love and words: missing marwa

I really need to pick up the ball again and start cross posting, I have added a new site for the blog – wordmachinist.com – courtesy of a request from the ever so amazing Angelheart, and it is invigorating me and the blog again. That and I think I am finally swimming to the surface of my still waters. And as I resurface, so are all of you and the comments have been flying and…I need to get back on the ball.

Maybe not today though…

I finally figured out why I was having such strange dreams, a part of it has to do with the Mad Kitten who is in deep hiding, she is not comfortable where we are staying until I can move into my new lair and she sleeps hidden all day in a bookcase, of all thing,s and then comes out at night when I am closed in the room with her and has her day. Last night she thought it was appropriate to use my head as a springboard. She was trying to get to the window and jumped from several feet away and landed on my head and went springing off to the windowsill from there.

Amazing how resilient she is, how she unfolds her personality once she knows the house is asleep and I am there.

Need is complex. The very word has become a bug-a-boo, much in the way that phrases like “real” and “know” have become co-opted by this perverse definition of relationships we have acquired culturally. But it is…an original word…and like another original word with both a positive and negative meaning (manipulation) it carries an uneasy complexity. We cannot progress in our understanding of Love and Relationships though, until we are able to hold the concept of “need” and see it in all its plusses and minuses simultaneously.

And that is true of everything. Most of our cultures (western, eastern or middle eastern) want words that mean only one thing, we want emotions and thoughts to only be capable of one defined thing and they are not. Nothing, absolutely nothing, about life is black or white. Yet we clamor for it.

In our drive to define the world we cut and slice experiences and understanding into small bits and bytes and try to lock meaning into them. We try to simplify things that are complicated, understand things in a few moments that contain layers of meaning that are only unveiled as we continue to allow ourselves to experience life with an awareness of these thing’s existence.

Understanding evolves. There is no point at which you completely “get” something or someone because there is no moment in which we totally “get” ourselves. All of us and all that we create are in a constant state of evolution. The thing or event may remain static, but our understanding of it and how it effects our lives, evolves.

Hopefully that is.

But the world today is dead set on black and white.

And what is black and white but an attempt to define the world in simplistic terms of good and bad?

And when you try to do that, hate is licensed and people suffer.

In the west we try to understand the rest of the world through such archetypical definitions. North Korea is bad, The Middle East is not too bad, but has bad people. To handle that contradiction we try to find signs of “badness” and many have settled on our different styles of dress.

A headscarf, the hajib means this person is a threat. Why? Because it means they are trying to follow the rules of a religion that we have erroneously assigned to the voice of evil. I imagine many Muslims commit the same error in viewing a nun’s habit with a mixture of disgust or fear. Amazing, how essentially a costume can elicit the fear of loss in others. The hajib, like a nun’s headpiece is nothing more nor less than a piece of cloth. The cloth is then imbued with power because of the belief the person has in what it provides them.

For many in the Western world, the hajib has become imbued with fanciful powers of evil and terror. But this is not a gun. This is not something that can hurt you no matter what the person within the hajib is thinking. I mean, unless they take it off, soak it in water, spin it and use it to whip your fanny like we’re all a bunch of adolescent boys hanging out in a locker room.

So why this fear of a piece of cloth? In the same manner that a roman collar can elicit not just fear but anger, it is because of what this piece of costume has come to represent to the person who is seeing it. This is important, the fear comes not from the person wearing it but in what it has come to mean to the person seeing it.

It becomes a phobia and if it was a spider or a dog all of us would “tsk-tsk-tsk” when the person became upset and demanded the spider be killed because we would recognize that the phobia is not based in reality but in the person’s pathology.

But when we develop phobias about a culture’s or religion’s costume, we sanction it and elevate it culturally as a source for real fear.

On July 1st, Marwa El Sharbini did the right thing. She was doing the right thing in the eyes of any culture that recognizes that when we all come together we cannot just “do what we want to do” but we must try to resolve things through what laws and means we have that are trying to govern all of us as a global community.

Marwa was in a Dresden court pressing charges against a German man for insulting her and her religion. Her hajib was the focus of his anger. As the court ruled in Marwa El Sharbini’s favor, serving the side of justice, the man leapt up and stabbed her to death in the courtroom.

What ghazal shall come from the husband’s grief…

What a loss, for Marwa was not alone, she was pregnant.

And yet…you don’t see this story much in our media. You see the brilliant reviews of the film about the Iranian woman being stoned in an isolated incident in 1986.

Because isn’t that what is more important? Yet another thing to bolster our one sided view of things…

What horrible people Muslims are, no? What a nasty faith…oops…what’s that fly in the ointment? A woman dying in a courtroom and her child with her because somebody has only seen and chosen to believe the black and white things he is being told.

Never you mind…let’s go watch the film….savages, brutes…how horrible. And what happened in 1986 becomes what defines today, what happens today is forgotten.

I have had it said, since my interest in the ghazals and because of some things I write in the blog that I must be an “Arab Sympathizer.” I even briefly made it on a no-fly list. But I do not sympathize, I think we are all equally f---ed up because we are all trying to reconcile these cultures that we have allowed to become so narrow in their vision and remain immature in a world that is fast exploding cultural boundaries. We can choose to defend what we have allowed to develop as our limits, or, we can begin to embrace the reality of what it means to be a part of the human race which demands – no matter what you believe – an unerring sense of responsibility for the sanctity of life.

Egypt is mourning the woman they are calling the “Martyr of the Headscarf.” The funeral is today.

When children walk past you and call you names because you are dressed differently or look differently their hate is not their own. It is their parents, whether directly expressed by them or allowed by them through a lack of teaching their children that such things are not right. The media that promotes these skewed views is permitted, supported and allowed by us…the adults…not the children. The myth of the buying power of children is prevalent but honestly, in the end, where does their money come from?

Yet…being an adult these days is much like trying to use the word “need”, not many know how to do it because it involves the very unchildlike world of discomfort where nothing means one set thing and we do not know what to expect just by what we see.

The world of the adult is one that is full of constant decision making. Not opinions. But decisions. Adolescents have opinions that shape blanket paths of actions. An adult learns that an opinion is most often a reaction and it is a sense of morality and ethics that is needed to guide the decisions to shape a path of actions.

I wear no headscarf nor roman collar. Neither do I wear a “do-rag_ that identifies my belonging with any set gang or group.

But I do dress differently because I have a very defined life and it is part of my symbol of belonging. It is an identifier to others and a re-assurance to myself. It is not blatant nor is what I am the subject of news broadcasts or political debates.

But I am different.

And we teach that different is frightening because we do not know what it brings.

I have traveled quite a bit. Lived on the streets in cities in “bad”areas in my caravan, talked to strangers and so on and one of the things I have discovered is that there is not so much in the world to fear from people. People, are generally nice and they are compassionate and kind.

However, I fear what we make in our paranoias and desires for power for it is that…what we make as a definition of right and wrong that tells people it is wrong to be compassionate, it is wrong to be nice to a stranger, it is wrong to ask someone who is different a question about their differences so we may understand.

We are taught as a society the antithesis of the core of all major religions that all of mankind has value. We are taught a world of us and them and define ourselves, prove to ourselves our worth by what we are not.

Is it any wonder that we use hate to bolster our own feelings of worth and value?

Is it any wonder that for many of our children, hate is all they have to maintain a sense of belonging and family…

in the ghazal the lover is aware that the nature of their love is illicit or unrequited, but they chose to love any way. This is not the love of obsession or stalking, this is the choice to love mankind for what you know it can be, even though the world is trying its best to destroy it. To love mankind without expectation that your love will be returned in any appreciable way.

To love a wife and child who lay dying on a courtroom floor because of a man’s fear of a yard of cloth…

to love a god that is not welcome
to love another who is distant but exists in your soul.

see what happens when I start going to the gym again?

New Performance Video! Requiem for a God