how to invoke religion while holding hands and sharing the heat of approaching summertime.

“I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence of stars…I learned God’s true language is only silence and breath.”  –Kazim Ali (Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities)

Last summer, I found religion in the journal of a poet who described his hunger and silence while fasting for ramadan. I walked around taking slow, deliberate bites of whatever was around me. Napped on napping trees. Kissed beneath enough moon shadows to call myself a believer of things. Tried a new cuisine called sloped Brooklyn. Became a smoker briefly because I liked the way my breath would tangle with the invisibleness of air. Had a short love-affair with mayflies. Played ukelele on as many benches as my skin could find.

Weeks wait to be found before summer begins but check out this air! One can call themselves religious just by breathing. Just by emptying the winter from lungs and exhaling bouts of lonely or shiver or hungry. Hours can easily climb mountaintops. Clouds wait to be deciphered into a language of picture maps.

This time is different. You may use the same words for things but meanings no longer need to be still and unwavering. You can memorize a prayer like love and it can be new each time. How amazing! How wonderful to climb hands into another’s and trace the elongation of breath traveling without passport to another country just by feeling your way. 

Bodies are like religious institutions. Stained glass. Memorials. Psalms and palms. Sermons threading together the meanings of things.

We fast (figuratively and metaphorically) to remember why we hunger so much. We gain weight when we allow our bodies permission to hold on to what finally nourishes us.

i’m looking.i’m looking.i’m looking for…….

“Everyone is looking for something. This culture. They want it now; they want everything,” A woman on the 3 train speaks this out loud to me or the people beside her.

The listener is the one who listens and I’m listening.

We want what exists on the other side of what we have and when we feel like we suddenly have nothing, we will settle for anything. 

My father tells me a story of a man he once knew who was a prisoner of war for seventeen months. He paced around in a tiny cell, giving himself permission to feel self-pity for a limited amount of time: 7 seconds per day. This restriction kept him stronger.

“And if he only used four seconds one day,” my dad explained, “he couldn’t use ten the next day. There was no storing or saving.”

I awake in a bed that is not my own, covered in sweat, my back a place of fire and unforgiveness. Panic presses itself into my chest. I am collapsing even though I am laying down.

Currently, I am looking for (permanent) housing. But more than that, I am searching for the crumbs dropped by my future self to guide me toward this present-tense path. There is no GPS for spirituality.

In 1.2 miles, make a left turn on Enlightenment Road…..

I think it might be time to join Kazim and the one who talks about intentional peace. The writers. Perhaps I have already begun this fast. Perhaps I ought to pay closer attention to the language of moaned organs. When I fast, I will think about what yearns inside me; I will pay closer attention to the appetite of my mind and pulsating heart. When Iftar arrives, I hope to break fast with intention of renewal. Renewing this self into something that can remain.

Many of us do want everything. We buy. We parade. We live out loud on computer screens for others to catalogue the meals we ate or faces we make.  And if we surround ourselves with these things, maybe it says:   I am ok. There is no suffer in me. 

Or maybe we should turn everything into one thing. One thing to want. Wonder what that could be. Write it out. Manifest if through.

spirituality of kinetics

Dear Kazim,

The wind huddled against my back in the earliest hours of morning. I call this an encouragement to remain. Turbine tickles my spine. Tell me about your clarity.

You wrote: “I am a man with many arrows inside me, each pointing in a different direction.”

I wonder how many arrows exist in me. When the wind gets involved, does it dishonor the direction I should have gone in?

Kazim, there is so much lust in me lately. Might you call it impure if it exists for the moon or that banjo ukelele I plucked in tiny music shop off west fourth street? Even this wind raises my skin into an erect question mark. I am unsure of where I should go from here. However, what I do know is that I do not need a home in order to birth these words. A wise human recently reminded me that spaces exist all over this earth to hug me into another sentence or stanza.

There is so much music surrounding me: Howl of wind. Percussion from moon beating against my hazel. You in my hands with your words and hunger– not for food but for more prayer.

Over in the midwest, two lovers say goodnight to each other as they split into different time zones. On the east, a poet contemplates a jump from unstable home toward collapsible tent. All of this is just another page marked as necessary. As you find your way through hunger, I find mine through displacement.

 

 

what happens to you.

Dear Kazim,

As you walk through this day as though it were an infinite hallway gathering wisdom from its length, I travel beneath the plaster of earth. Underground, I contemplate how hungry I am for home. An old man once asked me: where is the place I call home? 

In that moment, I was sitting with my knees together, surrounded by other writers in a classroom with no windows. Everyone else’s answers could have been found on a map. I could not help to say: My body. My body is my home. 

But even as I spoke this, I knew it not to be true. I was still searching for my coordinates. My own body’s map was water-logged and torn. It was faded and almost unrecognizable as a means for being found or locating an elsewhere. However, I spoke this as my answer because it was my hope to feel home in this construction site.

Kazim, I am moving again. Change of address; new route; another attempt at peace. This residence I leave now is cracked like sharp confetti hitting  me into bruises and tears. I may need to lock all these boxes and things up into a rented square with no windows as I roam. I need to air out this body until I understand it as whole.

The moon last night pushed through a curtain of clouds and called out to me. REMAIN!

I breathed in its romantic shadows and fierce eye contact. This lover changes shapes each night, but it never tells me to go away. The moon flashes me through this darkness as I begin my walk toward elsewhere.

Kazim, you wrote: the day is a hallway I am/ walking through

I respond: this Brooklyn is a fist challenging / my breath control 

 

o el camino solemne del cuerpo empedrado

The stone is grey and freckled with eastern dust. Kept in pocket, it cuts hips. In hand, it digs into palm. When touched, it enhances the heat of who holds it. The stone is trauma’d. It has been displaced and prefers not to talk about its previous amputations. Do not catalogue, organize or nickname the stone. The stone has been shoved into fires of coordinates that stretch beyond state lines, territories and provinces. The stone has been used as a weapon; it has deflated bone. Notice the blood stains against its minerals. The stone cannot keep a lover; its historical uprooting disallows dialogues on monogamy or the existence of marriage. The stone has been a perch for others, glued into walls, walked over by callused feet, and licked by ocean.  The stone is rib’less and gender’less. Call it androgynous, but the stone refuses to pick a side or sign or stagnant approach to infrastructure. The stone is a danger to itself and others; it has seen too much. Never mention the time the stone ********. Just do not mention that, please. The stone suffers from phantom limb syndrome, though its legs have never existed nor arms or approachable neck. The stone is sad. The stone has no womb, yet yearns to engage in the exercise which publicizes fertility. The stone is without race or religion. It’s color exists from the salt of earth’s breaths and fumes from sun. The stone is still in search of its god. The stone does not conform to any political party and yet this stone is queer. And yet this stone marches for the freedom of others and yet this stone is still. And the stone meditates. And the stone chants. And the stone is in search of its ceremonious existence within its scarred and scared packaging. 

an (atheistic) approach to belief

I carry a bible in my pocket now. It fits inside fake leather dip of hiding space. On the subway, I sneak it between my palms and underline the language that makes my blood seep through the holes in my skin. When I drip, I take note. This has become my companion these days as I gather up bits of moon and shadow, and conversational outbursts with others. Love is found in these pages. No need for beds or hand holding anymore; in this bound collection, I have found what I am most in need of: challenged thought and deeper meanings.

My volume is a bit different. There is God mentioned, but less attached to religion and more saturated by the language of poetics. I call it my bible, but it calls itself: Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. Sixteen years ago, a teacher of mine gave it to me and I have carried it from home to home in various states and mindsets. What led me to reopen this book and sew it to my body in this way is what I think might lead others to attend to their own searches. Seven years ago, I fell against pavement and received nine stitches among other medical help. One month ago, I fell in a different way and this book is my cane. For now.

I am not sure the moment I started calling myself an atheist. Several events could have led me there, but I believe it became solidified when I couldn’t find meaning to the parts of me stained and scarred by these happenings. I just stopped believing. Though as I look back, I still had/have my beliefs. I believe in magic and found it in humans and love affairs and at the tops of mountains and in cabins. I believe in poetry and the essence of its healing powers.

This is probably what led me to house this particular “bible” in my pocket.

Rilke writes, “…ask yourself…whether you have really lost God. Isn’t it much truer to say that you have never yet possessed him? Why don’t you think of him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? Don’t you see how everything that happens is again and again a beginning, and couldn’t it be His beginning, since, in itself, starting is always so beautiful.”

I replace “God” with “love”. I replace “God” with “words”. I replace “God” with “you”/”your”. 

All of this doesn’t have to be an end to something. That period at the end of the sentence could be its beginning. The loss of another could be the beginning of something so much deeper.

Yesterday, I was thinking about pronouns and how we are given a name at birth and a pronoun attached to it, but what if it doesn’t fit? So we make our own versions of what we need and what we are. This pertains to my atheism or what I thought my spiritual (non)belief was called. Perhaps I was never one. Perhaps there is something in between belief and non. Like: betweeniest. 

My mind is not set. Even at this age, it changes. Sometimes, it falls apart and I have to reshape it. This can be exhausting; however, it offers me a chance to rummage through the parts of myself I so often neglect. We do this sometimes.

So, I take off on a trip and feel the miniature words of Rilke press against me. It is erotic in how alive it makes me feel. Fear is what has kept me away from living (at times). Fear of understanding what I just don’t understand. Finally, finally….I am ready for answers found in these letters written between 1903 to 1908. Still relevant and connected to the language of the earth we all linger on.

And that’s kind of accurate….we linger. We loiter. We endure. And to fill in all the gaps and breaths of silence, we question.

even in doubt there is conviction

Dear Air.

I call you this because I do not see you. And I’d rather call you something that maybe you haven’t been called before. I write letters to you but they pile themselves into my palms and my arms shake. My wrinkles drown beneath the words I do not send you. But if you are all around me then I just may leave these notes on my body. You will find them as you wrap yourself into around me. Forgive my misspellings or unintelligible gasps. This language is heavy and I am tired and I am tired and I am tired. My prayers are edible and I forget to chew and there is choking and sometimes the spice causes me to lose control and when it is bland I rub my sweat into its soundlessness. You will never find me on my knees and my hands do not clasp and I do not wear beads or count blessings. The songs are only about the soil I wish cluttered around my bones because blood is too thin and much more grows out of dirt and clay.

Dear Wind.

I call you this because I hear your hum. And even in my tears, you climb into my salt and press them away. The other day, you lifted me up from path toward underground subway. My toes flew for a moment. If I threw paint against your invisible, you’d be stained glass. You’d be oil slick puddle of rainbow. Believe? Does it matter? I feel and this sense does not need to be in buildings or engage in holy. I do not need to memorize your songs; I have my own. I will not starve or separate or cling. The thing is, I’m still here. I’m still here.

That is enough.

what it looks like to believe

Are you Jewish?

A young girl with brown hair gathered into a neatly assembled ponytail asks me this, as I wait for the 4 train on Franklin Avenue.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked this. Many times throughout the year, Orthodox men wearing thick beards and dark clothing have come up to me wanting to give me Shabbas candles or call out the songs of the shofar or just simply pray with me.

In the past, I have said yes. But my answer is far more complicated than that. I am not Jewish.

For a long time, I was Agnostic leaning toward Atheist. Perhaps dabbling in yoga has stretched my body out enough to progress my leaning into full-blown Atheist.

It’s not that I don’t believe in anything. I believe in Poetry. I believe in the magic of nutrition and the reward of eating a good meal and my body’s reaction. I believe in gun control. I believe in global warming. I believe in the power of free speech. I believe.

It’s just that I’ve been inside too many rooms where too much has happened for me to still get down on my knees and pray to a / some God.

I wish. And I have thoughts seeped in devoted pleas, but I’m more moved by the strength and rise of the sun, rather than the inscribed stories written in the best-selling book of all time.

In the past, I have said YES to these religious men who have asked me if I were Jewish because it seemed easier to say one word (that they were already expecting) then qualify my atheism. But two weeks into a new year and I guess I just want to stop obliging so much. So, when this young child asked me, I said: No.

Suddenly my body got really, really hot. Granted, I was wearing many layers at the time, but it is Winter and this is the costume we must wear: scarf, several textures of shirts on top of each other and jacket (maybe 2) and heavy socks and hat and gloves and

I was sweating.

Suddenly, the train came and I watched her and her family get on the same car as me, though we were at different ends.

I looked toward her and noticed her notice me.

Then….her father. Right beside me.

“I think you might be Jewish,” he said.

And I couldn’t help but wonder what about me led him to think this. My bright red hair? The curls? Do Jews have dreadlocks? I’m poorly dressed and have been called messy by a number of women. Is that a tip-off? My nose? My thin lips? My dimples?

“I…I don’t practice,” I said.

“Your parents are Jewish. So you are.”

The thing is, I didn’t feel bombarded. I have a bias against men like him: white, middle-aged. But he wasn’t a man standing in front of me, handing me candles for praying and a pamphlet. He was a devout believer. He wasn’t pushy, nor did I feel threatened by his question in any way.

And I wonder. Why don’t we do this more often.

We ask: how are you?
We ask: what do you do for a living?

But what about:

Are you a Poet?
Are you happy?
What do you believe in?
How do you find a way out of your suffering?
Are you hungry?
What are you reading?
What words stain your wrist?
Where do your tears come from?

These men…this child…they are bold enough…such unwavering believers…that they are fearless. They go up to strangers and ask them this question without any judgement of their answer. Both child and father looked deep into me. My NO did not matter. They saw religion in me. Even if it is the religion of poetry; it is something.

I feel my feet curve from side-to-side in my black boots that are torn and have a not-so-secret hole in the soul sole that invites rainwater in. My migraine is back like a lover that I never loved in the first place. And the pain in my mind tries to take me away from my day. Smothering. Debilitating.

But in the evening, I fall against poets and we pray without finger-clasp. Without stained-glass windows or angels or illuminated memorials. We toast to words and I feel the belief inside them. And I don’t even have to ask. Although…I think I understand the power of hearing one’s answer.

take a knee

for { _._ }

We are often humbled by our crazy. By our hypnosis of chaos and gutted scar tissue. Why must we press pills into mouths who converse with invisible tribes. There is no need to call in sick or call out numbers like 9-1-1 when knees only need some dirt or wooden plank and hands can clasp or shake; there is really no uniform to this. Just breathe or don’t and it will all arrive in time.

A New York City rodent eats away at my french sourdough bread–purchased at the farmer’s market–which I left on my kitchen counter, and I am angry. I grow sad that it didn’t ask permission. And I want to know if there was enjoyment in its yeast. And I want to know if it grew bloated afterward. Or did it take the time to spread some peanut butter on it. And did it pray beforehand or at least take a moment to express gratitude for this find.

A small white dog barks at me on my way home from work and I begin to cry. I think about a big black dog too far away to pet. My arms are willing to stretch far to reach him, but I’d have to remove them first. I pick up one of my tears as though it is a child that just needs to be held. I let my tongue travel through its salt and memory.

I just want to know what home feels like.

Sometimes this city feels like a zipper I feel trapped in and there is too much blood to mention or measure but the music distracts me and the free love overwhelms me.

I see a hazel leaf by my foot, which is trapped in false leather; this smells of dust and Halal trucks fuming; hear the woman by the F train gasping out her cigarette.

am i breathing is this breathing is it breathing if i feel do i feel is this feeling what is felt

Woman plunges her map into my water.

Fall hard.

What is really meant by prayer? My knees are atheists. My breasts are annoyed and what fits between my legs is no longer fitting. What do I say? Forgive me? Reference how long it has been since the last time? This first time is the last time which is the only time which may lead to the next time, but I really cannot be sure.

survivor’s guilt

My mother and father are Jewish. So is my sister and her husband and their child. My cousins are Jewish too. So are my aunts and uncles. I am an atheist.

I grew up feeling guilty even when there was no cause for it. It is in my blood, (or this is what my ancestors say).

To wake up in an apartment with free warmth and free hot water and electricity in every room, lurking from every outlet, with a bed and clean sheets and windows without cracks and a working refrigerator keeping my perishables safe where my vegetable drawer is full from the farmer’s market where my closet has hangers hugging shirts and jackets and my floor is clean without holes or water damage and there is a roof above me and it appears secure.

To wake up.

To wake up with a father just one state away and a mother just a bus or train ride away and a sister just a bike ride away.

To wake up with love dripping from my wrists and hiding behind my ears and whispering from my calendar.

To wake up with a job to go to. Two jobs to go to. Four…including the ones that don’t always pay me.

To wake up without a cough or suspicious flu in my body. To wake without the need for medication. Without the need for hidden drugs in boxes, tucked away in the back of closet.

To wake.

I am an atheist and I believe in nothing and I believe that maybe I can believe in something someday when the haunt subsides. When the guilt goes away. When I start to really imagine life without having a secret affair with death.

To survive when others have not is not a feeling of relief. It reeks with the aroma of unworthiness. Music plays and all I can hear is why me why me why me why me why me why me why me why me why me why me why me why mewhy me why me why me why me why me why me why me why me.

Must I believe in some thing in order to make sense of this?