Chara

The Enormity Club

By Jan Shoemaker

Gazing out at the deep, glacial lake,carved out of the earth’s surface over a million years earlier, where kids were shrieking and jumping from rafts, I pushed my feet into the cool sand beneath the hot surface and squinted back at my own history. I traced it familiarly through the cottages and lakes of my childhood, then back more philosophically along a timeline that began with my mother and led all the way through the glacial days and the molten days, back to the big bang itself – the one event that links us all, our single family reunion. And, sighing over what had been feeling like the great weight of care-giving, I considered the obligations of daughters to mothers and wondered where they left off, unable or perhaps unwilling to see beyond the makeshift and unnatural borders I had thrown up: her and me.

In “The Enormity Club,” essayist Jan Shoemaker reflects on the philosophical reverberations brought about by caring for her elderly mother.  Studying her own feelings of resistance to the disappearance of things she loves, she uses ready humor and stringent thinking to consider that perhaps the things that separate us really are a lie.

(Photo of Ron Mueck sculpture © Mike Bruce Gate Studios, www.gatestudios.com)

 

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Shamanic Traditions and Sufism

Oruç Güvenç and the Healing Power of Music

by Azize Güvenç with Yousef Daoud

Most of us know first-hand the transformative power of music and sound to create a profoundly calming or emotional experience, and readers know our previous issue of Sufi was dedicated to sacred encounters through music.

In their carefully researched essay Shamanic Traditions and Sufism, authors Azize Güvenç and Yousef Daoud take us into the amazing life and work of Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç, a Sufi shaikh and master musician of Turkey who provides healing to the sick through music therapies that fuse Sufism with ancient shamanic practices from Central Asia.

Güvenç and his musicians combine music, movement and dhikr to awaken body, mind and soul. And researchers in Europe, the United States and Turkey are studying the positive effects of Güvenç’s sound and movement therapies on patients suffering from cancer, bone fractures, depression and other maladies.

(Photo courtesy of Azize Güvenç)

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Senegal, Sufism and Politics

Sufi Wall Graffiti of Ahmadou Bamba, Dakar, SenegalA CONVERSATION with SEYDOU DIOP

Interviewed by Annie Stopford and Eugene Ulman

The West African nation of Senegal holds a unique position in the global picture of contemporary Sufism. In a nation with a population of almost 13 million people, 94% of the people identify themselves as Muslim and, of those, 95% are affiliated with one of the four major Sufi orders in the country.

Sufi leaders wield enormous influence in all aspects of Senegalese religious, economic and social life. The complex and often controversial role they play in mediating between the government and their own disciples is often viewed as the source of Senegal’s relative political stability. In this interview Seydou Diop, a former Senegalese diplomat, shares his own personal insights and experiences in these matters.

Mr. Diop retired from the diplomatic corps in 2004 and is today a Shaikh of the Nimatullahi Order in Dakar.  The interview begins with some discussion of Mr. Diop’s religious and family background, and ranges over many fascinating subjects, including the differing responses of Sufi leaders to French colonialism, the influence of Sufi leaders on Senegalese politics, Sufism and the role of women, and his personal experience on the Nimatullahi path.

(Photo © Thomas J. Haslam, www.evolvinghumanities.org)

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Featured Poet: Mark Nepo

MARK NEPO is a poet and philosopher who has taught in the fields of poetry and spirituality for over thirty-five years. Here, he shares with us four of his recent poems. 

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Daf

THE SOUND OF COMPLEX SIMPLICITY

by Ali Nourbakhsh

Based on references to the instrument in early literature and on depictions in ancient sculpture and illustrations of musicians playing the daf, it is widely believed that the daf has been used in the Middle East for at least 2,000 years.

 

(Photo courtesy of Foad Tohidi)

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Lian Ensemble

MUSICAL COLLABORATIONS AND BEYOND

by Sholeh Johnston and Richard Barton

Listen to each of the ten albums that Lian Ensemble has produced during its 16 year recording history and one of the first realizations that strikes you is the quality of the guest performers and the rightness of the fused sounds. Again and again one is struck by unexpected musical combinations that nonetheless have a timeless quality, enveloping listeners in a cloud that transports them beyond themselves

 

(Photo Courtesy of Lian Ensemble)


 

 

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Featured Poet: Daniel Skach-Mills

WHY MONKS CHOOSE SILENCE

by Daniel Skach-Mills

To step out, once and for all,
from under the sag ging,
word-weary roof of the mouth.
To be the vast,
unfeathered nest of emptiness
out of which sound arises,
and into which it lands.
To live like the open ear of a furrow
listening for a seed—
loves infant hand knocking from inside,
wanting in to be the world.

(Artwork by Gordana Adamovic-Mladenovic, gordanaphoto.com)

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Let it Shine

MUSIC IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

by Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons

I cannot imagine the Civil Rights Movement without the music we produced as we marched, sat in or were jailed.  The music was the articulate voice of the masses of the people.

The music of black spirituals emerged for the suffering of African slaves in America. But how did it infuse the spirit of non-violence in the historic Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, that broke the back of institutionalize racism in the South? The scholar Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons offers a moving answer, weaving together history and music with her own personal experience as a foot-soldier for freedom in the crusade led by Dr. Martin Luther King.

(Painting by Anita Philyaw, anitaphilyaw.com)