processes. Curating, archiving, making, collecting: the messy work of memory and its distortions and transformations. Power further disfigures it all.

Several people, now, have populated my imagination by the fact that their practice is curatorial, and also archival, in this cultural preservationist sense. Curating is a beautiful concept, rooted in the words for care and attending. Today the word becomes associated with how people present their lives, works, services, or personae. Curating aspires to make a profitable, sellable set of images. It creates a brand. The stylishly cultivated presentations depend for their success on what is slyly suppressed, what is believably embellished, and what is already recognizable. This connotation then of curating has a somewhat one dimensional surface aspect. That being said, it can still achieve a kind of artistry. We also prefer that people who are passionately creative about something that is good for the world should get paid for their work.

The individuals I am thinking of, working within archival and curatorial contexts, are multidimensional and multimodal. Perhaps they are too chaotically enthusiastic to present their lives and works in a curated, profitable way. And yes maybe sometimes I’m thinking of myself in this sense. Their curating has layers and depths and is less about profit and more about the transmission of overlooked knowledge and the initiation into a creative, communal adventure. Their archives are often esoteric, disordered, ephemeral, and clandestinely transmitted. In some cases, their archiving can verge on intellectual hoarding.

These individuals are also usually enamored of a vision of a resistance culture or a radical avant-garde that is grassroots, communitarian, anarchistic, and diverse. A culture of potential, ever-pending collective liberation endures through creative documentation and inveterate art making, disseminating, repurposing, experimenting, and sharing. These movements strive to be in resistance to authoritarian, fascist, supremacist, and imperial regimes — while of course wrestling with their own internal elements of the same. As we all do. As we all must.

For archiving and curating insist upon the magical lives of objects. Their rarity and singularities appeal to our sense of wonder and sacredness. When the object is a document, it compels us by the fact that its very existence is a safeguard against powerful knowledge being erased. When the document is shared, like in the case of a zine or mail art, it induces a chain of relationships based on shared knowledge. We may also wonder about what is potentially redemptive about historical documentation and record-keeping. Especially if what is documented doesn’t really seem or feel historical. Big History’s connotations of wars, innovations, masterpieces, disasters, and borders being drawn and redrawn is not the history that many archival artists are documenting. Then we are left with: how can we empower our lives and communities with our un-histories?

My own tendencies to maintain archives, like semi-organized boxes of various documents, journals, pamphlets, photos, letters, ephemera, zines, etc., derive from charged, contemplative moments in my childhood. In solitude at home or wandering in nature, my imagination cleaved to the concentrated impressions of small objects, often of a set. The world was signaling to me through these objects. Was it that I recognized a kind of pleasing, calming order in the array of objects of a similar type? That was part of it: a cosmological logic to collecting. Another aspect, which perhaps influenced me more strongly, was the acknowledged rarity, singularity, or obscurity that certain objects embodied. A rare Susan B. Anthony dollar coin from the year of my birth, for instance. Scarcity and rarity gave them a talismanic power that entranced me. They were unique and singular, yes, but also largely unnoticed and often undervalued. Thus, the magic of a subtle singularity.

Whether it was looking for geodes or otherwise notable rocks along the reservoir shrubs (which was a consequence of being fascinated by the word “prospecting”) or buying baseball cards once a week, always in search of the elusive rookie cards or “error” cards, or delightfully accepting my Grandfather’s encouragement to have some of his rare coins and stamps, collecting small sets of compact objects instilled a kind of meditative serenity.

From the PEM’s extensive Native American Art collection.

(In graduate school, though, several years ago I read or tried to read a book by Derrida called Archive Fever. One of his arguments, I believe, is that “archive” is inherently a tool of ideological conditioning and state-sanctioned oppression. I believe he also talked about how memory becomes threatened by the archive. And all this is true, as well. Painfully so. Still, archiving is what we all do, whether we mean to or not. So how can we find the liberation potentials in it? How does art interfere in the archiving process? How might our memory be strengthened and expanded through particular archival actions? Our professor, a student of Derrida’s, reminded us that the esteemed post-structuralist, himself, did not use email for reasons he elucidates in his book. There’s certainly more to say about this book, but I’m not the theory expert nor can I find my copy. But it will be worth revisiting this book at a later point.)

I am charmed by memories of moving my archives, usually in a few bankers boxes, from house to house and tacking archival photos and notes on the walls and setting aside the boxes in the corner. Some nights, when I was feeling particularly solitary, I felt motivated to sift through my archives, perhaps reread old journals, flip through photographs, or read old letters from friends, family, and exes. The archives become a roving life museum, then. And museums exert a different kind of influence. They are what we are allowed to look at from all that is in the archives.

Questions arise. Do the boxes perhaps contain the evidence of memories and experiments that may help reimagine the present and the future? Or are they traps for nostalgia, a kind of maudlin materialism that memory would actually prefer we free ourselves from? Derrida was thinking along these lines in his Archive Fear book. These are haunted and haunting questions, which is another Derridean thing to say.

Ulterior histories. Marginal histories. Overlooked histories. Suppressed histories. All of these are straining our individual and collective memories. What gets through? What gets listened to? What is allowed to reshape and reinvent and reimagine us?

Over the summer, I spent a few days in Salem, Massachusetts while on a 3 week road trip through New York and Massachusetts. Salem is a town, I discovered, fully committed to the magical life of objects. I also happily discovered that such a civic and commercial love for talismans, amulets, fashion, charms, and aesthetic and cultural accoutrement entails a diversity of inclusive identity expressions, including metal, goth, queer, steampunk, horror. The breadth of artifacts means a breadth of identities. Many of them, wonderfully queer and in the most accommodating ways. It made me miss a lot of the San Francisco that I remembered. And it made me recognize, again, and again, that all the many universes that I inhabit or dip my toes into all form a complex unity, and not despite their paradoxes and complexities but because of them. A joyful and mysterious unity, even in relentlessly un-joyful, stagnant, stultifying times.

I had initially wanted to stay in Salem because of its witchy and occult reputation so of course I booked a famously haunted hotel, The Salem Inn. My room was superbly creepy and I would have thought so even had the hotel not been in Salem or been labelled as “famously haunted.” Indeed, on the second night in my room something banally terrifying happened that I’ve never experienced in all my years of staying in motels and hotels: the wall-mounted television set turned on by itself at 2 in the morning, causing me to almost fall out of my bed searching for the remote. Several people have said, “Oh I bet the hotel does that on purpose to scare you!” Perhaps so…it was a curated incursion. A semblance of the Otherworld. In terms of paranormal or supernatural activity, I’m usually in an intermediary state of open-minded fascination and playful wonder. Many friends in my life have claimed to see ghosts, fully embodied, as persons walking around, or as mists or fogs. Often these friends are agnostic or atheist. My whole life has been consumed with religious questions and searchings— and yet I’ve been denied ghosts that I can see. Maybe only ones that I can feel and, of course, write about. For the archives are ghostly, too.

Whatever might explain my trivial hotel event, I will take it as a humorous sign that Salem was welcoming me and encouraging me to return.

While I didn’t go to some of the more famous historical sites in Salem, I explored many of the occult, magical, and esoteric shops in the town, as well as a couple museums and galleries. I also walked the streets at night and experienced an East Coast 4th of July down by the docks. Salem was both very different from many cities I’ve been to while it contained pockets of the beautifully, consolingly familiar, including its love for objects, magic, and the many subcultures of the margins.

Within the many esoteric shops I spoke to the people working there, the curators and sometimes the owners. I was fully intent on spending most of the days in these shops and getting to know their proprietors. One day though, without planning it or even knowing it was there, I stumbled into the PEM, The Peabody Essex Museum. My first impression was amazement at the size and breadth of the museum. I was not expecting to find what appeared to be a well-respected, multi-storied museum in a town that seemed more committed to having dozens of witchcraft shops. And that would have been perfectly fine too.

When I went to Salem I knew almost nothing about it. So I tried to immerse myself in its living archives as best I could over a handful of days. The museum’s floors contained a wide range of cultural expressions: Native American art, maritime art, Korean art, South Asian art, Oceanic Art, a special exhibit on Moby Dick illustrations. Museums are troubled and contested spaces, vehicles of power and ideology. This is obvious. Yet they are also unique urban refuges in which contemplation and knowledge can coincide, all within a largely silent, non-coercive environment. And now, too, museums can often become sites where the oppressed and threatened archives can stand defiant in the face of tyrannical, censoring powers.

I sensed in this museum a heartfelt attempt to show how different worlds and cultures don’t just sit side by side but are imbricated within each other and, on the best of days, collaborate and listen to each other. The queer joy I felt in Salem, expressed vividly in its love of horror movies and witches and monsters and goths, also informed this museum. A sense of powerful inclusivity and respectful hearkening to the suppressed and oppressed voices.

Being in Salem, exploring this museum’s Native American art, as well as experiencing the 4th of July on the Salem harbor, I also thought about “America” and how impossible it is to form any kind of sober picture of this troubling concept, while also realizing that almost any feeling you can have about it, from hedonistic patriotism to absolute hatred, is rooted somehow in its archives. How can America free itself from America? is another questions I read while on that journey.

Moby Dick pop up book!

The famous witch statue in the heart of Salem!

This was a gallery of wax statues and marvels inspired by horror films.

A truly immersive experience in which phones were not allowed (which is, in some ways, a beautifully anti-archival action.) In my small group wandering through the chambers of horrors, there was much glee and exhilaration. Some of the lifelike figures induced palpable dread and we all quickly imagined out loud what it would be like to be here at night, when nobody else was around. I’m almost certain it would be panic inducing. While I didn’t have a chance to explore the topic further, I was wondering about the meticulous craftsmanship that goes into the creation of wax figures. My favorites parts were images and characters from classic horror films, like Val Lewton movies, in which atmosphere and mood are the talismanic powers. I would normally have not visited a wax museum, I don’t think, but this one was a surprisingly joyful communal experience.

Finally, I made repeat visits to the Black Cat Curiosity Shoppe, dazzled by their museum aesthetic and their array of relics. The jarred relics in the photo above inspired some lengthy conversation with the proprietor during which we discovered our shared interest in museum studies. I was pleased that these jars in question contained objects that were both real and imaginary. Allegorical objects I might call them. A couple of them went home with me. This shop holds a special place in my memory. Indeed, I think of it as I begin this series, as I feel the shop managed to coalesce so many of the feelings that I’m trying to convey here.

Finally, as long as we are talking of time and talismans, objects and heirlooms, sometimes a particular song becomes a magical object and then you put it on a mix tape or playlist and it concentrates all the vibes and sensations of a period of life. Every Sunday here in San Diego, on the famous rock and alternative station 91X, they have a show called Resurrection Sunday where they play older, classic, and obscure songs. Last Sunday I heard this classic that I had somehow overlooked (while for years I had been amused by the band’s name, The The) and its since become a talismanic song for this weird late summer time we are trudging through on our way to autumn.

Summer ends. Teaching resumes. Fall is near. I will be doing some shorter occasional writing series’s. I promise they will actually be shorter. Today’s post will inaugurate a series on Pedagogy/Wisdom. (Other will be on Spaces/Places; Horror/Uncanny; and others on collisions between Mysticism & Anarchism. I foresee some related printed matter too. Discussion groups.)

I debated about what to call this new occasional series: What is wisdom? What might wisdom be? What does wisdom sound like? Perhaps no title is adequate until we figure out a little more about what we mean.

My questionable premises: Wisdom means putting into regular practice thought that has been lived and tested. Thinking that’s gotten bloody and muddy and bruised in service to visions or principles. Wisdom means putting the rightest words into the most beautiful actions. Wisdom is concerned with lighting up the latent magic in any experience. New thoughts, seeded by wisdom, can impel new actions or correct old ones. Wisdom also means grasping that what often feels new might actually be something so old we don’t recognize it. So it keeps returning in emphasis, asking for reinvention, nuance, rupture, redirection. Not all new things though. So far though, we haven’t said much about wisdom, and that’s the point.

When I began teaching in 2013 in Las Vegas as an adjunct instructor of English composition, I received no real training. I knew what grades I had to give, I knew what assignments I had to assign. I knew that the students didn’t understand why they were there, except that it was required for graduation. A requirement though is never a valid rationale. After facing down several disgruntled student faces, I realized I had to convince my class of something sublimely ridiculous: that the artful engagement with language through reading, writing, and rhetoric had something to do with acquiring and honing wisdom in the academic world, yes, and in the “real world,” too. And in the world, just as real, that will always accompany them, especially when all else is gone: their spiritual-aesthetic-imaginary world(s).

I also had to encourage them to believe, at the same time, that wisdom was something immeasurably valuable — perhaps worth more than any status or possessions, fame or power.

So I want to start this occasional series looking at two thinkers who accompanied me into my first classroom as a teacher. Besides connecting wisdom to the language arts, it was also in those early teaching days when I first realized that the paradigm of the student/learner must be embodied in each and every of life’s contexts, no matter who we are. But first there was the night, where we learned to begin.

Meteors

When I moved into my first real one bedroom apartment in my first actual apartment complex in Las Vegas, I was scared and uncertain. I had landed in wildly unknown territory. Las Vegas didn’t look like any kind of city that I would call a city. Nor was it exactly a suburb or a town either. I had to drive everywhere and it was oppressively hot and the buildings were not pretty: these were my first impressions. Plus people smoked everywhere! But I was there because of an immense privilege: studying with writers in a Masters of Fine Arts program at UNLV, having time to work on poetry, to study it, to read, to travel, to commune with other creators and writers, and to learn how to teach. Yet I remained overwhelmed by all the differences. In my unease, friends helped. Two new companions, fellow writers in the program that I barely knew, came to pick me up in a car well after midnight in mid August. We were driving out to the higher, more unpopulated desert outside of Vegas so we could see the sky more clearly. It was two in the morning when we got there. The dry, crystalline evening had finally cooled down to the high 70s. In an empty road, the three of us lay on the warm asphalt, cracked some beers, and stared at the pulsing arc of stars above. Then, after a long hush, from the sky’s left, a sparkling, Roman Candle plunge, and to the right, another: the Perseid meteors had come and were descending in quick sputters and flashes as was foretold.

I was shocked by the actual, indisputable “red tails” that cut through the sky. In that wild starlit blackness, we watched the cosmic shower of meteors while talking about our lives, framed by the infinite suggestiveness of celestial life and inhaling the ancient stone breath of the Mojave. A night in the desert with a dramatic sky of tumbling visitors. Conversation that could only happen in those conditions. Words that were infused with the galactic drama playing out above us. A feeling of that night as a new quest’s origin — and persisting as a source I’d return to in memory. It was nothing that I had expected. And it was nothing I would have done on my own if my friends had not insisted that we go at such a late hour. Truths we shared under the meteors would not be said exactly that way again.

I’ve written a lot about the “unexpected” and “surprises” at Companion Moon. My mid-late 40s are being lived as a seeker trying to listen to life’s deeper insinuations. I try to envision the unfolding of my years as involving the lives of mysterious others, human and nonhuman, many unknown to me now. With mysterious others come unforeseen adventures and responsibilities. Some I can prepare for only obliquely. Some I realize entail tremendous risks. So much of this unfolding feels surprising, bewildering, confounding. Until it’s not anymore. Until it changes into the most beautiful sense and even adds some mystery to what has always made the most boring kind of sense.

The night of the Perseid meteor shower I remembered a famous Pre-Socratic fragment by the obscure man from Ephesus often regarded as one of the original philosophers of the West: Heraclitus.

Ἐὰν μὴ ἔλπηαι, ἀνέλπιστον οὐκ ἐξευρήσει, ἀνεξερεύνητον ἐὸν καὶ ἄπορον

"Unless you expect the unexpected, you will not find it, for it is hidden and thickly tangled."

or "He who does not expect the unexpected will not find it, since it is trackless and unexplored."

Even though I lack the ancient Greek, this aphorism is a great way to start the morning or a new semester. “Expect the Unexpected,” as my college students told me, has become a cliché, along the lines of “Think Outside The Box” and “Just Be Yourself.” But some cliches, more than others, contain a kernel of enduring truth. Some cliches are redeemable if you trace them back to their sources. Heraclitus’s pronouncement about the “unexpected,” at least in the translations I’ve read, is provocative because it evokes “surprise” as something or somewhere hidden, like how a path lies hidden beneath overgrown foliage. This concealed aspect is akin to his other saying about how a “hidden” harmony is more beautiful than an obvious or apparent harmony. If something is hidden it is always there, and doesn’t arbitrarily burst into being out of nothing. This might mean that every situation, every context, and every occasion includes, by design, hidden elements that can (possibly) be beautiful. For it is in the nature of events to occasionally seize us unawares. In those seizings or ruptures, how do we change, or how do we welcome or interpret change?

How do we respond to what shows itself as possible?

This seems to be a question that this fragment is posing.

A visit to Ephesus a couple summers ago, the birthplace of Heraclitus the Obscure.

I think this idea or question rhymes, in spirit, with a couple other quotes I like to put it next to, including Novalis: "Philosophy is homesickness: the urge to be at home everywhere" & Paul Celan: "Reality is not. It has to be searched for and won." These quotes can be used anytime you feel like you might learn something or when you suddenly see something in a different way. They are threshold aphorisms.

Through the lenses of these quotes, perception becomes an expeditionary undertaking, and a salvaging mission. Seeing and listening, even in the most apparently banal of contexts, becomes metaphysical detective work. I’m exaggerating, of course, as hyperbole can be persuasive. Such big, poetic words demand we throw our thinking in the dirt. That ask us to salvage among these half-livable ruins.

Salvage what? Some intuitive knowledge that our aliveness is pulsating with and through the aliveness of others. That the stars and the trees and the lakes and the parking lots suggest intricate communion with an imperishable source. And that the arts of love, language, imagination, nourishment, and care make life more bearable and more real. Salvaging, too, an older, less diluted mode of awareness. You learn to listen with your eyes; to see with arms and legs; to think with the heart and the gut. What the trees show us, we embody. What the stars reflect, we imbibe.

These ancient thinkers like Heraclitus make me dream about a sense of wonder and a mode of perceiving that is generally lost to us. This mode maybe survives in fragments and in some art and music and in rare, heart-shaking moments; it is occasionally reclaimed and embodied in our creations and relations. Love knows it. Dreams, too. Spiritual work reaches for it. Often a natural and wild expanse, far from cities, sparks this older apprehension. Perhaps I’m romanticizing something that was never lost because it was always absent in the first place. In the night, I think, we mourn its absence most of all.

The Absent Thinker or: How To Live At Night

I think of the spiritual children of Heraclitus, sometimes counting myself among them. When I think of them, it is the night time where they live. It is the night within the day that they seek. In darkness, subtler knowledge rests. During that first year of teaching college English Composition, while writing and studying poetry and poetics, I tried to condense and distill my creative visions. To get to essentials. To reawaken neglected wildness. To confront only what is archaic and cosmic. Most of these adjectives I could probably only really experience in language and so I returned, often, to a true heir of Heraclitus and writer of the Night: Maurice Blanchot.

Behind the stage of the thinkers, critics, and theorists that were most pressed upon me in college, I heard about and sensed this presence of a brooding, solitary, relentless thinker: Blanchot. Other more famous theorists like Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, were often referring to him with deference. Derrida claimed that Blanchot had made greater strides in thought than anyone else. The implication was that Blanchot had pushed thinking nearly as far as it could go. My introduction to him was by constantly seeing a massive book in the Barnes and Noble philosophy section, a book that is part of a University of Minnesota series that has to comprise some of the most blandly designed critical theory books ever published. A mauve cover. Simple black font. Hefty, nearing 500 pages. The lovely and consoling title: The Infinite Conversation.

Infinity is a concept that has haunted me since I was a child. Conversation has always conveyed a pleasurable couple hours in which two or more hearts are aligned. Real conversation has always seemed an act of defiance, too. Defiance of productivity and rivalry; defiance of business and distraction and division. A conversation might be a small attempt of aspiring to timelessness (a kind of infinity).

This vision of an infinite conversation was with me that first day of teaching. A young, provocative man from Texas — he kept wanting me to know he was from the “real” Texas — had already said something quite inappropriate and I didn’t know how to address it. Another young woman asked caustically about the legitimacy of the class. I coughed, I laughed, and didn’t know how to answer. Which is when we began talking about paradox. Paradox and Contradiction: that is how I began the first class I ever taught and, in most ways, it’s how I continue to start most classes. And most mornings, when I remember to.

These are the very ancient things we can keep talking about, I thought.

We can keep returning to them and they won’t get old. We aren’t trying to solve them, we are dancing with them. They are asking us to dance.

Later, after teaching got slightly easier, which means when students and I began having conversations, I remembered the conversations I had had with friends that in many ways had propelled me into my first classroom. Whatever pedagogy I professed or any knowledge about language I could claim had come from books and teachers and also from the lives and souls of all sorts of others. The conversations with Neeli, with Nico, with Margaretha, with Seth, with Joseph, with Visa, with Jeremy, with Brigid, with Emily, with David, with Jamie, with Kasey, etc., etc. My memories of talking with them among soft breezes or on grassy dunes; in garden patios and on rocky bluffs; sometimes by bicycle down beautifully painted alleyways. Coffee or beer or snacks close at hand. Mostly just the perennial flowery winds and rolling sidewalks of San Francisco. So many serene hours of talking idly and dreamily. And in that mutual gift giving of stories and observations and elaborations and responses and jokes, nobody was trying to win. Philosophizing and wisdom-making were happening, maybe unconsciously. Or retroactively. We may suddenly remember a vivid conversation from the past and a point someone had made in it, now felt in a new and revealing light. Nobody was asserting dominance or attempting to eliminate complexity or to obscure nuance.

We may imagine a body of conversations that is mapped onto our physical bodies. This could be a book, too. It might be the truest book ever written about our lives.

In Blanchot’s book, page after intellectually dizzying page, the writer is in conversation with writers and thinkers in modern literary and philosophical traditions. There is Nietzsche, Pascal, Camus, Kafka, Bachelard, Brecht. And Simone Weil, who he first introduced me to in this very book. He is also speaking to unnamed figures and voices who emerge within these dialogues. While he’s attempting to be as precise as possible about the most complex and unthinkable ideas, he is never trying to proclaim truth at the expense of the other’s experience. For to do that is to obscure and hinder whatever truth might have been there at all.

Blanchot’s big mauve book has been with me for years, but it seems always too abstract to finish. The writing of it must have been laborious and painstaking. Like his friend Bataille, the thinking is complex and highly philosophical and seems lacking in humor. For his big difficult book concerns itself with thinking that wrestles with thinking and then tries to surpass thinking. Language that bends and stutters and breaks in its efforts to reveal something or some non-thing that cannot be directly beheld or spoken about, only dimly acknowledged. But whatever it is, it’s urgent.

Blanchot doesn’t seem to speak too much about desire and libido and the body like so many of his contemporaries do (Deleuze, Kristeva, Lacan, Lyotard, Irigarary, Foucault). Instead, he keeps turning back to speech and thought in fraught relationship with darkness, death, the other, the unknown. Blanchot’s theorizing strikes me as not very hip or sexy. (Although it is possibly quite goth). And maybe this is why he’s always the thinker behind the curtain. However, as I reread some pages, like the ones about how it is impossible to write about the “everyday,” I realize that while he’s certainly not funny in any obvious ways, he’s being playful and even antic in his insistence on grappling with what perpetually eludes us. I imagine the figure of Blanchot, forever absent, always elsewhere, it seems, living in deliberate physical solitude in small, rural villages and communicating with his friends almost exclusively through letters. Did he have a radio? A television? A phone? The writer in his cozy provincial home surrounded by the shaking trees, the owls and foxes, and the humming constellations, writing obsessively about the Night and the Other; living a posthumous life, as he liked to call it, writing about being alone with the hidden god and his atheism as a paradoxical mode of faith. What was his relationship with plants and animals and coastlines? I haven’t read any biographies of him yet, so I don’t know.

What about this choice to abandon worldly and active pursuits in favor of solitary writing, thinking, and philosophizing? And in Blanchot’s case writing about such unwritable and unthinkable things. What a waste of time, we might say. What a squandering of energy! How painful! A neurosis? A pathology? I read in one short summary that he is plagued with bad health, one reason perhaps for his perpetual aloofness; in spite of this, he dies at 95.

Along with Blanchot’s concepts of the Other and the Outside, there is the Disaster. This is the event that destroys everything while leaving everything there, still. The ordinary, perpetual traumas of history. What we are witnessing now, of course. That life can go on as normal even when barbarity is inscribed as a norm. Blanchot experiences this disaster first hand when he’s almost executed by a Nazi firing squad and saved by an unexpected turn of events. A strange, alienated long life of literature and philosophy on a foundation of constantly encroaching/circling death. In his physical solitude, he still conceives of a deep, transnational, multiethnic “Friendship” based on language and literature. An infinite conversation, requiring many visits to the post office. Blanchot’s kind of solitude would have fascinated me as a teenager as I began to wonder about a persistent feeling of being out-of-step or somehow misaligned with the world. A cliché experience and yet, perhaps, the beginning of learning to listen to Wisdom. With Blanchot accompanying me into the desert as a first-time teacher, I also imagined him in a similarly denuded, abandoned landscape, at least metaphorically. I imagined him as a figure of vigil and reconnaissance, a lantern bearer, a night watchman, a presence both nocturnal and spectral.

From this wonderful review of a translated biography about Blanchot, a lovely excerpt: “Writing was “my true life,” he later claimed; it “estranged me from every other exigency, all the while changing my identity and orienting it towards an ungraspable and anguishing unknown.” It was writing that detached Blanchot from any former adherence to French nationalism, turning him, at least to some extent, into an internally displaced exile.”

Some dizzying quotes from The Infinite Conversation had been on my mind that summer before I started teaching. They are on my mind again, a decade plus into my years of teaching. Endlessly Blanchot grapples with speech and error – what can be said, who is addressed, what is behind speech, and what speech excludes. The excluded parts of speech are what he wants us to tarry with. Particularly, interruptions become significant when considering the limits of discourse. It is in the interruption, perhaps, that truth itself finds us, makes us Other. Typical of Blanchot are sentences like this, ones that to me could usher in an entire afternoon conversation:

“We sense as well that if pain (fatigue or affliction) hollows out an infinite gap between beings, this gap is perhaps what would be most important to bring to expression, all the while leaving it empty, so that to speak out of fatigue, out of pain or affliction (malheur) could be to speak according to the infinite dimension of language.”

These kinds of sentences occur, often multiple times, on every single page which can make the book particularly hard to engage with. But in small, meditative doses, reread with attention and even a kind of poetic suspension of meaning, as I discovered, it induces subtle inspirations that informed my own writing, teaching, and conversational practices. Our waking, sensible, law-abiding lives can be entered into because of regimens of repression and suppression. These limits allow us certain privileges, of course, certain pleasures. For Blanchot, it is necessary to think about what these limits curtail and contain. Language, itself, is a limit. What is beyond it? It is enough, now, to turn to certain sentences that make us wonder deeply about what we are doing:

“There is language because there is nothing in ‘common’ between those who express themselves: a separation that is presupposed — not surmounted, but confirmed — in all true speech.”

“Such then, would be my task: to respond to this speech that surpasses my hearing, to respond to it without having really understood it, and to respond to it in repeating it, in making it speak (…) To name the possible, to respond to the impossible (…) Speak without power, speak without power to.”

Above all in Blanchot there is an Unknown, an Other, and Outside that all our attempts at speaking and writing are addressing:

“We must try to think the Other, try to speak in referring to the Other without reference to the One and without reference to the Same (…) We will try to come to a sense of another form of speech and another kind of relation wherein the Other, the presence of the other, would return us neither to ourselves nor to the One.”

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A shrine near my home I like to visit on long runs.

Another school year starts Monday. Other timelines, too, of the heart and soul have left me reflecting and pensive. How long does brokenness speak? A sense of the world’s sickness is vivid. From Heraclitus I want to consider how I might look differently at what shows up around and before me; at how the art of perceiving is what creates real ways and means. And with Blanchot, there is the insistence that when we truly speak and communicate we are tying to become different.

With both thinkers, too, I like to think about how the night and solitude are refuges that each of us might have recourse to on our own but that we can also paradoxically share in our adventures together. A room full of collaborative solitudes. A collective night in the achingly bright day. Returning to the Others who each of us are, both to ourselves and to other people. To start again, with these difficulties, these paradoxes, with where we began, and with how we can keep beginning.

Concord River, as twilight mirror, mid-July, 2025

In Concord, MA, almost two weeks ago now, I reached a personal milestone that brought together the intimations of literature and nature I discovered as an adolescent with the wonders I've discovered on the Muslim Sufi path as a middle aged man. These convergences are not fated, but are sculpted — slowly, messily, imperfectly — by intuition and imagination (which are fate’s closest friends). Along the way, they run up against the conditionings and categorizations that overly influence every aspect of our lives.

Yet the world is far vaster and wilder and more undiscovered than our structures suggest (even if late techno-capitalism seems to have surveilled, labelled, commodified, cordoned off, and mapped everything on earth.) For much of the world’s vastness depends on how we are beholding what is in front of us. Lately, I keep returning to Ibn Arabi’s vision of the “Vast Earth”, implying literal, allegorical, and spiritual meanings. Feeling this uncharted spaciousness, these non-coopted intimacies, can inspire courage. It’s then one can begin again.

I’ve spent my life with Walden - a canonical American text written by a white, land-owning male —always present somewhere in my mind, while only really daring to try to understand Islam and Sufism in middle age. Growing up, and well into my 20s and 30s, Islam was still always “too other” and presented as difficult or risky to access, even if this wasn’t directly admitted. Part of that was my own fault and lack of courage and openness and, even, curiosity. It’s possible it was I who had drawn those lines. Myopia and relatability are insistent determinants. But later, finally, I arrived at an opening and some new understanding; I will keep arriving, inshallah, as my life, at best, is nothing but ongoing conversions. And knowing too that every arrival compels a turning and a courageous continuing, often in labyrinthine circumstances.

Concord River by the Old North Bridge

I can’t remember exactly when I first read Walden but I know that a lot of its ideas, along with ones in Civil Disobedience, seeped into my teen bookworm psyche as I day-dreamed along the tidy wilderness around the reservoir behind my suburban home. Only much later, in my 30s, in grad school in Las Vegas, my mentor Don reawakened a deeper, eco-spiritual love of Thoreau. Studying Islam and starting on this Sufi path keeps expanding what Thoreau means to me and to the world. Not just Thoreau, but the world and companions that shaped him. Sufism and Transcendentalism. They might not seem obvious together, but the hidden intimacies they share are varied and fruitful. The possibilities of putting them more intimately together are world-making and world-bridging and world-repairing. These possibilities are what guide me.

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The invigorating, welcoming, and joyfully creative Thoreau Gathering was the culmination of a three week road trip on the East Coast, in New York and Massachusetts. My trip began with a life-changing, heart-expanding 5 day retreat with friends and guides in the Inayatiyya Order in a lush, green place near Rhinebeck, NY. This retreat was immersive and initiatory, involving shared commitments among old and new friends; it was a slow opening of horizons and a gradual illuminating of ways. To witness the road trip then end in the company, yet again, of Hafiz, Rumi, Ibn Arabi, Hazrat Inayat Khan, and the many other Saints and Prophets, along with their kindred walker on the path, Thoreau, was a beautifully apt conclusion. A circle had been woven, now overlapping with other circles. More from that retreat will be explored in the days and years to come, for only now has the study really begun.

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On that Friday afternoon at the Annual Thoreau Gathering, I thought of how the gifts of that retreat were informing the tentative paper I was working on. On an “Eco-Spiritual Revolution” panel with two other wonderful presenters, I shared an abbreviated summary of that paper on Quranic/Sufi concepts of mysticism and ecology in creative dialogue with Thoreau's classic Walden.

The small audience appeared fascinated by the slides of Arabic words that tried to exemplify some key eco-spiritual concepts in Sufism and in Islam. I don’t believe anybody present was familiar with what I was sharing. Or perhaps they were somewhat familiar with more general terms but harbored some misrepresentations, generalizations, and biases about, specifically, the religion of Islam as a whole. And which is similar, I think, but on a smaller scale, to what has often been the simplistic and reductive interpretive fate of Walden in the popular imagination.

Many people came up to me to thank me, to express their astonishment and curiosity, and encourage me to soon publish the fuller paper. Some admitted quite candidly that they had grown up viewing Islam as something absolutely foreign and even hostile to their interests. So they thanked me on goading them to expand their minds. Others asked me to clarify what Sufism means and why so many people are confused by it, especially Muslims. Such questions are harder, even impossible to answer, but I was able to suggest some further paths of research.

Lush old garden spaces near Old North Bridge, Concord.

At the Gathering I was also inspired by other panels that explored Transcendentalist ideas of progressive reforms in education. Indeed, many presenters called for nothing less than a revolution in education which I can absolutely support. I later had dinner with an attorney advocating for the rights of teachers and students who had given a beautiful presentation on a reimagining of Transcendentalist pedagogy for our own time. Most movingly, during one day’s roundtables on abolition, many spoke about the imperative for agitation, resistance, and civil disobedience in our own horribly frightening and unjust era. The Thoreau who helped fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad is the Thoreau we must emulate today. That same Thoreauvian abolitionist ethos also impels us to protest our nation’s financing of the bombing and dismemberment of children and their families amidst the escalating, ever-more-cruel displacement, starvation, and eradication of an entire group of people (Palestinians).

On the right is the copy of Thoreau I’ve had since I was a teen and on the left is a beautiful, scrupulously-detailed book that helped me discover, almost by accident, the many ways that Walden and the Quran might enter into dialogue. These are two of the books I read through and annotated the most on that three week journey.

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I want to share some excerpts then from the paper-in-progress and also mostly what I shared to the audience in Concord. Interspersed with the excerpts are notes from texts I will use in a longer version of the paper:

Good afternoon, I am here speaking to you from the perspective of a lover of Thoreau, a Muslim convert, and a student of Sufism in the Inayatiyya Sufi Order.

(I made a not entirely untrue but tenderly humorous observation about how some of the universalist aspects of the Inayatiyya are akin to the Unitarians, in the best ways possible. However this observation requires deeper learning and clarification.)

Naively, perhaps, and with the ardor of an enthusiast beginner, I have a long term vision for a Quranc/Sufi commentary of Walden. I envision it as a poetic attempt to bring the worlds of Islamic Mysticism and American Transcendentalism closer together. Sometimes categories that seem opposed to each other benefit from intense proximity and experimental conversation. What I’m proposing is not a historical excavation of the Sufi texts in translation that influenced Thoreau, but a new and playful reading of Walden through a very specific religious and mystical lens that one could call Sufi (bearing in mind the many ramifications of that term.) And also bearing in mind that I’m no scholar of Islam nor fluent in Arabic, so I bring with me only my deep passion, enthusiasm and willingness to learn and make connections. That being said, more language acquisition and scholarly prowess are things I desire.

(In the next stage of the paper, I plan to present some background information from Sufism and American Literary Masters edited by Mehdi Aminrazavi. Themes that Sufism and Transcendentalists share: “vanity of the world, the analogies between experience in Nature and in love, and the inability of human reason to explain or address the world’s mysteries.” (2). Also, a deeper study of Thoreau’s reading of Sa’di's Gulistan, the only explicitly Sufi text he discusses reading. No doubt the Rules of the Dervishes part of that book gave him some insights into the spiritual chivalry of the Sufis.)

One warm day I walked to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and paid my respects to Henry and his family.

(In a longer version of this essay, I want to include thinking from Branka Arsić’s amazing book, Bird Relics which helped reinvigorate my love of Thoreau back in 2016-2018. I first read the book in the summer of 2017, a few months before the Las Vegas shooting, and several other related tragedies that affected my small downtown community. At the time, amidst that larger collective mourning and my own personal struggles, I remember turning to the book to make sense of the violence and loss engulfing me. It seemed odd then that a highly academic, even mostly theoretical book would bring me consolation. Yet it was the uncanny materiality and our collective organicism that the book explores which made me feel consoled.

While centered around a formative, mournful event in Thoreau's life (the sudden death of his brother), the book ramifies in many beautiful directions to explore diverse ideas in Thoreau's writing, inspiring in the process a larger and much-needed dialogue between science, philosophy, art, and literature: music boxes and how we experience sound, the purpose of lament in ancient Greek poetics, nonlinear temporalities, the biology of death, the physiology and symbolism of birds, the vitalist science of the 19th century, the process of decay in vegetal life, grief and its relation to the Wild, the science of shell mounds and fossils, the phenomenology of bodily practices, like walking and contemplation and the reasons for writing obituaries for strangers who died alone (which Thoreau did write.)

As I got further into this paper/project, I want to emphasize Arsić’s exploration of “taking Thoreau at his word,” especially when he writes things that seem implausible or overly poetic. One particular chapter of the book discusses his belief in “healing by moonlight.” The possibilities of an allegorical-actual. Enchanted materiality: divine disclosures. A kind of empiricism that creates deeper connections to nature and reimagines an enchanted materiality. Walking and journeying by night, the importance of the moonlight, etc: how these overlap with the lunar currents of Islam. Finally, Thoreau’s “noontide of the mind” and the mind “relaxing in coincidence with its surroundings”: a way to think more deeply about contemplation and nature.)

Walden Pond. I had one beautiful afternoon with some friends where I swam in the warm, freshwater of this storied pond, until my friend on land pointed out the big snake that was also swimming near me. Harmless, we deduced, but unsettling all the same.

(A quote from Arsić that I want to use later: "Thoreau is less an ecologist than a thinker obsessed with the problem of life in a properly ontological sense. By this I mean not only that everything in his world—from stones to humans—is alive, but also that in his philosophy life is afforded the status of a force that precedes and generates all individuations and into which individual forms dissolve. Consequently, death is considered a process of deformation but not of cessation. Differently put, in Thoreau’s world death does not have the power to interrupt life but instead functions as the force of its transformation, enabling us to experience finitude while ushering us into what remains animated.")

The original site of Henry’s cabin at Walden.

Let’s start with a question it might take years to begin to answer: “What is Sufism?”

My concise, insufficient answers to this question (appropriate for this 6 minute talk) are colored and influenced by my identity as an American Muslim convert, as a pluralistic mystic, as a lifelong student of religions, as a lover of language and the imagination, and as a multifaceted individual who finds homes in many kinds of overlapping worlds including art, writing, queer, progressive, radical, spiritual, and educational worlds. Here are some attempts to begin our exploration:

Sufism is….

• A continual spiritual struggle.

• The purification of the heart.

• The cultivation of excellent character traits.

• To witness God in creation and respond accordingly

• To polish the rust of the heart.

• To remember and re-embody our primordial conditions, or fitra.

• Observing the proper etiquette in every situation.

• To recognize the divinity within and without.

• Recognizing the entire cosmos as the locus of God’s self-disclosure.

• To make of every moment a teacher and a friend.

• To become a child of the present moment.

(What I did not and probably will not get into are the many confusing, controversial, and complicated positions on Sufism vis-a-vis Islam and Sufism as it has been transmitted to mostly white Westerners like myself. I’m slowly becoming more at peace though with my functional belief that Sufism is a capacious, intricate range of practices of Islamic mysticism that can also inform other ways of knowing and believing.)

Sufism, strictly speaking is rooted in the Quran and the prophetic example of Muhammad (PBUH), but also in the examples of many other saints, prophets, and friends of God. For Sufis though, it is imperative to understand the Quran in Arabic is a religious text that is not just interpreted via surface level or literal meanings; for many Sufis, every line in the Quran has at least 4 levels of meaning and some traditions hold that there are many more. Consequently, these more esoteric interpretations can be at odds with more literal, exoteric readings.

The Quran and the natural world are the interconnected sites where the Sufi begins the quest for the knowledge of the heart. Just as Thoreau went into experimental retreat to Walden, knowing full well that he wasn’t divorcing himself from his community, so Muhammad (PBUH), like prophets before him, retreated to a cave above his town where the first Quranic epiphanies were received.

In the Quran, everything in nature exists as a “sign” of divine disclosure, God’s creativity, intimate proximity, and endless mercy. “Signs” and “miracles” tend to be closely allied in meaning. A heart that is polished and able to see might deduce that even a simple rainfall constitutes a miracle. Adamantly and often, the voice of the Quran insists that if humans pay attention to what’s around them and reflect on what they behold, they will find reasons for praise, wonder, charity, compassion, and goodness. The Quran says in Verse 26 of Surah Al-Baqarah: “God does not hesitate to set forth parables of anything, even a gnat.” In other verses (themselves called ayahs or “signs"), “signs” are mentioned explicitly— whether “signs on the horizon” or “signs” within human consciousness. The Quran, like Walden, employs a dizzying semiotic sensibility and a hermetic one, too. (We won’t have time to get into that today!)

(A crucial and beautiful essay about the sacredness of nature is by my friend and mentor Omid Safi: “The Qur’an of Nature.” )

Nothing that is alive is seen as lesser than anything else in terms of its capacity to disclose theophanies. Discerning hearts that read and interpret the signs (and act on them in judicious and merciful ways) are gifted with wisdom, peace, compassion, knowledge. The Quran, like Walden, is a presentation of guidance for how to live justly, wisely, and compassionately in relation with all other living things within a larger framework of Truth. The fact that truth and divinity are interchangeable is both radiantly clear and also an intuitive knowledge of the heart that is worked towards over a lifetime. Frequently in Walden, just like the divine voice speaking through the Quran, the writer refers us back to the Truth, the ultimate criterion, what will survive when all else perishes.

We should ask what Thoreau meant by the Truth? What actions are implied by referring to it? I hope to creatively suggest, and in more detail at some point, that his Truth is akin to Haqq the Ultimate Reality for the Sufis. Indeed the very Real itself.

The Truth for Thoreau was the guiding principle behind his many preferences and explorations and stances. The Truth guided his abolitionist principles as much as his scientific, artistic, mystical, and literary endeavors.

Many would rightfully ask: What Truth? Whose Truth? What does this word even mean? Haven’t too many people been killed in service to another person’s idea of “the Truth'“? These are urgent, difficult questions that, perhaps unfortunately, only inspire new and equally troubling queries.

A replica of Thoreau’s cabin, Walden Pond.

The comprehensive ecology within the Quran is an intersubjective, relational paradigm of creation. All our interactions with all living things and beings, whether seen or unseen, engender appropriate, artful, God-conscious responses. An artistry of attention, then. A religious framework for every action. And a pervasive animistic sense of being a creature among other creations acknowledging and imploring us. These ideas can be difficult for many more secular-leaning, more individualist-centered people to grasp.

What is asked of us then?

Responses that the world inspires from us might include: prayer, praise, gratitude, rectification, charity, guidance, cultivation, collaboration, knowledge, care, and reflection. The great Imam Fode Drame refers to the act of responding to the world as the fundamental, recurring labor of our lives.

And these responses, it should be emphasized, are not just abstract or mental. They involve the concrete and essential: from cooking for our loved ones to giving food to the poor to planting a tree to tending to livestock to making children laugh to giving our money to charity to composing music to creating art to fasting to napping to prayer together to conversation with tea and coffee. Even individual prayer takes on a physical and concrete shape in salat. Whatever commentary or philosophy or esotericism emerges is first rooted in and purified in tactile, earthly practices. A longer Sufi commentary on Walden will include how Henry consistently paired his abstract, poetic flights with earthly practices, like building his home, growing beans, making bread, befriending squirrels and birds, measuring the pond, and talking to his neighbors and guests.
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Broadly speaking, Sufis have a word for this sacred range of responses: “adab”: an art of spiritual etiquette, rooted in the Sunnah or example of Muhammad and which pertains to every conceivable aspect of life. Similarly, a real tradition of Sufi chivalry still thrives today which makes a true art out of adab. In that tradition, for instance, one of the phrases that characterizes true Sufi chivalry is “heroic generosity.”

Walden is also a book that delineates a certain, albeit often paradoxical spiritual etiquette and chivalry, and one that can be put into action in any situation. (I think too of the Gary Snyder essay, The Etiquette of the Wild.) Our artful responses are also shaped by the nuanced contexts and immediate environments in which particular actions, impressions, and ideas unfold. (It might be possible to view adab as an ethical poetics, although increasingly, it seems, poetics, the term, is becoming overused?)

Garden of the Old Manse, Concord.

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Some notes for elaboration: More reading from Thoreau’s Religion by Alada Balthrop-Lewis and a fresh reading from Thoreau’s God by Richard Higgins.

• The unifying of nature/ecological piety and social justice/activism. A third element, perhaps, a complex of poetry, art, ethics, and spiritual paradox: Ihsan.

• In her introduction, she says how white supremacy has distorted many readings of Thoreau. The Woods provided Thoreau with unexpected diversity. Indeed, his chapter on former inhabitants illuminates the Black Walden.

• Spiritual themes of awakening and the persistent motif of Morning, akin to Remembrance and Gratitude and Unveiling in Sufism.

• The spiritual challenge of associating the concept of ascetic with freedom, with abundance, wisdom, mobility, even happiness and joy.

• Political asceticism. An abundance of activities that fall outside of conventional modes of work or recreation, both of which are seen as areas of alienation.

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Adab is incumbent on us not only at all times but in all places. A related prophetic saying correlates with this idea of adab: “The entire earth is a mosque or masjid, place of prostration.” Nowhere is profane and every action, no matter how trivial, can be sacramental.

Sophia Thoreau, Henry’s wonderful sister, a botanist, artist, abolitionist, an editor of Henry’s works, his caretaker when he was sick. Hoping to read and learn more about her.

Even though the whole earth and every little thing sings the praises of the Creator, the Quran is consistently ambiguous about the role of human beings in creation. On the one hand, we are uniquely tasked as being God’s emissaries or wardens on earth. Each of us is invested with the God-given powers to protect, cultivate, mediate, and keep the natural world, including ourselves vis-a-vis other creations, in relative harmony and peace. On the other hand, human life on earth paradoxically involves an accumulation of errors, illusions, and forgetfulness.

Indeed, in Islam our lives are often viewed as ethical tests beset with trials and temptations. Our God-given status as divine emissaries tends to easily get forgotten amongst the distractions of earthly life. All throughout Walden, Thoreau is often ambivalent and often critical about the value of society, the habits and tendencies of the “mass of men,” and the superficial, capitalist, status-driven “values” that he believes are unwisely pursued and prioritized. In the Oxford Quran translation that I first read, Sura 95 contains the famous lines: “We created man in the finest state and then reduced him to the lowest of the low.” While it can be hard to read such lines, it is clear, to most of us I hope, that human life is inherently composed of such contradictions that call us to respond to them in some fashion. How we respond becomes the province of art and faith.

I grew enamored of the greenness and blossoming spaces of Concord this summer.

In the “Spring” chapter of Walden, Thoreau writes: “We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influences of the slightest dew that falls on it.” This idea resonates with the Sufi view of the present moment as being both a teacher and a gift.

In Thoreau and in Quranic ecology humans are often implored to emulate other non-human beings, even though they may be seen as ontologically lesser than humans. This idea is beautifully elaborated in both the book, Muslim Environmentalisms by Anna Gade and Animals in the Qur’an by Sarra Tlilli— both of which I’m still reading and learning from. In Walden, too, animals and other denizens of the natural world, including trees and plants, offer surprising wisdom and exemplary responses that humans can learn from and often imitate, at least metaphorically. Historically, the Sufis have often referred to animals as being amazing teachers, especially of the arts of concentration and meditation.

Reading Walden through a Sufi lens I have become more attuned to his poetics of subtlety as a mode of ecological engagement. Indeed Sufism, one of the 99 Names of God is Al-Latif, which can mean the Subtle and the Gentle. A sense of subtlety too is aligned with concepts of hiddenness and revealings. One of the more famous prophetic sayings that Sufis meditate on is in the voice of God: “I was a hidden treasure yearning to be found so I made the universe so you might discover me.” Nature, for Thoreau, similarly cries out to be discovered anew and through such discoveries, we remember who we are, we awaken to our divinely-ordained conditions.

Another simple yet effective slide for a 6 minute talk lol

While the word for “earth” is used hundreds of times in the Quran (Gade, Muslim Environmentalisms) and thus achieves special prominence as a stabilizing, archaic reference point, a frequent word often used in conjunction with earth is “corruption.” Part of how we are being tested, here on earth, is our willingness then to prevent corruption, to fight against it, or in the words of the Quran, “Stand up for the oppressed and fight against injustice, even if it’s against yourself or your loved ones.”

Propensities for corruption and injustice, indeed, are woven throughout our daily lives on earth; our societies seem to exist as endless factories of corruption of all kinds; many forms are not noticed or pass unchallenged or seem impossible to resist; and hence, our moment-by-moment struggle to polish the heart’s rust away and to cultivate excellent character traits so we may see and respond to the world with ethical artistry and moral beauty.

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(This journey towards this conference also began with one of the first critical books that viewed Thoreau’s religious identity seriously: Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness by Alan Hodder. Here are some notes from that book I might add later:

• Empiricism: seeking divinity through experience.Faith arises from a subtle contact with transcendent life. A dislocation, a blending of senses.

• CPgs. 44-46: Famous Parable of Loss akin to“Two Eternities” – Barzak

• Pg. 78: “ambiguous constructions”: Thoreau’s well-known penchant for such puns and double entendres and slippery meanings.

• Key elements joining Thoreau and Sufism: water and the reflective aspects of bodies of water and moonlight.

• “I regret not being as wise as the day I was born”: FITRA: Primordial Identity.

• The Pantheist theme: A pantheist nature, seeing God everywhere. Pantheism and animism might cross over and mix in a Sufi vision of Thoreau. Endless hairsplitting occurs when the debate is whether God is here, in all things, or whether all things possess a spark of divine substance, a soul that is inherently connected to God. A Sufi Hermetic vision of Thoreau.

• Pg. 246: “the reversing mirroring structure of his ecstasy.”Relation between “niche of lights” passage Quran and Time passage go a fishing in.

• Pg 172: “I would not forget that I deal with infinite divine qualities in my fellow.”)

One of my slides during my presentation…

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The most Thoreauvian concept in Sufism, to some degree, and that really speaks to the intense sympathies between Quran and Walden, is the idea of Ihsan. When asked what IHSAN means, Muhammad said: “Ihsan means worshipping God as if you see Him, and even if you can’t see him, be assured that he still sees you.”

Incidentally, this quote also reminds me of signage I saw a lot during my pandemic-conversion period when I was camping a lot with my friend, Chris. Those camp trips, where I seemed to alternate between reading Thoreau and reading Quran translations and Sufi poets and mystics, deepened my pieties in ways I wasn’t expecting. The serene environment of the campsites enhanced the religious words I was going over, letting their meanings seep into my consciousness just as much as the breezes that rippled through the trees. We also went on hikes, often at twilight or night, in which many different signs alerted us to threats or wonders.

The Sufi sign in question, which maybe you’ve seen reads: “Beware of mountain lions here. Even if you can’t see them, or you’ve just seen one, you must know that it’s already seen you first.” While this unlikely analogy is gently humorous, I hope, it also goes back to a conception of the natural world as being preternaturally alive and perceptive. Any animal or flower might pose a question or a reminder to us and thereby God, too, is communicating with us.

So we return to this complex, and hard-to-translate word Ihsan – often translated as virtuous excellence, spiritual beauty. A recent teacher of mine rendered it into very Thoreauvian terms: “Ihsan means to beautify the world around you, inwardly and outwardly.”

Or as Thoreau says, speaking like a Sufi: “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”

One of the joys and privileges of this trip was to discover the history of “Black Walden” which I will now continue to educate myself on.

A visit to Louise’s grave too and a reminder to reread her and to study her family’s own radical and abolitionist legacy more deeply.

This is a long exploration of a draft in progress. Thanks for hanging in there!

I will end now with a powerful image that is related to all I’ve tried to say: a vision of moral courage and the fight for justice combined with the allegorical abundances of the earth. There is a young artist whose work I really love: Nabi Haider. Just recently I received a beautiful and inspiring print the artist made that depicts the noble martyr Imam Hussain, grandson of the Prophet, and murdered for his resistance to tyranny and oppression. From his beheading, a garden sprouts. You can read more here. A gorgeous and profound reminder of the interwoven imperatives of social justice and earthly beauty, which Thoreau, I’m sure, would also appreciate.

Today I’m nearing the end of some East Coast pilgrimages, visits, and research trips.

Yesterday, I swam in Walden Pond for the first time — along with a long, black water or garter snake — heavy with the news of the death of Fanny Howe. So much of her work I still need to explore and it’s warming to see so many recollections of love for her online. Long ago she bequeathed me the spiritual concept of “bewilderment” via her book The Wedding Dress that I carried with me constantly; perhaps everything else I’ve done or thought has come out of that idea. So I mourn her passing and give thanks, too, for what she gave me.

Tomorrow, with much emphasis on “bewilderment,” and on one of Robin Blaser’s favorite words, “astonishment,” I will present some thoughts on Thoreau and Sufism at the Annual Thoreau Gathering in Concord. Such luck and gratitude to have this extended time and this deepening of connections and relations. More will be said, later; today I’m trying to attempt some prefaces.

This photo above, of the central fountain in the riad I stayed at in Marrakesh two months ago is the image I took with me when I first got to NY almost three weeks ago. I also took with me a quote that I can’t place that feels related to this photo — and maybe will place it later — which was something like: “gardens hidden among flames.”

A phase of stark juxtaposition that evokes this whole, damaged world — a world that shows itself to me everyday on my phone in images of extreme cruelty and suffering, many involving children. What to do with what I see. How to live with it. How to help others live with it. A world bewilderingly made of pain.

The octagonal fountain above is green-tiled (of three types of green), and from its central spigot a rose opens to the night; in the low-lying water, rose petals drift together at one end (because roses were everywhere there); and a low light illuminates the other end. Outside the fountain, oranges.

What does the image mean? Better: what does it suggest? Before I can answer I notice the white-tile design on the bottom of the fountain. The question reasserts itself. To which we will return.

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On this East Coast road trip, I’m reflecting on the fact that as everything feels like it’s getting worse and more cruel in our shared worlds, I am sitting with astonishing memories and meanings from 5 days of retreat spent with my Sufi friends and guides near Rhinebeck, NY. These retreat moments (which I will unfold, in various ways, over time) included painful discussions of this burning world that we call home and whose many horrors involve and implicate all of us. The lifelong contrast is clear: with awestruck gratitude and privileged curiosity, I’m seeking meaning and fulfillment for myself in a world built on denying meaning, fulfillment, survival and dignity to so many. It’s obvious and has always been so, I’m led to believe. My life and all its privileges could not have proceeded otherwise, without much structural violence, systemic oppression undergirding it. Thinking too much about it you may resort to cynicism. Sensible, maybe, for some. But not realistic or fruitful. One Eid a couple years ago, the Imam said: “not one person’s blood is more sacred than another’s.” So what do we do with that knowledge?

Entanglement is a popular and also beautiful word in critical theory. For good reason. We want to learn to entangle our meanings with others, which isn’t merely theoretical but an act of survival and integrity. The most painful, raw meanings of others, of ourselves — which we all get to, eventually, even if we start with humor or pleasure.

To create, then: more, bigger, and wider nets for ourselves to fall into. A spiritual shame and rigorous self-scrutiny can help us widen our nets and strengthen other’s. The fact we should all be ashamed is a point worth spending time with. This is the path, the one I’m only now starting down, the one I will no doubt stumble on, stray from, and start anew on, always. The path of juxtapositions tenderly held and acted upon as compassionately as possible. But I always tell my students: that word is big and ugly (juxtaposition) so let’s say “wild contrasts.” Or maybe we need a new word.

I think of gardens as nets, too. And fountains. Signs and gifts, both. Resources and creatures, both. I think of the contrasts they help bring together into harmonies.

They are both rare and also more than what they appear to be. Cities, in some places and in certain eras are designed around them; civic duty entails their cultivation and protection. Not only protecting what they are, in their function and design, but guarding what they emblematize, evoke, and promise. The circulation of water is the primal priority; and then honoring what rhythmically circulating waters can bring to life for all entities. The razed, rubble-reduced neighborhoods we see everyday must include the hope they might one day again yield tender space for gardens and fountains shared in common. And the hope we can take upon ourselves the labors of gardeners, sanctuary-keepers, water protectors, land-wardens. These are what we began as, in some long-ago dark memory. Primal pre-conditions: the only future.

My brief, revelatory journey to Morocco over two months ago was a decisive encounter with sublime hiddenness. A wise guide I met there told me that Morocco embodies the Jamal qualities of God. The subtleties, the gentleness, the recesses, the mercies of slowness, stillness, flow, patience, heartfelt presence, intricate beauty — all within outer worlds of commotion and business.

(Imagine, I thought, if people with power and authority held those privileges with emphasis on their less-obvious, and more compassionate Jamal qualities.)

This encounter was made beautifully vivid when we visited the too-on-the-nose-named Le Jardin Secret in Marrakesh. Closer to the street, there is the exotic garden, containing plants from all over the world. Nestled in the back, further away from the road, is the more secret and deeply nestled Islamic garden. We read:

“The four-part layout of the Islamic garden (which was previously encountered as early as in the sixth century BC in the Persian gardens of Cyrus the Great, and in Morocco at the turn of twelfth century), designed to facilitate the irrigation of the grounds, reminds you of the description of heaven as narrated in the Quran. The garden is as a matter of fact a metaphor of heaven; it is a sacred place, laid out according to rigid geometrical rules, in which the Muslim order asserts itself over the wild disorder of nature.”

Then there is the fountain aspect. We read:

“In the heart of Le Jardin Secret, as in almost all Islamic gardens, there is a spring. The water, which creates a play of lights and favours the closeness of the environment, also represents a surface in which the soul can contemplate its reflection, enter its own world and purify itself. Water is indeed a privileged element for spiritual cleansing, as the ritual washings through which the believer readies himself for prayer; Muslim civilization considers water to be a symbol of life and a sign of God’s existence and power, while heaven is described in the Quran as a “garden in which streams flow”.

I think now of these hidden gardens and fountains as suggestive of what a particular life might look like. A life of nobility and goodness beyond what we prioritize and value and attempt to measure.

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Before I went to Morocco I read the biography of Ibn Arabi by Claude Addas: The Quest for The Red Sulphur.

From this extremely detailed book, (and at this current novice stage of my Arabi studies), I took away the expansive image of a life dedicated to sacred wandering and spiritual retreat. Retreat and wandering feed into each other. It was the same in the life of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). An outward, intuitive nomadism reflecting an inner circumambulation around a primordial source. The journeys, too, were built on reciprocal acts of hospitality. Arabi depended on generosity of hosts and teachers while on his quests; in turn, he dispensed the riches of his wisdom and spiritual sustenance. To venture forth into the world, with eyes vigilant for rustlings of the unseen, was to simultaneously build up an indestructible inner world of piety and peace. All of this went against worldly concerns.

What outer events or obvious achievements happened in Ibn Arabi’s life that our contemporary capitalistic world might view as notable? Perhaps the fact that kings and nobles sought him out. For me, I’m struck more by the intricate intensity of the retreats and pilgrimages which were the direct expressions, too, of an inner life that no worldly criterion can ever quantify or evaluate.

He once had a spiritual retreat for a month in a cemetery, befriending the spirits of the dead. A kind of Islamic animism infuses his perceptions and thoughts. Numerous other occasions he went into retreats, spending often a month inside certain mosques all around the Muslim world. From these retreats, visions were beheld and inner journeys were undertaken; monumental streams of prose and poetry also came forth. His prayer life took him to states of consciousness many of us could not begin to fathom. Nor, perhaps, would many of us feel these are useful to seek out. A few visions can go a long way. But it’s also useful, I think, to see what an entire life dedicated to vision and prayer might look like.

All or most of his mystical transports are captured in his voluminous writings. While inwardly his spirit and inner vision traversed multiple dimensions, outwardly he journeyed endlessly on the earth, seeking out resonant, holy sites and powerful guides and teachers. Every earthly sight became a form of guidance and a node of reflection. He celebrated what he called the Vast Earth (echoing the Quranic concept of the “spaciousness” of the earth) and the many Earths that he was granted knowledge of. Traveling also served a philosophical purpose: travel helped him witness firsthand the fleetingness of cities and civilizations and the transitoriness of earthly pursuits. A memento mori, both for the individual and the society.

For a mystic who seemed to be constantly occupying abstract dimensions, his feet were very much rooted on this vast, green earth. Both/and; the earthly and the cosmic; the numinous and the material. This biography is just the beginning of an exploration and study of Ibn Arabi which will last the rest of my life.