Category: Issue 96

Archives 96 – Winter Issue

EDITORS’ NOTE

Internal.  External.  Eternal.  These aspects of a seeker’s self are always in conversation. The writers in this issue eavesdrop on this conversation, and relay what they’ve heard with varying approaches at turns lyrical or layered in complexity, direct or meandering. Some grounded in ancient history, and some firmly planted in a technological future. What do you know of yourself?  Perhaps it might be more interesting to ask who—and where—is the you that is knowing it? READ MORE

 

 

 

 

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DISCOURSE

KNOWLEDGE OF THE SELF
by Alireza Nurbakhsh

 

ARTICLES AND ESSAYS

DIFFRACTING RUMI
On Becoming Human
by Annouchka Bayley

THE SONG BECOMES EVERYTHING
Kanai Das Baul and the Path of Longing
by Surat Lozowick

LETTER PRESSING
by Mary Gossy

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INTERVIEWS

HEART OF THE MATTER
Interview with Tiokasin Ghosthorse
by Sholeh Johnston

BEYOND MATERIALISM
Interview with Bernardo Kastrup
by Neil Johnston

 

CULTUREWATCH

ZIKR: A SUFI REVIVAL
Virtual Journeys Into the Nature of Reality
Interview with Gabo Arora
by Sholeh Johnston

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POETRY

THE CREED OF DRUNKENNESS
by Alireza Nurbakhsh

HOW COULD I KNOW
by Jalaluddin Rumi

HIDDEN COMPANIONS
by Roger Loff

NAMELESS
by Elif Sezen

MAY MY SOUL BE A TEMPLE
by Marina Featherstone

FIREFLIES
by Jeni Couzyn

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96 Editors’ Note

EDITORS’ NOTE

 

Internal.  External.  Eternal.  These aspects of a seeker’s self are always in conversation. The writers in this issue eavesdrop on this conversation, and relay what they’ve heard with varying approaches at turns lyrical or layered in complexity, direct or meandering. Some grounded in ancient history, and some firmly planted in a technological future. What do you know of yourself?  Perhaps it might be more interesting to ask who—and where—is the you that is knowing it?

Surat Lozowick offers a vivid potrayal of Kanai Das Baul of Bengal, whose day job is “singing to the Divine Mother,”  who is immersed in the presence of his Beloved whether in song or silence. Sholeh Johnston interviews Tiokasin Ghosthorse, who re-defines what many think of, by habit, as an external natural environment as actually existing within, when he suggests that it’s not about personally identifying with nature, “…it’s that you ask Mother Earth to be with you when you speak.” In her piece, Diffracting Rumi, Annouchka Bayley riffs on the prismatic capacities of both poem and guru; each can throw rays here and there, yet remain constant in essence. When the spirit takes human form, we are reminded of the Koranic version of a Divine Presence outside human experience, but closer than your jugular. Bernardo Kastrup, in conversation with Neil Johnston, also questions the reliability of the concept of “outside,” asserting that matter is only a matter of perception, and that, “It tries to answer this question: If this world isn’t outside consciousness, how come we are all sharing perceptions of the same world?” Mary Gossy, in her piece, Letter Pressing, tells us how a word gets in the body through slow reading,  how truth gets in the body through physical movement and contact, and how “Being enclosed, in a space or a practice or both…the kingdom of heaven within and without touches itself in you.”

The conversation of true self knowledge is sometimes an analytical dialogue, sometimes an intimate whispering, sometimes a love poem to the part of you that isn’t only you. “Searching is outside. Be with the guru, don’t search…” Kanai Da reminds us.  And in his discourse on knowledge of self, Alireza Nurbakhsh quotes Attar’s stanza explaining that when one reaches the stage of self-knowledge: He sees the core, not the outer layer, He does not see himself anymore, only the Friend.

—The Editors of SUFI

CALL FOR PAPERS

The editors of SUFI invite submissions of articles, stories, poetry, personal essays, and artistic works on all topics relating to mysticism. For details please visit www.sufijournal.org/submissions.

PHOTO © GRANDFAILURE | BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM

RETURN TO ISSUE 96 TABLE OF CONTENTS

96 Table of Contents

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DISCOURSE

KNOWLEDGE OF THE SELF
by Alireza Nurbakhsh

 

ARTICLES AND ESSAYS

DIFFRACTING RUMI
On Becoming Human
by Annouchka Bayley

THE SONG BECOMES EVERYTHING
Kanai Das Baul and the Path of Longing
by Surat Lozowick

LETTER PRESSING
by Mary Gossy

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INTERVIEWS

HEART OF THE MATTER
Interview with Tiokasin Ghosthorse
by Sholeh Johnston

BEYOND MATERIALISM
Interview with Bernardo Kastrup
by Neil Johnston

 

CULTUREWATCH

ZIKR: A SUFI REVIVAL
Virtual Journeys Into the Nature of Reality
Interview with Gabo Arora
by Sholeh Johnston

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POETRY

THE CREED OF DRUNKENNESS
by Alireza Nurbakhsh

HOW COULD I KNOW
by Jalaluddin Rumi

HIDDEN COMPANIONS
by Roger Loff

NAMELESS
by Elif Sezen

MAY MY SOUL BE A TEMPLE
by Marina Featherstone

FIREFLIES
by Jeni Couzyn

 

COVER ARTWORK

FRONT OUTSIDE
FRONT INSIDE
BACK INSIDE
© Razaq Vance

BACK OUTSIDE
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CONTRIBUTORS

ARTISTS & PHOTOGRAPHERS

EDITORS’ NOTE

NIMATULLAHI SUFI CENTERS

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96 Zikr A Sufi Revival

Zikr: A Sufi Revival
Virtual Journeys Into the Nature of Reality

Interview with Gabo Arora

Interviewed by Sholeh Johnston

Gabo Arora is an award-winning immersive artist, filmmaker and Co-founder/Creative Director of TomorrowNeverKnows™, a content, technology and research studio founded by the industry’s leading creative pioneers and entrepreneurs focused exclusively on emerging technologies currently known as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). He is also a professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he designed and leads the new Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technology (ISET) program and lab.

Created with John Fitzgerald and Matthew Niederhauser, in collaboration with fellow technology studios Sensorium and Superbright, Arora’s latest immersive documentary, Zikr: A Sufi Revival, takes four participants on an interactive, virtual reality journey into a world of ecstatic ritual and music alongside members of the Tunisian Sufi group Association de la Renaissance du Maalouf et du Chant Soufi de Sidi Bou Saïd. By opening up an experience to Sufism through dance and song it aims to introduce participants to a heart-centered practice of inclusion, acceptance, art, joy and understanding.

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Thank you for joining us Gabo. Can you tell us a bit about your background, and how you came to work on immersive documentaries? I was a Senior Policy Advisor to Secretary Ban Ki-moon at the United Nations, and became their first Creative Director. I founded UNVR, their virtual reality app, through which I made many of the earliest documentaries using this new medium. Since my time at the UN I’ve continued to push the boundaries with what these immersive technologies can do to tell documentary stories that get people to relate to far-off places and to issues. Recently, I’ve done a documentary on the Holocaust; in Zikr, as you know, we’re talking about Sufism; and most recently I’ve done a piece on the bombing of Hiroshima and testimonies from survivors there. It’s a rare time now in which an artist can have their palette completely expand every month with the emergence of new technologies and new ways of telling stories.

I never saw humanitarian work as a career. I saw it as a calling to make a difference. Before the UN, I was in the NGO sector and worked as a grassroots humanitarian. I was in Colombia with an organization called Peace Brigades International which was nominated for a Peace Prize in 2001, where I chose to do a lot of direct action—I was literally a human shield. So when I started my UN career, I was critical of the UN, and I realized I was only going to do it if I could do something extraordinary with that sort of power and privilege. And I think I did—it allowed for VR to be used for social good which wasn’t happening at the time.

My first documentary, Clouds Over Sidra, led to Oculus VR for Good being founded. I worked with HTC to set up their VR for Impact program as well, and these investments have been made because they saw the success of those early UN documentaries. They also increase donations—Clouds Over Sidra famously continues to double donations across the world in face-to-face, on the street fundraising. But to get this impact it has to be a good film, not just VR. It’s about good and honest storytelling. To be really creative you have to take risks, you have to be a little edgy. Now, like at the last Tribeca Film Festival and Sundance, there’s a huge appetite for people to use new tech to connect us to our common humanity because that was the original promise of the internet.

What is so powerful for you about immersive storytelling, particularly for addressing both the current and historic issues that you mention? I studied philosophy and film since I was very young, and I have always felt this desire to create. And I think there’s always this tension between form and content—each new generation, in order to be taken seriously, has to be original. It can be inspired by the past, and for me that was literature from 19th-century Russia and also cinema from the 60s and 70s, but I knew I had to do something that was going to be new. So, when I was exposed to VR I immediately felt that the form I was looking for to express myself had found me, or I found it, and the excitement was in being able to tell stories in a way that had never been possible before—you get to be in a story, you get to interact with a story, you get to shift your perspective in ways that traditional mediums like cinema don’t do. So, a lot of my work is neither cinema nor a video game, but it’s a merger of those two or a new iteration of those two mediums.

The question of dealing with historical or current topics is a good one, because it’s not always evident that a story or topic will lend itself well to VR, AR or interactive approaches. For example, with my experience on the Holocaust, The Last Goodbye, there was an enormous amount of pushback out of fear that somehow my work would trivialize or “gamify” the Holocaust. There were similar concerns with Zikr, for something that is quite a serious, spiritual topic. That is definitely a challenge and a valid concern, and it’s something that has motivated me, because I know that when you get it right you can provide a new sensation and experience for a person that they would never have had before. Regarding Zikr, so much about Sufism cannot be understood rationally, it has to be through participation, and VR technologies are, by their nature, participatory. You have to engage in order for something to reveal itself to you.

Many of the topics you work with are somewhat political in nature, so what was it that drew you to telling the story of Sufism? A lot of my other work up to that point didn’t necessarily directly relate to my own personal experience. In fact I would shy away from that—I’ve always been very curious about other people and other cultures. I like to have the naiveté of someone who is looking at things with fresh eyes. I was commissioned by Steven Spielberg and the Shoah Foundation to make The Last Goodbye, and I’m not Jewish, my family has not suffered from the Holocaust, but I think that brings an understanding of the common humanity that we have to make everyone else care about those issues. I don’t think you need to be Jewish or have gone through that to have empathy.

Now Zikr was really a calling. During my filming of The Last Goodbye with Pincus Gunter, who was a Holocaust survivor, and Steven Spielberg whose foundation did a lot of work against Islamophobia, both were alarmed by what has been happening throughout Europe with the migration crisis. I was really struck how Pincus saw parallels between that and the Holocaust, and I thought: okay, how can we figure out a way to deal with Islamophobia? And this is where my personal history came in.

I grew up in a Hindu family, and my parents have dealt with the results of religious persecution and a lot of tensions with Islam. I grew up with these biases, and what really helped alleviate them was my exposure to Sufism—through music, attending shrines, and the philosophy of Sufism. So I thought, maybe the personal part of me can come out for the first time. I didn’t pick Sufism on the subcontinent though, it was Sufism in Tunisia, which still allowed me to have a different perspective and a heightened curiosity that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Tell us more about the Sufi group, Association de la Renaissance du Maalouf et du Chant Soufi de Sidi Bou Saïd—how did you develop a relationship and the trust to participate in and film something that was probably quite intimate for them? That’s a really good point and one that I try to make—the rituals in Zikr are not meant for audiences or voyeurs, they are meant only for participants. The only reason the community of Sufis that I eventually worked with agreed, is that we really let them know what the technology was doing. We showed them VR in an education process to build trust and reassure them that this was not going to be a flat film on YouTube, but that we are allowing someone to become a virtual digital participant, and that the aim is the same as in real life: to open your heart, to be vulnerable, for this music and the vibrations to allow you to experience an elevated state. And as a result of that, they were excited and opened up.

I encountered the group in a very serendipitous manner. I was in Libya working with the UN to do some training and I just asked people: what’s interesting here if I was to make a VR documentary? And one of my colleagues, who’s an Associate Producer of the experience, told me that there’s a revival of Sufism and he knew some groups and could invite me to meet them. I met them and participated in rituals first and was able to build their trust by being very into it, and then slowly over a series of trips we were able to meet more people and understand the community better. The thing that we’re most proud of is that we were able to gain the trust of women’s groups as well, because I think that story about the empowerment of Sufism from a feminine perspective is neglected in Islam.

The documentary merges ritual with interviews, so you have this ability to hear and understand directly from people what Sufism means in their own lives, and why it’s their chosen path. It was a huge learning process. It’s not easy because they’re not performing, they’re more interested in doing the rituals, so some of that works well with what we’re trying to capture, and other times it was more difficult.

And for those who haven’t experienced the film, can you walk us through how it works and how that entrance into the ritual is set up through the VR experience? I’m interested in how that invitation into a genuine spiritual experience is made, when so often these rituals are relational and defined by their context. Yeah, we take that very seriously—it’s called “onboarding” where you’re able to bring people into a physical space and get them to wear the headsets.

In our installation at Sundance and in its current form, we play an actual zikr, which is a recitation of the Qur’an in a layered, repetitive, drone-like way, through the speakers in the physical environment before you have your experience. So people come into the space and they’re already feeling like they’re going to enter into something different. They take off their shoes. They stand on a carpet. What’s most interesting about the experience is that it uses the latest and greatest of avatar science, a field which studies the effects of having digital bodies.

You have to experience Zikr with three other people—it’s not a singular or alienating experience. There are four headsets in a circle and that’s how the experience starts. You have sensors on your hands, and controllers in your hands, and immediately as you go into the experience you realize that you have this effervescent body made out of particles, and you can see other people as you begin as well. Avatar science explores human relationships and emotion, and the abstract relationship of connecting with people even when they don’t have real bodies. You can feel their essence through a digital space, and you start having different cognations of what your relationship is to the stage, place and story.

You then realize that you are connected to all the people you’re doing the ritual with through virtual beads, prayer beads that connect you. And what’s fascinating with the physics of virtual spaces is that even though the bead rope is not physically in your hand connecting you, your brain automatically thinks you have a connection to these other people. When you move the beads they seem to have an elasticity that makes you want to continue to move your hands, and as you do that you light up other avatars and the world of where you are.

Slowly, that takes you into the experience. It’s a merger of 360° video and then being in the “otherworldly” spaces where you connect as avatars. Sometimes you have virtual instruments, so you can play along, and as you move you start changing and influencing a lot of what you’re experiencing. I know what I’m saying sounds a little crazy, but you have to trust me that it actually makes a lot more sense when you do it. It’s much more than just listening to music and watching people. You actually feel your presence and the presence of others.

It sounds fascinating. You’re playing with this idea of virtual reality and a kind of ‘particalized’ presence, which in itself is like a metaphor for a real trance state or ritual environment. There’s something really interesting about how the technology works and the kind of world it’s inviting you into, and maybe what it says about the nature of reality. Has that been part of your thinking? Yeah, I think it has. We didn’t want it to be too ‘on the nose’ but subtle and abstract enough that we allow the subconscious to guide us in some ways. I think it’s important for it to be instinctual and not a rational understanding of what that state is like. It’s a representation and there are definitely elements of the experience that are trying to illicit a deeper state. But I was very sensitive to the risk of doing this in ways that people would associate visually with psychedelic drug culture. I had read this New Yorker article as we were making it about the de-Islamization of Sufism in the West, specifically with Colman Barks’ translation of Rumi’s poems, so I wanted to avoid this to make sure to stay true to the Sufi troupe’s own story. I wanted it to be something that these Sufi troupes could use themselves to get people excited about Sufism in their own country. So, the story and design are within what they feel comfortable with as an Islamic practice. It’s subtle, but we’ve tried not to trivialize it.

What are some of the responses that you’ve had from people encountering the installation? The best response I got—and there have been many of them—was: “I needed that.” [both laugh] There was a Vice journalist who started exploring Sufism and seeking Sufi groups in New York. A group of white guys from Colorado were like, “If this is Islam, sign me up!” [laughs] That’s cool because it means that fundamentally people enjoy it. People feel lighter. They feel enthralled not only by the music, but it’s almost like a massage for their soul.

When I was working on it I got slightly criticized—people would say, “Are you trying to convert people?” I said, what are you afraid of? If you want to convert, why is that a bad thing? I think there is something in Zikr that gets people excited to realize that there is something more to Islam that was being hidden from them given our political and geopolitical relationships, where we were born, or our histories. Not being from the Islamic faith, I felt a strong sense of wonder that there was more there, that for reasons of my own biases, or my own culture, I was preventing myself from accessing the greater truth. I think a lot of people were getting a glimpse of something that they can then go deeper with in their own practice.

Generally as an artist there is often this imperative to be secular and objective, to not give privilege to religion, but I think that’s a mistake in some ways. My second documentary at the UN was called Waves of Grace. It was about the Ebola crisis and the story of a survivor, and I got a lot of flak because we decided to focus it on her prayer to God. At the UN, which is the church for secular fundamentalism, people would say “you can’t evoke religion,” and I’d reply that, well, religion is part of people’s lives. Why don’t we allow them to express how they would really express themselves in real life? Why are we afraid of religion? I know religion has done a lot of damage in the world, but it is also a source of inspiration and faith and hope. Maybe we don’t truly understand what religion is. I think that in America, in the West, in the world, we’re not getting that relationship right, because we tend to close off dialogue with anyone that evokes something that feels unscientific. I think there’s a deeper truth to be explored, and this is the first step in understanding what that is.

Yes, the political complications around religion create a lot of fear that can block our capacity to understand each other on a much more fundamental level, and also reach for the things in our experience which might be different on the surface, but fundamentally and universally similar. So it’s interesting to hear how, rather than presenting information, you are offering an experience which is not appealing directly to the intellect, but appealing to the body and the subtle mind in a different way, which perhaps is opening doors that aren’t initially possible through direct or political dialogue. Yes, exactly, and most people become religious because of some mystical experience, right? People can negate it, but that sense of awe is still such a strong part of human experience. With virtual reality the tools are still developing, there are a lot of issues, but I couldn’t think of a better use of the technology—it gets us closer to mystical experience than any other format I can think of. In film they say “show, don’t tell,” and I think VR allows people to “be.” A great VR experience makes you lose yourself so that you actually think you’re in a different world and you feel a sense of presence in another place. That is powerful and spiritual to me on so many levels.

Thank you for taking time, Gabo. Thank you.
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PHOTO © ZIKR MEDIA 360 ZAHROUNI COURTESY OF SENSORIUM
PHOTO © BETTORODRIGUES | BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM
PHOTO © COURTESY OF SENSORIUM

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96 Fireflies

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PHOTO © RADIM SCHREIBER / FIREFLY EXPERIENCE

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“First is the journey from God,
then the journey to God.
Last is the journey in God.”
—Sufi tradition

Fireflies

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Crossing a field in darkness
we slid into like
delicious swimming

feeling our way without eyes
sifting strands of dark
like falling butterflies

we found a hedge alight
with fireflies
drops of light

like crazy raindrops
skittering
in all directions.

We wanted to see those
dancers of light, imagined them
white-winged,

holding their lanterns high,
plunged our fists into thorns
captured worms.

That might have been the moment
I lost you,
encountered

a dual world
knew myself
separate from the sun.

I began the journey back
to find you, toiling upstream
on rivers of light

in my rowing-boat-body
didn’t notice the rivers
were your veins

your arteries
sun rising and setting
blink of your eye.

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JENI COUZYN
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96 May My Soul Be A Temple

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PHOTO © SALLY BANFILL

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may my soul be a temple

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May my hands be like the gentle wind,
caressing you with softness.
May my hair be like a blanket of spun gold,
keeping you warm.
May my tears be like oceans waves,
cleansing you of your burdens.
May my eyes be like galaxies,
bringing you wonder and delight.
May my lips be like roses,
gently healing your wounds.
May my voice be like celestial music,
moving you to dance into eternity.
May my scent be like the fragrance of heaven,
enveloping you in sweetness.
May my face be like the sun,
giving you light and life.
May my heart be like a lighthouse,
guiding you home.
May my soul be a place of worship,
so you may forever be with the very essence
of God.

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MARINA FEATHERSTONE
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96 Letter Pressing

Letter Pressing

By Mary Gossy

 

A legible message made of words is a text. That word, “text” comes from the same root as “textile,” and it has to do with weaving. One strand, one word crosses another, and then there is a phrase, and the phrases tie together into thicker webs of meaning, until a fabric of text is made, made by hand, whether by moving a stylus over impressionable material, like a chisel into stone, or a pen over paper, or fingers over a keyboard of some kind or another. Even electrons leave traces. That’s one reason that circuits heat up. Text comes always from some form of typing even if it flows from ink out of a quill onto parchment. Moving the shuttle across the warp and woof takes force, and so does spinning, and all that movement makes friction and heat. Weaving hands and typing go together in very particular ways. “Type” comes from the Greek “typto,” which means, “I strike.” If you have ever used a mechanical typewriter you know this, because it can take a good deal of force to get the key to smack the ribbon hard enough to mark the paper beneath with the reverse of whichever letter you have chosen. “Typos” originally meant “the mark of a blow,” in the sense of a bruise or wound. Later it means a stamp struck by a die. And then later it can mean example, or copy, or pattern, and today, read in English, it means blows that have struck in the wrong places, printed letters mixed up, misplaced, absent. It’s what our text messages are full of, typos, the marks where our touches miss.

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A monastery is a place to run across words with this kind of intensity. There the practice is lectio divina, or holy reading, a process likened to a cow chewing its cud. Reading very slowly, doing anything to read as slowly as possible, reading one letter at a time, reading one word over and over, reading in a language one does not know well at all, with a dictionary—anything to slow down the process of expectation—“I know what this means—I know what this is going to say”—so that an opening can happen, when a word or a short phrase, possibly one that the reader has seen or heard many times before, can strike—there is type again. The reader feels the word striking at the heart of things, and the practice is to stop then, and to listen—to feel—to let the word in. It is for Christians the voice of the Spirit. Possibly what is most striking about it is the way this word gets into the body after the blow of its newness, revealed by the slow reading. Anyone who says this kind of practice is a way of getting away from the body and its needs and wants hasn’t ever been in it—meaning a demanding mystical practice, one that takes full, slow, patient attention and a turning from all random thoughts and wishes. It happens with the whole being, “slowly, slowly,” as Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh, late master of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order, has it in one of his poems:

Say continually the name of the Friend,
slowly, slowly;
with this alchemy change the copper
of the heart into gold
slowly, slowly.

This practice of gently and slowly letting the word open the being to reality makes for full embodiment. Everything about mysticism highlights the body and the fact that feeling the whole of one’s body is necessary in every way imaginable in order to experience and manifest God. The five physical senses have the opportunity, salved and trained by silence and visual spareness, to rest and then to reawaken to a new world of depth and intensity of sensation, always both carnal and divine.

Being enclosed, in a space or a practice or both, makes you touch everything inside and out of you; the kingdom of heaven within and without touches itself in you.

As so much poetry indicates, this happens metaphorically and literally in gardens and orchards. At a cloistered Oxford convent some of the apple trees are a hundred years old, as old as the place, put there by the first nuns. Fruit tree specialists from the university have visited the trees because some are ancient varieties, almost extinct—almost but not quite eradicated by the uniformity enforced by economies of scale that corporate agriculture has imposed. What is left is alive in difference. The apples have ancient English names. The names sound like the first fruits of the amalgamation of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon. The trees are a lot of work and most of the nuns can’t climb into them anymore to pick the apples, or to prune the branches. Picking is hard but intoxicating. You have a ladder and a canvas shoulder bag for the apples, and up and up you go, picking from the top down, resisting the temptation to skip to the easy ones, reaching, reaching for what’s ripe, regardless. The bees don’t always want to share, but gentle movement makes room for everybody. Your head is sticking out the top of the tree. You come down carefully because you can’t see through the tight branches. Feel your way, you are much wider now because of the over-full shoulder bag of apples. Down you go, to the little cart, there actually is something called an applecart, and into it you carefully, but not exactingly, which is the adverbial subtlety of monasticism, place the apples. Then up again you go. For now, before Vespers, the apples, and there are lots of them all at once, need picking. Not just one apple, many of them, and no biting, not until supper, or breakfast.

There has to be a touch for every need. Not every touch is right every time, and sometimes no touching is best, most healing, most loving.

Nuns take good care of apples the way winemakers take good care of grapes. Apples need curing the way hams do.  So at the end of that afternoon’s picking you roll the cart to the apple store, which is not somewhere to buy things. It is somewhere to put things aside until they are ready, because ripening takes place at its own pace on the dark shelves after the bright branches. Some of the September apples won’t be ready to eat until Christmas; it takes that long for their sugars to sweeten, for their flesh to conform to its right firmness, for the sour to prepare to angle itself along where it will streak the tongue.

Picking makes you stretch, storing makes you bend. The shelves go all the way down to the floor, and they are a meter, or more than three feet, deep. The apples go all the way back, and are stacked on each other, pyramidally, with a sheet of newspaper in between. This is hard work; you have to fold yourself in half so that you can get to the back of the shelf.

All that work can get to be too much, and so the worker might find a secluded spot and just lie down and watch the sky for a while, and then, all of a sudden, an ecstasy might swoon over the whole body with the word, first with memories of love long past, and then with the full pressure of the present moment.

Why anyone should be surprised is surprising. The stories in the Gospels, for example, are full of touching. All anybody ever does is touch, touch, touch. Jesus they touch like crazy. Sometimes the touch surprises him, but mostly he wants it, he’s asking for it. Doubting Thomas, testing his master in his master’s supposed absence, said, “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” The word King James’s translators made “print” is “typon,” that mark of a blow, the wound, the hole in the body like a door. But when Jesus literally walks through the locked door between them, in response to the amazement on Thomas’s face Jesus says, Touch me. Put your hand in the holes. Touch the the wound, the type; print: read: come in.

Christ is all about touching, and the touching heals.

There has to be a touch for every need. Not every touch is right every time, and sometimes no touching is best, most healing, most loving. But sooner or later touching has to happen again. Talking about touching doesn’t do the trick, and writing about it is only bearable because it takes touching to write, even if spoken words go into a recorder and are converted into electronic light on a magnet. A cord in a throat had to vibrate and imprint itself somewhere, somehow, so that later the sound could come again and make an eardrum beat, or glow into somebody’s eye. The device gets warm, after a while, in your hands, whether sending a message or awaiting one. The message can land like a blow, after all, and the endless waiting for a desired communication can circle in the brain like a vulture over the watchful half-darkened eye of an immobile animal not yet gone. Type is a serious matter for bodies. Wounded bodies are bruised with typing that marks out the text of their traumas. Jesus responded to Thomas with a famous answer that bears repeating: “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.” More touching, this time by way of an invitation to feel for yourself, to follow the trail of the marks and to find their sense.

After the nails and the spear there are openings forever after in the body of the Christ, five places at least where a lover’s body in doubt can feel for itself the body of the beloved the lover thought it had lost, and in losing that beloved body, felt it had lost a whole world.  But then it just takes one finger to come across the abyss of separation, tapping into the wound, “beholding,” that is, seeing by feeling, that message of presence, touch-typing a text of connection between bodies that arcs a bolt of love between and all around as you reach your hand forward and thrust it into the side, reaching the seat of mercy. This is the proximity of God. The faith to get there is really the grace of a little leap across a synapse that makes a finger move, and that faith is how we read and meet each other in the whorls. That one word, “typon,” in a language barely understood, like one thin skein in a labyrinth, can lead to text, and reading, and contact with truth. To telegraph is what we do when we text: we write across distance, through the ether. There is a way to get there: following the path, sensing the typos, feeling the way, slowly. And when it’s time to make a move, as sheikh Paul Weber was fond of saying, forget just one tentative finger, or even one timid hand: “jump in with both feet.”

NOTES:
1 This text is excerpted and adapted from Enclosure, © Mary Gossy, 2009/2018
2 “The Name of the Friend,” Javad Nurbakhsh, M.D., Divan-E Nurbakhsh, New York, 2014.

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