Onions, meat, veggies and olives.  My favorite part is the caramelized/burned onions that you scrape off the bottom of the tajine.  When I was pregnant with my firstborn I craved nothing more than one of these beauties…alas roadside tajines are not common in California.

Agadir is one of Morocco’s newest cities.  An earthquake in 1960 completely destroyed the city.  Since then it’s been rebuilt, and it’s retained a newish, cleanish aura.  We went there at the end of December and found the resort town eerily empty, not the usual bustle of sun-seeking tourists.  Welcome to the worldwide recession folks.

I love a good stone/adobe wall.   Solid, real, beautiful.  Whenever I see one I get a good look, because this building technique is fast disappearing, giving way to the fast, cheap and durable cinder block.

Along a dusty alley in Southern village I discovered this giant bag full of Argan shells.  Once you go south of Marrakesh you see a LOT of Argan trees and the oil is sold everywhere.  You’ve heard this all before, but let’s give a recap on why Argan oil is such a high-profile oil.  For one, the trees only grow in Morocco and in some areas of Mexico.   And it’s supposed to be great for you, whether on your skin or on your plate.  I use Argan oil on my skin on a regular basis and the thing I like most about it is it’s a dry, non-greasy type of oil, unlike olive oil for instance.   It’s good, not miraculous, but good.

Each and every thing or action can either have baraka or not.  For example, food that is purchased on an honest income, prepared with love and prayers, shared among as many people as possible is said to have baraka.  Food that  is bought with questionable money, or processed in an unnatural way, or consumed greedily without praise of the Creator, without sharing with or offering to those around us, is said to be devoid of baraka.  The first kind of food makes you healthy, physically and spiritually, will never make you ill, will strengthen your body for doing good things, will strengthen bonds of friendship and unite hearts.  The second kind will weaken you, make you anxious and leave you wanting.

Our daily exchanges can have baraka.  Take, for example, this exchange I had with a man who is a car guardian.  This is when I get in the car to drive away.  I am giving him 20 cents for his car guarding, and he’s helping me navigate out of my parking space into traffic.

Me: Salam alaykom akhoya.  Peace be with you my brother.

Guardian: wa alaykom salam. And with you peace.

Me: bismillah.  In God’s name.  (hand him the money)

Guardian:  Allah ya3teek el khair.   God give you good things.  (another way of saying “thank you”)

Me: Allah y3awnek.  God assist you.

Guardian:  Seeri fid Allah.  Go in God’s care.

And that’s it.  As I type it in English it sounds so contrived, but you have to understand that in Arabic, this is actually completely natural speech.  This is just how people say “hello”, “thanks a lot”, “good luck” and “have a nice day”.  Every utterance is a prayer, returning the speaker to the divine, time and time again.  As I drive away from the guardian I feel so incredibly thankful that this is the case, I feel a little more alive, more humbled, more compassionate.

Most times when I have an exchange like this, I walk away feeling a little more light.  Then there are those exchanges that feel like the person reached in, took out my heart, plain cracked it open, washed it in light, and placed it back in my chest.  A heart unexpectedly broken in the best way possible.  Tears flowing at the most importune of moments.

And it can come from the most unlikely sources.  I’d like to tell you about someone who dazzles me with light.  She’s a woman who sells candy outside my son’s school.  Her name is Naima (not Naima from the baking project, it’s a common name) and she is one of the more joyful, exuberant people I know.  She’s got this cart that she had made, and it’s a child’s delight,  full of every kind of candy and trinket.  She pushes this cart to the school in the morning, noontime and afternoon school, as many as four times a day.  My son is a regular customer, both because he likes candy, and because I really, really want  to support her.  I often stop by after dropping him off at school, just to get a little dose of Naima to start my day off right.  I never know what the topic will be.  So I might ask her a question, like, “how did you get started with this cart?”  She’ll animatedly tell me all about how she got it made and  how she started out, and then she will offer the spiritual wisdom behind it.  ”Honey, I’d rather make one dirham the right way than a million dirhams the wrong way!”.  Or if she had a day off, she’d say “Our body has a right over us!  These hands, these feet, they have their rights!  They’re going to bear witness against us if we aren’t good to them”.  She is smiling and animated, and has this amazing faith in God.  I doubt she can read or write, but she has a deep, strong wisdom about life, the human soul and our journey.

About 2 months ago, I came to the school, and I saw Naima dressed head to toe in white.  I was in total shock, because this is the color of mourning in Islam.  Even though I knew exactly what had happened, I couldn’t think of any other way of approaching her than to ask her “Naima, why are you wearing white?”.  She answered, “the man of the house died”.  This is a way of referring to her husband.  I stood there in total shock, and she told me about it.  She said “he wasn’t sick, so it was a total surprise.  He died a wonderful death, he didn’t suffer, his body was completely at peace.”  Her face is glistening with tears and at the same time she is smiling and there is that joy and light in her face.  ”And you know, he died during the best times”.  (the first ten days of the Islamic pilgrimage month, considered to be the holiest days of the year).  Then, as usual, she shares spiritual insight, “we’re all just renting space on this earth, and once the rental contract is up, we’ve got to leave.”  But the words that stick with me the most are “a wonderful death”.  I’m amazed that anyone would use that particular combination of words, and I love it.  This woman endured the ultimate loss, the person that was closest to her,  and she was completely accepting of it, and could see that it happened in best way possible.  These are the fruits of a spiritual life.

Since then, it’s been so strange to see Naima every day, with her white jellaba, scarf, socks and shoes, busily selling candy to a 100 screaming kids or cheerfully chatting with the mothers after morning drop-off.  She’ll wear white for 4 months and 10 days, the traditional mourning period.  It’s a constant reminder of death.  We talk about it often, revisiting the story of her husband’s death.  And every time I am awed by how real her strength and faith are.  More often than not, we both end up in tears, and laughing for no other reason than that we enjoy each other’s company.  Exchanges of baraka are possible anywhere, anytime, if we are open to them.  If you’re not getting any love then you just have to be the one that gives it.  A kind word, a smile, a sincere prayer are what soften and open hearts.

The sufis say that a saint is one who reminds you of God.  With him or her you experience a higher level of reality, in an instant, effortlessly.  If anyone ever wonders where the women saints of Morocco are, have no doubt that they are there, making bread, raising children, pushing a candy cart around.

My dear husband is not feeling so good…nothing better than the old school remedies to help him get well.  Real honey (including actual bee parts), pomegranate (the world’s strongest anti-oxidant), some garlic lightly fried in olive oil and a cup of green tea (no sugar of course).  And the prayer for healing, Lla ba’s, tahoor inshallah.  May this illness not be harmful, but purifying, God willing.

She lives in a triangular sliver of a room.  No beds, just blankets.  A TV to keep the girls company while she is at work.  A bamboo roof that leaks in winter.

She knows the prices of food; she knows that a bowl of white flour costs a dirham and a quarter, precisely.  She knows because she needs to.

It is the details of poverty that make it real to me.  The contrast between what she eats, and what I can choose to eat.  The gulf between our earning capacities.  It is the details that I want to know, so I pry, I am nosy, I persistently inquire.  Really, you made how much?  50 dirhams a day?  And you worked 12 hours a day?  50 dirhams is a little under 6 dollars, it’s 4.5 euros.  For this she stood for 12 hours in the cafe, over a hot griddle, patting out the greasy dough for fried breads, one after the other, one hundred per day.

When I do hear the details, I have to let each one sink in, with all the emotions that come with it.  I am awed, I have so much respect for this woman, she is tough as nails, she has endurance.   I honor her for this.  Then I am sad, pained at this, at hearing how little her labor earns, and at the part I play in this imbalanced picture.  But most of all I am humbled by her wonderful smile, her gratitude for life’s smallest blessings, her constant mention of God, in praise and thanks, her celebrating of her children.  I think she knows that life transcends what we merely see, touch, eat and surround ourselves with.  Even as she lives with so little, she floats above it with grace and a smiling face.

I let the details drip, drip, drip into my consciousness.  I let each of them change me, just a little, propel me towards something.  What is the solution.  Do I give 1 dirham, do I give 10?  Do I solicit more on her behalf?  All this I can do, and have done.  I cannot bear to think that her girls could go to bed hungry, or not get the proper nutrition, or have the cold seep up from the floor through the blankets at night.  I know that in some countries poor people get fat because the cheap food is the fattiest.  But here they can’t even afford enough of the cheap food to make them fat.  Potatoes, white flour, sugar and oil are still precious commodities, often purchased a dirham at a time, enough for a meal.

Finally things have coalesced into a new picture, a new phase.  Fatiha and Naima, 2 of the ladies who I love dearly and have blogged about here, have started up a small baking enterprise.   They are baking to supply the small cafe at our workplace, the Center for Language & Culture.

It’s been an exciting and creative process for them, and very rewarding for me to watch unfold.  Both women have spent extensive time baking mesemman (Moroccan fried flat-bread, a staple in most cafes).  However, neither of them had baked, or even tasted, much else.  So we set about learning how to bake a few things.  They had already learned fruit tarts last year in cooking classes.  I showed them how to make chocolate chip cookies, and finally after tweaking the recipe over the course of a couple of weeks, they now have a great, easy go-to method for delicious, beautiful cookies.  In Morocco we don’t have brown sugar, which makes the cookies moist and chewy, so we’ve had to approximate the taste and texture.  I’m getting into the details here, the bakers out there can stick with me, the rest of you just scroll down if you wish.  Our dear friend and wonderful cook Khadija gave the ladies her recipe for awesome chocolate cake, and we figured out that it works really well as a cupcake.  The chocolate cupcake is one of the best-sellers, the ladies make a batch of 30, or a double batch of 60, every day.  Then a dear friend of mine, who is French, showed us an easy recipe for crepes.  Those too are a daily must (20 a day).  We stumbled on a recipe for easy chocolate pudding to fill the crepes with (ok, I’ll admit, it has cornstarch, the dreaded “thickener” that we are meant to avoid in search of “real” ingredients.  Let me tell you, the stuff tastes great, and we do not have such discerning palates around here).

Next we wanted something savory to balance out the sweet stuff, so we tried small quiches.  Those too were a big hit, but we have a problem with the crust.  We are baking them in the same pans we use for the fruit tarts, which are the kind with the pop-up bottom.  When we pour the egg/milk mixture into the crusts and bake them, the egg mixture seeps out through the crust onto the oven pan.  I think it might be our crust.  Any suggestions?

The ladies have also learned how to make a pretty tasty pizza from scratch.  Before this project, it’s safe to say that neither of them had tasted the majority of these foods.  Now they have this amazing new skill, and the confidence that goes with it.  The first week or so I was in the kitchen with them a lot.  But now that they have their core recipes down, they run their own show.  They are doing an excellent job of planning, working together, communicating, decision-making, and most of all baking from morning til night.  The baked goods are then available to the students and teachers at the center, mostly during their break times.

What’s new for me here is working without a blueprint.  Seeing potential in a situation that is not all spelled out.  I have to say I was very nervous to even start the whole thing.  What if I just got their hopes up, and then it didn’t work?  What if we lost money and got demoralized by it?  What if we couldn’t master the recipes?  What if we couldn’t actually make enough money for them to live off of?  And honestly, some of the people I shared my idea with had the same doubts.  I lost some sleep just being nervous, or I’d drive somewhere and forget where I was driving, cause my mind was busy sifting through all the details.

I’m glad I didn’t listen to the doubts.  It’s only been a couple of weeks, but already the project looks very promising.  First of all, the food is great.  In fact I want a strawberry tart right now.  Secondly, sales are going well, there is rarely anything that is not sold.  Some of the items are tricky because they need to sell the same day (crepes, tarts, quiches).  Even so things rarely go to waste.  We are starting to have regular customers.  Even though I told the ladies to view this first month as just a training period and not worry about the money just yet, it already looks like the project is financially viable, alhamdulillah.   And thirdly the ladies are totally enjoying being their own boss, for the first time ever.  One of them mentioned to me something like “Now the color has come back to our cheeks”, in reference to the fact that they feel FREE in their work.  It’s nice too because they are together, they keep each other good company, they can bring in their children if necessary.  When one of them brings her baby in, they take turns carrying him on their backs (the original Attachment Parenting, fo’ real).   And it’s all getting easier and more relaxed.  We already have plans for expansion, but I’ll leave that for another post.

These customers look happy:

My husband’s father and stepmother are spending some time in Spain and graciously invited the children and me to visit them for a week.  I haven’t been to Spain since I was 19 and studying Spanish in Salamanca.  The kids have never been, and we did not travel this summer due to Ramadan and work, so needless to say we were all excited and ready for some adventures.  And you know what they say, be careful what you wish for, because you may get it.  I don’t usually blog about the ins-and-outs of our comings and goings, but this is a tale worth telling.

My in-laws are staying in the south of Spain, but we flew into Madrid and they picked us up in a nice 7-seater, ready for the long drive south.  We managed to extricate ourselves from Madrid’s maze of highways and were driving comfortably down the A-4, without a map, relying on the GPS navigator.  After a couple of hours of travelling due south, the navigator takes us off the main highway and on to some byroads.  We are perplexed by “her” choice but trust that “she” will get us to our destination.  Now, this is important to remember, the navigator calculates the shortest route, not the most logical one. So there we are at about 10 pm on a small country road in la Mancha.  My littlest all of a sudden needs to pee, so without giving it much thought we pull off the road and I hop out with him.  It’s only then that we realize we’re stuck in the mud.  Really stuck.  The more we spin the wheels the more stuck we get.  We try to push the car from the back, but we can’t get much traction in the mud.  We make deep ruts about 10 feet long and cause significant strain to the (rented) vehicle.  The wheels are only about 3 feet from the highway, yet it’s impossible to breach the gap.  After about 20 minutes we call a friend in Madrid, who instructs us to call the rental company.  Duh!  One last thing, I ask him, how do you say mud in Spanish?  Because I’m going to have to do all this in Spanish, and although I have a college degree in Spanish, I sure wasn’t prepared to describe our current imbroglio in the Castillian tongue.  Barro, he answers, estamos atrapados en el barro.

I call the rental agency and explain that we are atrapados en el barro, and they assure me that being atrapados en el barro is most definitely not something we are insured for.  Why is that not surprising.  No matter, we still need a tow truck.  Un gruista.  So now I am trying to explain to the gruista our exact location, I give him satellite coordinates, road names, painstakingly describing our location in as much detail as possible.  I keep asking him to hable despacio por favor, speak slowly please.  I don’t remember any units in my Spanish textbooks covering a conversation with a tow-truck driver in the middle of the night on an abandoned highway.  No problem, says the gruista, I’m on my way.  We wait.  30 minutes later he calls.  I can’t find you, he says, I’ve been driving on these back roads and I just can’t locate you.  Apparently we have stumbled into a  Bermuda triangle right here in the vineyards and wheat fields of la Mancha.  Our hopes are dashed once more.  At this point the kids are out of the car, they are so excited, whooping and hollering up and down this country road that no one know exists.  And I realize one thing, you couldn’t buy excitement like this if you tried.

But wait, the gruista says, you can call trafico, they will locate you and then they can call me and I’ll come pull you out.  He gives me the number for trafico, I have no idea what that is.  It turns out that it’s theguardia civil, sort of like a highway patrol.  I’m running the gamete of emotions, feeling stupid that we are not travelling with a map, embarrassed that we have to be rescued by the civil guards during our first 5 hours in the country, thankful that they exist, even a bit jealous that there are these kinds of services here in Europe (as compared to Morocco of course).  Elated that when I explain where we are, they actually know where it is.  But not too elated, because we’ve had such an unbelievable run of bad luck, and we’re still not out yet.  At the same time, there is a deep sense that it’s all ok, that we are in fact, exactly where we are meant to be.   For reasons that are not quite clear.  We are happy to be together and this experience is grounding, we are breathing the fresh campo air, getting mud all over us, laughing and getting sillier by the minute.

Next scene: enter the civil guards.   Blue lights flashing on the highway.  We’re saved, I think to myself.  Two large and capable looking men emerge from the 4×4.  If these guys can’t get us out then no one can.   They are jovial, that typically Spanish mix of cynicism and humor.  They proceed to remove our luggage from the car, setting it on the highway, and in my mind I can just see us driving away without it.  Every ridiculous thing seems possible, even likely, at this point.   And indeed, when they try to hook our minivan up to their truck, well wouldn’t you know, their winch doesn’t work.  They spend some amount of time trying to fix it, cursing the tonteria, the idiocy of it all.   But it’s obvious to everyone that that our comedy of errors has a few more acts left in it.

We’re going to have to call a gruista, says one of them.  It’s like we are not only stuck in physical space, but in some some of time warp that folds back on itself.  20 minutes later, he reports that the gruista says he already went out to look for us once, and that he still can’t find us.  Just our luck that they would call the same directionally impaired guy that we had earlier.  One of the civil guards illuminates our understanding with this factoid: Que Espana no es Europa, es Suramerica.  Spain is not Europe, it’s South America.  I counter that while Spain might not be Europe, it’s no Morocco either.  In Morocco we would not have civil guards on call 24 hours a day.  My father-in-law says that in Morocco we would have about a hundred people come and just push the car out.  Ok then, says the guard, let’s do it como en Marruecos, like in Morocco.  It’s then that someone gets the bright idea to push the van from side, rather than from the back.  They are going to try to slide the whole van sideways onto the highway.  And obviously, since I am here typing about it, you can guess that they did in fact succeed.   We all cheered and hollered.

They escorted us to the nearest town, to a hostel where we ate warmed up Spanish tortilla and Manchego cheese at 1 in the morning, before collapsing in our beds.

Sometimes things like this happen and you are forced to slow down and smarten up.  When you are travelling it’s easy to get ungrounded, make little mistakes that cost you a lot.  Travelling in groups is even more challenging because the chaos of the group leaves you less attuned to your surroundings.  It’s easy to rely on someone else to think of everything.  Three kids in a car for hours on end is also a lot to handle, any way you slice it.  In our case we relied too heavily on the gps navigator, without knowing precisely where we were going.  The first thing we did the following day was buy a map of Spain.  Oh yeah, and we had to get the car realigned, one last little chapter in the saga.  Despite our eventful entrance into Spain, we’ve spent a week in a a place so idyllic and peaceful it seems surreal.  It’s like a blend of Taos NM and the Ourika valley in Morocco, so I feel like I’ve been here before.  Tomorrow we drive back to Madrid to catch our plane back to Morocco.  Insha Allah khair (God willing it will go well!).

For me, plastic is just another thing on my list of things to feel guilty about.  I always forget to take my shopping bags with me so I end up lugging things home in micas.  On the rare occasion I refuse a plastic bag, the shopkeeper will get this amused look on his face .  This unconventional foreigner is going to walk home with her loaves of bread all exposed to the elements and to people’s curious eyes.  What a rebel.  At home we have a special cupboard whose sole purpose is to house all the plastic bags we bring home.

So when I stumbled on an art show under the theme of MICA (plastic in Arabic) I was intrigued.  I was walking in Casablanca, which is a highly unpleasant and yet energizing experience.  I happened to walk by a place called Villa des Arts and dropped in to see what it was all about.  Why am I bothering to blog about it?  Well for one, I don’t get out to many art shows, so I found this inspirational in its pure playfulness and freedom of imagination.  Granted I prefer classical beauty to this type of art show, it’s nonetheless creative and funky.  This post fulfills the artsy cultural quota for this otherwise straight talking, plain Jane blog.

If you are an artist and you ever run out of inspiration, don’t panic!  Grab the nearest thing to you: a flip-flop, some pencil shavings or a plastic bottle cap.  Now multiply times a million.  Voila!  Instant art show!

If plastic could talk…it would be singing this ditty:

See above for instructions for instant art show.   The commonplace item reproduced here for shock and awe effect is none other than tofita, the world’s cheapest candy (1 dirham  or 10 cents will get you 10 of these).   Don’t quite know how this relates to plastic, and I think I don’t want to know. 

As hard as I try to appreciate the random beauty of this, and not apply my bias against trash, I just can’t.  Can you?

I do appreciate that someone took a fresh look at trash bags washed up on the beach, I really do.  It’s still gross.  I’ve walked on these beaches. My kids swim in this.  

Something else to discover:

Then again, maybe it’s all a matter of gaining the right perspective:

Feel free to share your own feelings on plastic, trash, art shows, art shows made of plastic trash, beaches, or gaining perspective, in the comments!

A couple of weeks ago my daughter Karima spent the night at one of her best friends’ house.  Apparently, all hands were put to work making intricate Moroccan cookies for an upcoming wedding.  You know how other people sometimes bring out something special in your kids that you have yet to witness?  Well it was like that.  On Eid Karima repeated the feat for our own family.  We did not have a recipe so we had to wing it based on nothing but our extensive experience tasting Moroccan cookies.  The dough is some combination of flour, oil, butter, water, a little powdered sugar.  What the proportions are beats me, but we came up with something edible.  The filling is basically peanut butter mixed with powdered sugar.  Since we do not have peanut butter in Morocco, we are talking about making it from scratch.

We watched her in wonder as she assembled these little gems…it’s magical the way they take shape, from nothing much to a thing of beauty.

Ramadan myth-buster: fasting 15 hours a day from food and water in 100+ degree heat is NOT a detox, cleanse or anything related to weight loss.  If it were we’d all be sipping chilled water with a squeeze of lime.  Fasting is hard on the body, especially at first (then again at the end.  The middle is ok).  The  intention behind fasting is not some sort of “perfecting” of the body.  That would be a waste of intention.  Our intention is like a container that we bring to a river…if we bring a thimble, we will get a thimble-full of water…if we bring a glass, we get a glass-full…so in Ramadan we make sure to the bring the biggest possible container, and bring more as they fill up.  And that intention is to please our Lord and taste closeness to Him!   It is the perfecting of the soul that is in play here, as C.S. Lewis said “You don’t have a soul, you are a soul.  You have a body.”  For now.

Ramadan is a time of increased worship.  Many people endeavor to read the entire Quran during this month.  They do this by reading one thirtieth of the Quran daily, which takes about an hour.  There are also extra prayers every night after the last of the 5 prayers, which last about an hour and a half.  Read my post about that from last year.   At the beginning of the month, for those of us not accustomed to a lot of worship (I definitely fall into this category), these extra practices seem quite daunting.  At the same time, for me, without those things Ramadan would just be hunger and thirst.  It would be like coming to the thresh-hold and never passing through to the higher level of existence.  The thing is, even though I did not do those extra practices every day, by about the 2/3rd mark of Ramadan it totally changed for me.  As my dear husband said, in the beginning, you are pulling your practice along, and it takes a lot of effort, but by the end, it’s pulling you along, effortlessly.  I felt this the times that I got to pray at the Koutoubia, my favorite outdoor mosque.  I’d be giddy with excitement and anticipation for the tarawih prayers, the thought of standing with thousands of sisters and hearing the imam’s beautiful recitation of Quran, thinking to myself, there’s nowhere I’d rather be.  I understood, to a very feeble degree, the teachings of the Prophet when he would say that one of the most beloved things to him was the joy he found in prayer.  Or the man from that time who needed to have his leg amputated, and he said, wait until I begin the prayer (because he would be in such an altered state that he could bear the pain).  Or the great saint Rabia when she said “Oh lord, it is night, and every lover has gone to her lover, and I have come to you”  (paraphrasing because I don’t have the exact quote).  I know that for these people, that is their station, their permanent state if you will, whereas for me, I’m all too aware that it is a state, among many, and undoubtedly it will pass (or it has passed already).  Nevertheless, I am thankful.

This Ramadan it seemed, based purely on anecdotal evidence, that many people entered into the Islamic faith here in Marrakesh.  I myself witnessed, on two separate nights, two French ladies who took their shahada at the Koutoubia mosque.  They uttered the words over the microphone to be heard by the thousands who were there.  It is such an emotional moment, like seeing a baby being born.

During the last ten nights of Ramadan, there is a night called “The Night of Power”.  Prayer during this night is better than 1000 months of prayer (!!!).  The thing is, we are not told which night this is, although the Prophet (peace and blessing upon him) said “Look for it among the odd nights”.  That means starting from the 19th, 21st, etc.  In Morocco there is a widespread idea that the Night is the 27th, and as such, there are many practices, both cultural and spiritual.  The cultural ones I’m not so familiar with, but for one thing, children who have never fasted try fasting for this day.  There is special food, djaj el beldi (free range chicken) and other dishes.  As for the spiritual practice, people try to spend all night in prayer, either at home or at the mosque.  This year I had the immense pleasure of going to the Koutoubia mosque with my friends Safia and Zineb.  We arrived at 1:45 a.m and found the place packed, the overflow area had overflown and people were praying in the garden behind the large open air pavilion of the mosque.  There was such quiet, no other sound beside the beautiful quran, no other reason to be out than to worship God.  As I stood in prayer I saw, several rows ahead of me, a tiny face looking back at me, a baby in her mother’s arms.  I admired that mother’s determination; in Ramadan we are shown again and again that what we think is impossible is in fact, possible!

When the imam finished reciting during the last cycle of prayer, he made a long, soulful supplication to God.  Among my favorite lines…”we seek refuge in You from eyes that do not weep, from a heart that does not feel awe” (na’udhu bika min ‘aynin la tadma’, wa min qalbin la yakh-sha’).  Several times the imam would make a supplication that was particularly meaningful to him, and he would break down sobbing.  Throughout the du’a we would hear sobs rising from people as their hearts opened, faith turned into certainty; sobs of humility before the Creator of the worlds.  I felt to incredibly lucky to be there on one of the most special nights, during the most blessed hour, right before dawn, when “The Lord descends every night to the lowest heaven when one-third of the night remains and says: ‘Who will call upon Me, that I may answer Him? Who will ask of Me, that I may give him? Who will seek My forgiveness, that I may forgive him?’”

When the prayer was over, Safia, Zineb and I stood in the street watching the thousands of people flooding home, and it was like being in a river of light.  We commented how usually we only see these kinds of crowds for soccer games or protests, and it’s heartening to know that life in this land can transcend those kinds of preoccupations.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.  I did not have the focus to write during the month itself, but needed to put down these words now.  As my husband pointed out, it’s not my usual style of blogging, not as fun/funny perhaps.  But I know that you all appreciate what is real, and right now, this is what’s real to me.  I’m left subdued by this month, both the physical hardship of it, and the spiritual uplift.  I appreciate all those who have subscribed to the blog and who check in to see what is here, I’m honored to offer you my writing.  And may we all catch a glimpse of more than the eye can see.