For Issue #84 of SUFI we spoke to Louis Lefebvre, artistic director of Heliofant productions, the animation outfit behind the short film I Pet Goat, II which created a viral whirlwind of speculation when it was released online last year.
Caring for Others: Sufism and Altruism
“If we are to survive as a species on this planet, we need to embrace views or belief systems that are inclusive of others.”
By Alireza Nurbakhsh
Featured Artist: Yari Ostovany
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Living in the space between two cultures, I am interested in investigating the nomadic in-between spaces: between emergence and disappearance, between the solid and the void. I am further interested in the mechanics of a symbiotic relationship between Persian and Western Art; the former being my innate orientation and the latter the tradition in which I have been trained. My interest lies not in a synthesis of styles but rather in an epistemological approach and in the tectonic interactions that give rise to the creation of peaks and troughs within a culture, dismantling those visual vocabularies to their most bare and abstract cultural elements and sensibilities, using this as a point of departure to move more and more towards a terrain that lies in between the musical and the architectural. yariostovany.com
SUFI ISSUE 84 – INSIDE FRONT COVER
PAINTING#2 FROM CHELLEHNESHIN SERIES BY YARI OSTOVANY
Chellehneshin is a compound word in Persian consisting of the words Chelleh; which describes a period of forty days; and Neshin, which literally means sitting. It refers to a seeker going into solitude for a period of forty days and forty nights to pray and meditate. In several mystical traditions, The cycle of Forty is a common duration needed for spiritual metamorphosis and transitions to another, transcendent dimension.
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Blessing Way Singer
A Visit with Navajo Medicine Woman Sheila Goldtooth
at Canyon de Chelly, Arizona
Interview by Chara Nelson | Photography by Alex Cowie
Framed against the backdrop of deep golden canyons, red mesas and mountains of pondersosa pines, Navajo Medicine Woman, Sheila Goldtooth, takes the reader back in time in the ancient Navajo Way. Much of Native Tradition is based on the idea of harmony—with nature and with self. For Navajo healer Goldtooth, a life out of balance can lead to disharmony and manifest in illness. But imbalance can be realigned through the sacred chants and songs of her healing tradition, called the Blessing Way, passed down from her mother’s brother and the generations before him. Goldtooth tends to the women and families of her Arizona community, performing puberty or coming of age ceremonies, but is well known throughout the area for her strength in treating all those who need to be brought back into harmony. Goldtooth was born and raised in Round Rock (Tsénikani), Arizona, north of Canyon de Chelly. She grew up tending sheep and cattle with her uncle and learning about healing herbs from her aunt. Tradition and a closeness to the earth and nature were essential to her upbringing, all part of the path that led her to become a healer.
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Mercan Dede
Turns the Tables on Sufism
By Michele Rousseau
Sufism has few ideas, but an inexhaustible wealth and variety of illustration. Among a thousand fluttering masks the interpreter is required to identify each old familiar face.
~ R.A. Nicholson, 1898
Internationally renound musician and DJ, Mercan Dede, is beloved by many nations of the world but his home country, Turkey, houses his harshest critics – those who feel that his contemporary appropriation of Sufi music, whirling dance, and ethics are an erosion of the traditions of the path.
Michele Rousseau balances the anxieties of Dede’s critics with her own experience of his music, and his extraordinary power to bring people of all walks of life together to partake in a shared experience, a “contemporary sama.”
(Photo Courtesy Yagmur Kizilok)
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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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