“Anyone pulled from a source
longs to go back.
At any gathering I am there,
mingling in the laughing and grieving,
A friend to each, but few
will hear the secrets hidden
within the notes. No ears for that."
-Rumi, (excerpt) Song of the Reed.
Since Thanksgiving of 2005, I’ve found excuses to spend the holiday by myself. Last year it was kind of obligatory. This year it was a choice, and one that I’m happy for, believe it or not.
Yesterday I attended a pre-holiday meeting of my Islam class in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. There were perhaps a grand total of twelve people in attendance of the sixty enrolled. It was okay, however, as I stumbled upon some more Rumi (the excerpt above) that I hadn’t viewed in the correct light, I suppose, in the hundreds of times I’d seen it before. It triggered a heavy emotional response in me, however, that I kept under wraps at the time but couldn’t contain as soon as I got home.
Last night, inspired by what I had read, I stayed up very, very late. I thought about how Rumi, as a child, might have viewed Afghanistan. Surely his Afghanistan was a much different place than that I had come to know. I remembered the dust, the Thanksgiving in the Sharana crematorium, and so many senselessly killed and wounded as we were forced to withdraw from our position and retreat into the safety of the mountains, not to return again for the better part of a year. Although I remember most of the details as well, I more intensely remember the physical pain, the fear, and the sadness all rolled into one. It was an amalgamated set of emotions that I have thankfully not encountered since, and hope that I never do again.
At Thanksgiving last year, the war was almost over for me. I had been away from the United States for well over a year. Although I had grown immeasurably as a person, I had also grown very tired, and grown much older than the simple chronology of seventeen months could ever hope to attest. Most of my friends had long since gone either off to safer vocations or off into the sweet hereafter, but not me. I remained there, alone with my thoughts, the tools of my trade, and my shortwave radio, listening for a familiar tune and a voice from far, far away.
When I left Afghanistan, I packed up my radio carefully, wrapping it in my old field Astrakhan scarf, and placed it in a box somewhere for safekeeping. I hadn’t unpacked it since I came back. (Hadn’t even looked for it, in fact.) But I always knew right where it was. Last night, I dug it out, and set it up on my kitchen table in tiny Mount Pleasant, Michigan, looking for that familiar old voice, emanating from a place I remembered well. For a moment, I remembered Akrotiri. I recalled sitting at the end of a long pier, watching dolphins swim together in the Episkopi Bay, silhouetted against the waning sunset. I visualized twenty bare toes swinging to and fro off of the dock, a good conversation, and the feeling of calm and peace that came with that day. I remember how conflicted I felt when I knew that the messages sent off into the sky from that peaceful place would wreak such mayhem, violence, and destruction when they were received somewhere that was anything but calm and peaceful. My little radio had warmed up. I dialed in the numbers that were still seared in my memory, but heard nothing…just static and silence. I casually whirred about the dial, looking for where the voice should have been, when it should have been there, but still…just static and silence. Then, as if it knew I was listening, the Lincolnshire Poacher began to play his twelve bars, and strings of numbers filled my kitchen with an unusually strong, loud, and absolutely clear female cockney accent. As quickly as it came however, the voice was gone, and my home was again empty, save for more static and silence.
The horrors of Sharana, both the Thanksgiving abandonment and the summer return, have been behind me for some time. Yet, when I hear the numbers that I have no ears for cast off into the cosmos, I know that they land with one specific person, in one specific place, seven-thousand miles away from me, here…in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, and that the message is received as it should be. Some part of me takes comfort in that fact, but some part of me wishes that I could speak to that person and give them just a few lessons about being conscientious, judicious, and peace-seeking in all of their endeavors, despite what some faceless, nameless voice tells them from thousands of miles away. There is a way to reconcile the two worlds, if you work at it.
I decided that I could, and that Rumi, a native Afghan, could be my guide. The Sufi tradition, in a fashion not at all dissimilar to the Buddhist tradition, has a way of transmitting thoughts across the cosmos to someone else. Rumi was a sound Sufi. I am not, nor do I claim to be. I did however, just for the night, begin to read the same lines of the Masnavi over and over, in the hopes that my casting peaceful thoughts off to the breeze would catch up with malevolent numbers being sent over radio waves, if not reach the target first. Foolish, in all actuality…but simply the thought I tried to get across was this:
“Turn from the ocean now
toward dry land.”
-Rumi
Hoping that our people find their way out of the ocean soon so that they may mingle again with laughter instead of grieving, I packed up my shortwave, put it back in the closet, then read more on my couch until I fell asleep. When I awoke, I found that the ground in Mount Pleasant was covered with a fresh, cleansing sheet of cold white snow.
I haven’t felt so warm in years…
http://irdial.hyperreal.org/the%20conet%20project/disc%201/tcp_d1_6_the_lincolnshire_poacher_mi5_irdial.mp3
