For Selin
We wake at 6 to the prayers from the mosques. They sound like songs, singing to us of past ways. I think they want to be heard. There is light in Selin's eyes as she looks at me and wonders: “Why does it feel so comforting to hear the prayers? I’ve missed this.” They are a kind of music that reminds us where we come from, just in case we need it, albeit not having the words for it.
•
At their summer home, Selin's grandpa would pick oranges and clementines from the garden. He then hand-squeezed the ripe fruits to make fresh juices. Afterwards, He would sit with Selin’s grandma on the patio, gazing out together at the streets as they enjoyed their cups. It was a little ritual they shared every summer day.
“I hope you guys both find a best friend like that in life.”
•
“You can fight with strength without having to fight up a war.”
•
It’s amazing that anything unfurls at all — that minds and hands were all it took to concoct this miracle of a world. All that we've had and done is happening, manifesting trials and guesses into physical forms. Events unfold without our ushering, though sometimes we bend the stream with small surprises we call milestones. Yet water on this planet cascades ever downward, and after three or three hundred or three million turns and drops, it eventually gets us to a place out of promises of many places. Life is possible because everything allows so much more to occur. The core of anything is restless creation — entities colliding randomly to create fleeting magic. In such turmoil, an erratic rhythm emerges — a continuum, a spiral, an ignition — that becomes life as we know it.
•
Where two continents meet, ocean waves crash upon jigsaw coastlines. I picture the exhilaration and delirium of an army, a people embarking on an expedition across mountains, deserts, and waters. Here, as they arrived at what they presumed to mark the end of the land, a hard stop to existence — a limit to the limitless, the end and the genesis of a world –– only to find more. Is it a relief to see that life is not a cage after all, and constraints only become constraints when someone believes in them? The salt wind lifts their spirits over the gulf. What will become the destiny of infinity? Whatever they believe they must do, they do with a burning urge. Thousands of years of grandeur in glory and agony that eludes understanding. The mystery of it all only drives them crazier. Minds and bodies, forgetting so to become, rush to the world’s edge, then the next, and the next.
Istanbul
January 2024
I will have to tell you about this class I’m taking on language and its evolution … it reminds me of your words on beginning - and then more beginning!
‘Only to find more’… love you and miss you dear Erica❤️