The Revelers
I was eighteen and very lonely when I knocked on the door of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order’s Dergah in Chelsea, Manhattan. The door itself was narrow with a metal grate on it, the Sufis had tucked themselves between an Irish pub and a dim late-night lounge. I was nervous, wearing a long skirt and shawl I’d found at the Bushwick Goodwill. When the Wali opened the door, I told him that back in the Bay Area, I was friends with Amin al-Jamal, the grandson of Sidi Muhammad Sa’id al-Jamal. Sidi, who had passed away a few years before, had been a beloved Palestinian Sufi Shayk and activist. Hearing his name, the Wali’s face lit up and he welcomed me into the Dergah.
Inside everyone went barefoot, kneeled on sheepskins, shared glasses of mint tea. People stirred stew and cut bread in the kitchen, talked softly in English and Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Berber. In the bathroom I washed myself the way I read on Wikihow: hands, mouth, nose, face, arms, hair, feet. The light was warm and dim and it smelled like rosewater. We did Zikr, a kind of chanting that can last for hours. There was singing, there was a spiral dance where you got to sort of hug strangers and hold their hands, which you don’t get to do very much in New York. During the whirling, they said if you kept your eye on the crux between your thumb and your forefinger you wouldn’t get dizzy. I got dizzy anyway.
I frequently had no idea what was happening. I arrived only knowing Sufism from poetry: Rumi and The Conference of the Birds, and bits Amin had fed me. That was the real reason I ended up at the Dergah- I missed Amin. He is in grad school now, becoming an arachnologist, but back then he studied insects, a fixation so complete he felt compelled to eat them: fried grasshoppers, rollie pollies and bees in teriyaki sauce. At the 24-hour Korean Grocery store I found a can of silkworms in black bean sauce that I mailed to him. We had spent the previous summer reading each other’s science fiction stories, listening to doom metal and making sculptures that we hid in the oak trees of the San Geronimo Valley. They’re totems, he said. Not idols.
Once I ended up at a memorial service for a member of the Dergah. I can’t remember his name. He had been twenty-six years old, and in his picture he was handsome, smiling through a thick beard as he stood on a kitesurfing board. He worked at a bakery. His supervisor said on his first opening shift, he blasted Iron Maiden through the bakery speakers, to wake the customers up.
In the end, I didn’t study Sufism hard enough to understand what was happening around me in the Dergah, I didn’t take the Shahada, I never converted. But a year later I found myself dropping my phone in a metal bowl to amplify Run to the Hills while mixing pancakes for my coworkers, and thinking about the man whose name I couldn’t remember. Rain buffered the canvas tent. Butter and batter sizzled against cast iron. It was dark out, and we needed a flashlight to see if the pancake undersides were oozy, or burned, or maybe perfect. We weren’t really awake yet, but we were trying. That was the spring we spent in the burn scar north of Santa Cruz, clearing trails and roads of charred, fallen debris. The fire swept through six months earlier, but once, as we were digging out a drainage swale, we found a pocket of roots clinging to some smoldering warmth. We picked it up and felt its heat like a baby animal, passed it around until it fell apart. Over that month we watched the landscape change: rain turned the ash to black mud, anthracobia fungus bloomed up in orange polka dots, followed by parrot mushrooms and elf cups. Salamanders made their slow pilgrimages across the trail, tunnel spiders built cities in the bare ground. Redwoods and Manzanitas send shoots up from their charred stumps, followed by flowers: chickweed, milkmaids, trillium. In our last week there I found a hatchling garter snake in the old fireline birm. It slipped between my fingers and into the bracken. The foreman yelled to keep moving. I kept moving dirt and underneath it I found more dirt. My roommate asked me to scratch a pentacle into his pec with a bit of obsidian, for protection. Later, in a new city, I met a group with radical haircuts who were sure we could reach transcendence by flogging each other with salvaged bicycle innertubes. And then my friend went to Columbia to take Ayahuasca and ended up tied to a Poinsettia tree because she ripped open the Shaman’s earlobe. White kids! Why are we like this? Why do we need things to be so foreign, so indecipherable, so extreme, so utterly devoid of context, in order to feel like we’ve woken up? Why would I only say God’s name in a language I didn’t understand?
We sprinkled chocolate chips in the pancakes and watched the batter seize up. Once in a while, slogging uphill with a Dolmar of gasoline over my shoulder, my breath sunk into a rhythm a little like Zikr: la ‘ilaha illa Ilah. Someone stooped to lift a salamander off the path. But I forgot to tell you the important part. This happened in the Dergah around midnight on a Thursday in November, 2018. We had finished whirling and everyone sat on the carpet, feeling glowy and warm. In the silence before the Shaykh spoke we could hear the rain outside, the taxis honking, and people coming out of the bars on either side of us, drunk, laughing loud.
“We can hear the revelers outside,” The Shaykh said. She stopped on that word and smiled. “There are many ways to revel in the light.”
Elizabeth Wing is a writer and gardener in Portland, Oregon. Wing’s recent work has appeared in venues such as The Washington Square Review, Mudroom, and the Rebis. She is currently scheming to create Portland’s first poetry reading-slash-amateur wrestling event.