Watercress

Congratulations Australia for ousting Howard in the election. After the despicable antics of some of his party’s members in lying to forment race hate and bigotry to frighten people off the opposition, they deserve no less than to be booted out of power. Thank you everyone who voted for decency.

There used to be a time when people could have experiences outside the realm of reason and logic and accept it as a normal part of life. My father talked about those days. It was before electricity had come to the countryside. He thought it had to do with the complete darkness of the night time. Nowadays, we don’t get to experience total darkness outdoors. Light leaches from the towns and roads and reflects off the clouds. My father told stories of the strange things that happened in the pitch darkness, about lights in the sky that people followed, and there were stories of beings that share this world with us, but are not human. (from a Muslim POV, we would recognise these beings as the Jinn)

This all came back to me as I was listening to a talk about Ali Farke Toure, the great musician of Mali. He had some strange and powerful spiritual experiences in his younger days which he felt gave him his strength as a musician.

What Ali Farke Toure and those old folk my father remembered had in common is that they were all immersed in the natural world and they were free human beings. They weren’t penned into little concrete boxes. They had the earth to walk on, not joint jarring pavement. They could see pure night, without the toxic orange fake-light of the ‘civilized’ world to disturb them. They were unhindered from acknowledging the mystical in their lives. It’s more difficult for us. We have to first break through the thick crust of modernism just to be ourselves, just to be natural. It can be done, although it seems the everyday experience of the mystical has been lost to the majority of us.

At www.freerice.com you are presented with a series of words and you have to click on the answer that you think best defines them. For every one you get right, they donate 10 grains of rice to feed the world’s hungry.

It’s all good. You get to improve your vocabulary and someone benefits in a real way. Some of the words don’t even look like English, but hey. I got to 1000 grains and I think the vocab level was at 43.

Umar Lee says in his blog

“..I believe that yes being a white Muslim in America for many people, myself included, means that you will be lonely and you will be a stranger, but we have to accept this isolation for the sake of Allah. We no longer have a racial or ethnic group to identity with, or that will accept us, so we must be involved in helping to create an American-Muslim identity and building strong families and that will cure the isolation and loneliness. “

I agree with this and I think it has relevance to European Muslims too, although the American exerience will be unique in many ways. For a white convert Muslim, there is a sense of isolation; we are not the same any more, and especially wearing hijab, we become ’strange’ and strangers to other white people. At the same time, we are still regarded as white by Muslims of other ethnicities. At times, in the Muslim community, our whiteness is like a currency, and gain can be derived from it, whether social or politicial. Or, it is a barrier to full acceptance. However, we accept our fate as Umar says, ‘for the sake of Allah’. What we have gained in Islam outweighs by far the difficulties we have.

It is our position in history to be among the founders of an indigeneous Islam for this place. We don’t know what it will look like, but I hope it will be distinctive, a cultural cross pollination between Islam and western Europe. Of course, Islam has long enriched eastern Europe and we would do well to learn from the experiences of Muslims there.

For our own and our children’s sakes, we must concentrate on building strong family bonds and develop our children’s sense of place, culture and religion. I am glad to say, most of the convert women I know have comparatively big families. When I imagine the future, all the weddings, family gatherings, even funerals, it comforts me to think that my children will have each other. The isolation of the first generation need not be passed on to the next.

Writers I admire remind me of craftspeople, like weavers who create something amazing from all the strands that they control and shape. It’s a skill I would love to cultivate, but I would need to have a lot more practice. I hope this blog will prompt me to write at least something regularly, and maybe find out if I have anything to say. Someone said that the reason for a first draft is to find out what your story is about. Part of the reason for this blog is to find out if I have a story at all!

Masha Allah, comet Holmes continues to beautify the sky with its flourescing green coma and blue tail.
To celebrate the beauty of the night sky, here is a video of images from the Hubble telescope with lines of a Rumi poem.

Last night was clear, so it was a good opportunity to get out and see comet Holmes .It’s located a little to the -ahem- left of the fifth star of Perseus. Perseus is near the Pleiades. I have no trouble finding Pleiades because they are quite distinct. I can also find Orion, Cassiopaeia and the Plough. To find comet Holmes, I had to learn what Perseus looks like, and now I do, and it feels good to have learned a constellation I didn’t know before. It would probably have been better to look at the comet through binoculars. With the naked eye, it was quite faint. It may have been a better show a few days ago when it suddenly increased in brightness, but it has been cloudy here for the last while.

It got me thinking about the constellations, and how human beings inevitably ‘joined the dots’ and saw shapes in the stars. In a way, the night sky has been like a giant canvas for generations of people. They made pictures that are hundreds of light years across. The universe is so vast and so complex, yet it cannot imagine or concieve of itself. That is up to us. We may be insignificant in scale, but we can encompass the stars in our minds.

One of the few things I remember from college was a remark made by a tutor that wasn’t even part of a lesson. He advised us to never have a bad word to say about anyone, to get a reputation for that with people, and to walk as if we owned the world.

A simple click at this website and 1.1 cups of food are donated to the hungry. A brilliantly simple idea and an easy way to do something to help.

At the park a few days ago, there was a performance by a man juggling fire. He had two batons, each burning at both ends, and these he was throwing up into the air and twirling around his body. His movements were rhythmical and his adhering to the rhythm was his protection from getting burned. As long as he maintained his rhythm, the burning batons maintained theirs, and together they danced.

After a while, one of my boys turned to me in great seriousness and said, ‘He’d make a right good Jedi’.
High praise indeed.
All things Jedi are very popular at our house, and such skills as fire juggling are appreciated in the light of the exciting and fast paced light-sabre duels of the Star Wars heros.

The parallels between the Islamic mystic way and the Jedi Master-Apprentice relationship have been explored in plenty of articles, I won’t go over it again here. But, I am glad there is something in popular culture for boys to enjoy that has a fundamental core of goodness and that borrows from a noble tradition.