In The Eyes of the Desert Sands: A Sufi Takes Flight

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Note: This column was first published on June 16, 2009.

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—2/21/11—It snowed last night in New Jersey.

Not here in Teaneck. Farther south, if we’re to believe the weatherfolks. Snowed so much the stuff had to be ploughed. We’re talking June 16th here.

In Greenville, SC, yesterday, it was close to 90 degrees, and my husband and I were wrapping up six days in the state that gave birth to my maternal grandmother, and her maternal grandmother, etc., etc. (Abalena Boleman’s maiden name was the ubiquitous “Smith” so, as I’ve written elsewhere, I’m related to approximately 68 percent of all South Carolinians, white, Black and all combinations thereof. Lots of Smiths in Carolina.)

Getting to sunny South Carolina from (not yet) snowy New Jersey was a near thing last Monday, though. Dean and I sat, at Newark, in the terminal and on the tarmac (in first one small jet; then another), for six hours before we were cleared for take-off. The name of our carrier was, purportedly, Continental: Air Cuisinart would have been more apt. Right after lift-off, two seconds into our “flight” (wrong noun, entirely), I knew we were in trouble.

We experienced flying-through-thunderstorms turbulence; clear-air turbulence; and flying-in-a-grey-out turbulence. Not even the pilots could bring themselves to speak to us till we landed (or fell onto our wheels), and then it was just to issue a string of laconic (even for pilots) apologies from the cockpit. Grown women were throwing up in the WC.

When I got to terra firma , I felt like an escapee from GitMo: but I’d been waterboarded without benefit of water.

Now, the last few years of my life have been decidedly odd ones, given my culture of origin (all those Southern-Baptist Smiths, for one thing). My current life trajectory (or “course of study in this middle-aged incarnation”), began with a year spent working towards my Third Degree in Reiki (hands-on healing), an arcane pursuit by most standards. But, from there, I got stranger still, spending five years dotting the many I’s and crossing the myriad t’s of Iyengar-Style Yoga.

And a traditional Reiki mastership, followed by the most anal-compulsive of all of Yoga’s “genres” has led, naturally, to something even more bizarre than snow in June: Sufism.

My sleep specialist, a saintly, Western MD who’s been studying the interface between Stage Four sleep disorders and Depression (my own two noirest of bêtes ), recently advised me to take up some
entirely new pursuit. Reiki, Yoga, penning non-fiction, managing a Big Band? Apparently, all of the above, undertaken at once, do not suffice for her.

So, I said, “I have , actually, been considering taking up whirling. . .”

“Whirling?”

“Yes, as in Dervishes,” I elucidated. “Whirling Dervishes.”

My doctor blanched.

But, really, I have been considering it, though I’ve had no luck, yet, locating a living, breathing local group of Sufis, with a sane, central, still vertical Sufi teacher in its midst (Sufis: a bit thin on the ground hereabouts).

I could head for the Swat Valley, or Eastern Turkey, or some regions of Afghanistan, perhaps, but I think the Sufis there might well look askance at a 57-year-old American woman not given to wearing much head-hair, let alone a scarf, or shoes. And then, there’s the language barrier.

But I have been reading everything by or about Sufis I can unearth (I’ve just about bled www.abebooks.com dry in the process).
Idries Shah, I’ve found to be the most accessible of the admittedly-Sufi writers (not counting the poet Rumi, as translated by my long-ago college poetry professor, Coleman Barks), but Shah is no longer on the planet; nor is his brother, who took up his sibling’s work. Ouspensky’s gone, too.

It doesn’t help, either, that the Sufis aren’t at all interested in attracting converts, acolytes, disciples or cheerleaders. They’re something akin to the Quakers in this regard. They’re seemingly as rare, secretive and solitary as the Blue-Spotted Snipe and, if I ever managed to run one to earth, he, or she, would probably deny being a Sufi at all.

So, why bother with them?

Because, the moment I began reading about their philosophy—their “take” on Creation, the Creator, creativity, where we are, what we’re here for—it all struck a big, resounding chord in me. The Sufis
believe all religions are, in fact, one and the same, and they teach using somewhat outlandish and, on the face of them, pretty lighthearted parables, poems, anecdotes, tales and stories. “The Blind Men & The Elephant”? A Sufi teaching parable. Think about it.

Discursive words, per se and however, in any language, don’t go very far towards “wrangling” Sufis or Sufism. And they’re mutable critters. Swat Valley Sufis of the Middle Ages are not going to resemble
Washington State Sufis of 2009, if such creatures exist: different (but still Sufi) strokes for different (but still Sufi) folks.

Here, for example, is the last Sufi parable I read before boarding my Air Cuisinart flight to South Carolina (“The Tale of the Sands,” as recorded in The Sufis , by Idries Shah, 1964):

“A bubbling stream reached a desert, and found that it could not cross it. The water was disappearing into the fine sand, faster and faster. The Stream said aloud, ‘My destiny is to cross this desert, but I can see no way.’

This is the situation of the disciple who needs a master, but who cannot trust one, the pathetic human situation.

The voice of the Desert answered, in the hidden tongue of nature, saying, ‘The Wind crosses the desert, and so can you.’

‘But, whenever I try, I am absorbed into the sand; and even if I dash myself at the desert, I can only go a little distance.’

‘The Wind does not dash itself against the desert sand.’

‘But the Wind can fly, and I cannot.’

‘You are thinking in the wrong way; trying to fly by yourself is absurd. Allow the Wind to carry you over the sand.’

‘But how can that happen?’

‘Allow yourself to be absorbed by the Wind.’

The Stream protested that it did not want to lose its individuality in that way. If it did, it might not exist again.

This, said the Sand, was a form of logic, but it did not refer to reality at all. When the Wind absorbed moisture, it carried it over the desert, and then let it fall again like rain. The rain again became a river.

But how, asked the Stream, could it know that this was true?

‘It is so, and you must believe it, or you will simply be sucked down by the sands to form, after several million years, a quagmire.’

‘But if that is so, will I be the same river that I am today?’

‘You cannot in any case remain the same stream that you are today. The choice is not open to you; it only seems to be open. The Wind will carry your essence, the finer part of you. When you become a river again at the mountains beyond the sands, men may call you by a different name; but you yourself, essentially, will know that you are the same. Today you call yourself such and such a river only because you do not know which part of it is even now your essence.’

So the Stream crossed the desert by raising itself into the arms of the welcoming Wind, which gathered it slowly and carefully upward, and then let it down with gentle firmness, atop the mountains of a far-off land.”

Patanjali, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed? One and the same Sufi stream . . . and all Sons of God, by any name.

And so, when we hit that first vicious pocket of turbulence over Newark, and it continued, unabated, for just under two hours, I took my husband’s (clammy) hand in mine—and Dean is no white-knuckled
flier—and I began to speak with God, out the airplane window as it were. Calmly. As one sentient being to another. Without fear.

I didn’t ask for anything, though I was pretty certain our little German jet was going down. The cumulus clouds, filled with lightning, all around and about us, were hissing, in French, “I speet on your little German jets, Earthlings!” I wasn’t fazed. For the first time in my life, “up against it,” I wasn’t bargaining or groveling. I knew, somehow, that there is a God, and that people building jets, and people flying in jets, and people going down and surviving crashes, and people going down
and not surviving crashes (seemingly) were all . . . OK. Not OK in a way I can/could/will ever be able to articulate. But OK, nevertheless. OK in the eyes of the desert sands.

My longsuffering shrink, whom I still see once a year, in SC, just for the hell of it, and whom I did, in fact, see the day after our Continental flight limped into GSP, said something to the effect that I
had suddenly come to terms with mortality, chaos, random acts of destruction . . . and decided against employing my usual responses. We actually spoke (meta-communication-wise) for over an hour about what went through my mind on that flight (and I got billed for it—very un-Sufi, Dr. Richards!), but I couldn’t repeat the gist of our conversation to save my soul.

Something the Sufis would expect: on the line between life and death, between time as we know it and time as we don’t yet know it, words get drowned out by the stream-laden Wind.

But the Wind’s roar is peaceful.

As things stand now, I have no idea if I’ll ever realize my dream of whirling with Dervishes—or whether I’ll remain unafraid-of-flying for the duration of the flight.

One thing is certain. The Stream is now much less fretful about being swept up by the rainclouds to be spirited across the Sands.

PS As of this writing, in February 2011, I have still not found any actual Sufis-in-the-flesh, but I have read more and more about existing groups on the Sub-Continent and in Central Asia, and still hope, one day, to meet some of them in person.