I’m sipping Turkish salep pronounced “sah-LEP,” and I guess the stress goes at the end of the word as the verb is placed at the end of a sentence in Turkish. I got in last night after 1 AM through a gigantesque airport. Foreign language brings out my competitive side which is healthy, I think. How fast can I learn? It’s not quite that. How long does it take to retain a word? It’s a small act of love; making this small effort to connect instead of wanting to sound smart due to that scary bridge between you and the person that wobbles or doesn’t exist.
Salep is a beverage of hot milk, sugar, and thick from wild orchid tubers with cinnamon on top which soothes the nerves and relieves chest congestion and bronchitis.
The Hagia Sophia has been calling me, which isn’t a surprise. Every time I get somewhere, I ask “how far is that on foot?” I don’t tend to take transportation if I don’t have to. I got lost, went down sidestreets through a wholesale fashion quarter with squat slender buildings and boxes for windows.
Finished my salep.
A bath of blue, green, yellow, and red through countless windows in red striped domes and semi-domes, it’s just light and books and men praying in crafted spaciousness. I don’t count, I don’t think, though I am always frightened of doing something disrespectful as a tourist in a spiritual space. Patterns, patterns, patterns. It doesn’t end. It doesn’t begin. Pointed arches, foliage curling on stained glass, lights hang from stars in the ceiling on metal strings. It’s circular, cosmic. There is no image of God—it’s in everything; it even blooms on the carpet. I am alone in the Fatih mosque in a pink scarf covering my hair cleansed by light and space.
Patterns, patterns, patterns. Hand-carved blooms radiating on doors. The cosmos is in everyone and everything even wood—it’s basic. A raindrop at the end of a bulb, where does inspiration come from? Spirit never abandoned me and people, sometimes, I gotta tell you.
In spaces such as these, a work of art, I can put aside some of the brutal history that comes along with religion and power and get to the essence of a breath. Why such violence when this mosque fills me with such peace?
This is sacred geometry, mathematics meets poetry, a perspective on power. I remember Anas telling me about Morocco before the arrival of Islam, how that faith tried to erase their history before its introduction to the country. What gorgeous writing in gold curving lines with tails; serpent like as if written in the moment. Astral. Natural shapes become majestic. Patterns, patterns, patterns. We are bonded to this place, at least for a moment in time.
Some people made peace with their parents. I never knew what do with them and then I hated them. It’s a strong word, and I use it more for the effect. I felt spirit give me the space to just feel that and take my time. All in all, I don’t see them which I appreciate. Protected by spiritual walls. The call to prayer has begun. A cat is sitting on a panel in the pink carpet: blue blooms. In my case, my mother gave me away to a total stranger when I was four, and I was four at the time, so it took me some time to reopen my childhood. Not everyone comes from a happy upbringing. It’s a fact of life, too. I started over at 37 after a couple of years of unearthing my past and what it meant to me, and just continued forward, all the same.
A guard tells me to leave—it’s time for prayer and women don’t share the same space as the men. They have their own area unseen by them. We’re connected to the omnipresent thing; the inexplicable patterns that become impossibly beautiful. Between us, there is such separateness. You’re a part of this but you’re over there. I don’t feel comfortable joining the women. I am not Muslim, but I haven’t felt at any point unwelcome. I am a spiritual person who meditates. Writing as prayer; in the flow of a current that runs through all of us.
Thinking about psychology as an architecture; religion is quite a pillar in the world that exists inside of us. If you’re against it; that’s still a relationship. It’s there. Watching the pendulum swing; sides. Even psychology, bathed in a holy light, that was my passion, probably. I just got in touch with that since I started writing. I went through a deep change; there was nothing wrong with my life, but being told “you were repressed for a long time,” I had to agree and also wish I hadn’t gotten involved with some of the people that I did in the way I did.
I’m taking in what I learned right now. I never felt better, and the more I let go, honestly, like—let go, the easier it feels.
As a view outside one’s window, a church can even be part of the draw, but it comes with a history that’s hard to swallow because of its patriarchal perspective on power. Mosques in Istanbul glow hot in the night; they look like the future to me. It doesn’t inspire the same feelings because I don’t have a connection to it; it’s like foreign words, they don’t carry the same history and weight. Religion has waged so much war when one would think it would be about respect.
Now I’m eating lentil soup and olive oil with black olives. I’m home wherever I am, but I cannot say that, though I am where I am. We all have to eat though, that’s true.
Pop music plays on a terrace near a mosque under renovation. A soccer game is on the big screen. NFO vs EVE, whatever that means. Red and blue, a packed stadium. The sun is setting through plastic walls downing smoky the outdoor patio smoky with a hazy golden light. Patterns, patterns, wherever I look; cushions with monstera leaves on black and white triangles. I don’t know about this traveling. There are many ways through the world, so what’s yours? You start traveling in your own hometown and you come to discover just how many people, how many lives are out there.
I wanted to live. That’s just the thing.
The Oldest Storyteller appeared. I’ve been thinking about that character.
I wanted to keep on living, growing, so I made a choice to evolve. I did. I’ve had to adjust some of my relationships, but we’re all creating our own realities. I tend to take on full responsibility. Maybe that’s a product of having had two parents who were mentally ill. I don’t know what the trajectory of their lives was. I’m not feeling low; we make decisions on many levels. I don’t know what to say about not having been fed properly as a baby; that was a rough thought, sensational, to be confirmed by someone who didn’t even ask “How are you doing?”
These four years I spent in another house came crashing down in a confusing world; mine, but I have to keep in mind that there was so much I didn’t grasp as to what was driving my life. If I find myself slipping into old patterns of behavior, it can be painful. It’s less that there weren’t positive motors, but right now, I’ve been struggling with whether or not I want to be living abroad.
I understand that now with a pipe on my lap and a blue and gold glass hookah like a fountain catching the last rays, a swell.
These first couple of days hit me hard. I didn’t want to be here. All my stories that I wanted to tell supported me in getting through a difficult moment, but I experienced how a change in my world, let’s say, came with its challenges. I’m becoming so much more…I hope so. I hope that would apply to everyone. Sometimes, I would rather abandon my story and start totally anew.
There’s a larger world out there, so it doesn’t matter, but navigating out of my tiny world to reach a new point of view has been a little—step on the gas. I’m thinking about the oldest storyteller right now because I’m working on an application, and the way the Pacific Islanders charted the currents…the goal was to reach that land mass out there…and they knew if the boats into the currents that they would get there eventually even if that meant curving rather than traveling on a straight line.
Flowers in tiles on columns; what a life, a heavenly light in bloom. What’s the day look like after you die? One life, no? A long one. If I wasn’t living like a student, I would feel a little better, but I’m just looking for a job and coming above ground, really; that’s really what it was.
I’ve hardly had a birthday party in my adult life—yeah, it’s the simple things, isn’t it? I want that now; a group of friends and someone to bring me a birthday cake—one whole person. To throw myself a party. I have to scratch my head; I must have done it, but that’s what I mean. I feel like I could create a community around me now, a family type of thing.
Time bends, the oldest storyteller says in a city full of strangers. He told me long ago, “a few years,” he always reminds me, “everything is going to change.” Things really did change.
I wanted to deal, heal, and move on if not reach my potential; it’s just some people in my life appeared to have to go. I didn’t want to lose hope. Madonna said there is no greater power than the power of goodbye…so there are many goodbyes I’m saying right now.
I asked myself long ago, what does it mean to change in a world that never stays the same and that you wish would change, some things.
Birds soar over domes outside these plastic walls, over plastic flowers. Time, it will take some time, but not much to turn a life around. It does feel like a new life. That was some story back there, looking at my camomile tea in a glass saucer. Letting go…saying goodbye…
Time bends even through the plastic coverings on this terrace, patterns made by rain, some crappy material you can’t even recycle takes on an otherworldly glow.
The doctors in their scrubs are fresh out of the hospital drinking beers at 10 AM after a 48-hour shift. You can tell when someone is in a totally different timeframe than you are. It’s their night off, the light of day. We stood on the morning porch with laundry hanging. They’re smoking cigarettes. I say I am tired and pause with my cup of coffee. I apologize to them…The ER doctors in Istanbul, Turkey don’t mind with their 40s at 10 AM, calm. Go buy filters, they say, and make my own coffee. I just got here. I don’t typically like staying in a house.
I write this from a hookah bar with “I’ll be missing you” the remix playing on a big screen TV between two stained glass windows with men in a smoky brown cafe in Fatih. I’m drinking apple tea and smoking my hookah.
Cerese called. “I am so sorry I am missing…”
Thank God for her.
I leave the shisha bar up the street at 5 AM. It does not close. The doors close, but the shisha bar does not. I worked for two weeks straight since my last droplet and came into a new space. The great affair is to move, and we do. I had to settle into a new head space. We keep moving…
I haven’t heard a peep from my roommate Anastasia from Russia for two weeks. We seemed to emerge at the same time. Our roommate Muhammed is caught between our questions, finally. Helping me put my laundry into the machine, he says, “my mother says do this.” I make Anastasia jump. “You move like air.” I do not make sounds at home, that’s not typically what I do. I do not turn on lights. I avoid this. I do not want to disturb anyone.
Thus far, on my travels this year, Marrakesh, Morocco was a monastery time since I was still going through pain. Summer in Vico Equense was about dealing with my own relationship with bonds, what I want to bond with, too, that’s very important. Not that. That.
They don’t know that. They don’t have the problems that are in my family, so I could deal with these dynamics that came to the surface privately. Fes, Morocco was home = cosmos. The castello in Vico Equense was military. Defense. Protection. What my walls even are. Learning to put them up but not embracing everything—saying no. That’s an important one. Istanbul seems to be about intimacy, taking care of self, and setting up a sanctuary though I am not home. Home and hearth.
Is this time about travel or is it about home? I am here for three months, about, and three months later, editing this, I would never judge someone for not wanting to travel. I want to stop imposing on myself.
Istanbul is a remarkable city that opened its mosques for me to meditate in. “Conflict is good,” a Muslim-American conflict resolution specialist said who works at the highest position for the United States. This was an authority, honored, who never made me feel small. My system of thought, though; much had to shift, and I’m embracing the space rather than trying to fill it, and even as a character in my mind, she draws out wisdom out of me.
We rely on each other’s differences, too, in that, this woman has walked into war zones and situations that I have not. There’s a bigger world out there that wants to embrace you, so she represents that, too.
The spaces themselves cleanse, the writing on the walls fluid and stunning as if done in the instant. It vibrates.
I sit back and think about decoders, people who are gifted at deciphering a language group. They can reflect on the lines, the symbolism, the writing, and begin to compute the patterns, the logic, the meaning.
I heard about a decoder who works for the government—they just called her one day in college. It’s not a secret. She is a federal agent, not a secret agent. They need people with certain skills. She was studying ancient languages, Francophone, I believe. She was so good that the government called and said, you are basically decoding—work for us.
And the thing is, I know, because I can, because her friend is allowed to talk about it. He doesn’t know what she’s doing but he has the basic information. If he couldn’t talk about it…he would know. Isn’t that interesting?
Don’t do that.
There are people who penetrate a network, even ancient, and begin to create a map for those that just see lines and symbols. “Oh, I understand the meaning or the message…” eyes that can see through the surface, so many layers. Sometimes, when I read “oh they intercepted a message,” I think, “did they want you to?”
There is more than meets the eye and sometimes what you see is not exactly what you’re seeing. You think—diamonds over a line, it’s not connecting, but there’s a connection. This symbolism makes up a whole message, word, I don’t know in this case. Is it a phrase? If I were to move over that piece, it might lose its sense; a B becomes a P, something. It’s a sentence that isn’t constructed on a straight line, perhaps, but then, I sift through my own symbolism, since that might not look like a kingdom to someone else.
I can probably already deduce due to context that it’s probably God-related. Koran. Isn’t it all? I’m looking up and around the walls. Is it the feminine holy wisdom that created the masculine that my friend told me about? That’s what Sophia means, for example, but then, how do I know that? She read it, but that doesn’t mean that’s what it means…that’s the other thing. Information and our interpretation. It means “divine wisdom” in the feminine?
Learning is one of the great joys of being human. Our ability to learn, write, and create a whole system of thought and architecture that meets the eye in more ways than one. Language is a kind of architecture. There’s structure. It holds us up. For some, that might appear very real, which it does, not flat. “I’m walking inside a structure,” I’m getting to know what it is. Like math, too, maybe. This + this = this, so I identified the verb? I heard that there are three columns for consonants in Arabic, and this is classical Arabic, so I don’t know how that translates, but they make up the root of the word. The vowels change the form of the thought: noun, verb. To farm versus a farmer. In Turkish, you place the verb at the end of the sentence. “Coffee I want.” Arabic is not Turkish, not at all, but it’s on the walls. Turkish is a relative of Japanese, and I heard Basque is too. Arabic is the Semitic language group along with Hebrew.
Isn’t that amazing about language—how it connects us? Our ties extend beyond blood since language is fundamental in our architecture as well as how we relate to the world, and it turns out how we relate has even older roots since languages are organized into family groups. It always comes back to that, and my family group was hard to relate to, but I felt it connected me to so many, so I’m making my choices as to how I want to relate through this fuller, firmer understanding of my foundation. I feel the ground beneath my feet in splendid architecture.