I was eighteen and very lonely when I knocked on the door of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order’s Dergah in Chelsea, Manhattan. The door itself was narrow with a metal grate on it, the sufis had tucked themselves between an Irish pub and a dim late-night lounge. I was nervous, wearing a long skirt and shawl I’d found at the Bushwick Goodwill. When the Wali opened the door, I told him that back in the Bay Area, I was friends with Amin al-Jamal, the grandson of Sidi Muhammad Sa’id al-Jamal. Hearing the surname al-Jamal (literally: the Camel), the Wali's face lit up and he welcomed me into the Dergah. Sidi, who had passed away a few years before, had been a beloved Sufi Shayk.
Inside everyone went barefoot, kneeled on sheepskins, shared glasses of mint tea. People stirred stew and cut bread in the kitchen, talked softly in English and Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Berber. In the bathroom I washed myself the way I read on WikiHow: hands, mouth, nose, face, arms, hair, feet. I learned how people greeted each other in the Dergah: a deep head nod with one hand over the heart, often followed by an embrace. The light was warm and dim and it smelled like rosewater. And soon enough we were doing the Zikr, a musical chanting that seemed to morph and move underneath us, like a wave. There was singing, accompanied by the Santoor and Gimbri, and there was a spiral dance where you got to sort of hug strangers and hold their hands, which you don’t get to do very much in New York. More people filtered in throughout the night, fifty or sixty by the time the whirling started. They said if you kept your eye on the crux between your thumb and your forefinger you wouldn’t get dizzy. I got dizzy anyway. The rhythms of the Zikr echoed in the thumps and squeaks of the subway car careering around corners on the ride back to Clinton-Washington: la ‘ilaha illa Ilah. la ‘ilaha illa Ilah. Almost home.
I frequently had no idea what was happening. I arrived only knowing sufism from poetry: Rumi and The Conference of the Birds, and bits Amin had fed me. That was the real reason I ended up at the Dergah–I missed Amin. He is in grad school now, becoming an arachnologist, but back then he studied insects, a fixation so complete he felt compelled to eat them: fried grasshoppers, roly-polys and bees in teriyaki sauce. At the 24-hour Korean grocery store I found a can of silk worms in black bean sauce that I mailed to him. We had spent the previous summer reading each other's science fiction stories, listening to doom metal and making sculptures that we hid in the oak trees of the San Geronimo Valley. They’re totems, he said. Not idols.
I attended the Dergah semi-regularly for about a year. Once I showed up, hoping to attend Zikr as usual, and there was a memorial service happening for a member of the Dergah. I can’t remember his name. He had been twenty-six years old, and in his picture he was handsome, smiling through a thick beard as he stood on a kitesurfing board. He worked at a bakery. His supervisor said on his first opening shift, he blasted Iron Maiden through the bakery speakers, to wake the customers up.
In the end, I didn’t study sufism hard enough to understand what was happening around me in the Dergah: I didn’t take the Shahada, I never converted. The plague year came. I left New York. But a year later I found myself dropping my phone in a metal bowl to amplify Run to the Hills while mixing pancakes for my coworkers, and thinking about the man whose name I couldn’t remember. Rain buffered the canvas tent. Butter and batter sizzled against cast iron. It was dark out, and we needed a flashlight to see if the pancake undersides were oozy, or burned, or maybe perfect. We weren’t really awake yet, but we were trying. That was the spring we spent in the burn scar north of Santa Cruz, clearing trails and roads of charred, fallen debris. The fire swept through six months earlier, but once, as we were digging out a drainage swale, we found a pocket of roots clinging to some smoldering warmth. We picked it up and felt its heat like a baby animal, passed it around until it fell apart.
Over that month we watched the landscape change: rain turned the ash to black mud, anthracobia fungus bloomed up in orange polka dots, followed by parrot mushrooms and elf cups. Salamanders made their slow pilgrimages across the trail, tunnel spiders built cities in the bare ground. Redwoods and Manzanitas send shoots up from their charred stumps, followed by flowers: chickweed, milkmaids, trillium. In our last week there I found a hatchling garter snake in the old fireline birm. It slipped between my fingers and into the bracken. The foreman yelled to keep moving. I kept moving dirt and underneath it I found more dirt. My roommate asked me to scratch a pentacle into his pec with a bit of obsidian, for protection. Later, in a new city, I met a group with radical haircuts who were sure we could reach transcendence by flogging each other with salvaged bicycle innertubes. And then my friend went to Columbia to take Ayahuasca and ended up tied to a Poinsettia tree because she ripped open the Shaman's earlobe.
White kids! Why are we like this? Why do we need things to be so foreign, so indecipherable, so extreme, so utterly devoid of context, in order to feel like we’ve woken up? Why would I only say God’s name in a language I didn’t understand?
We sprinkled chocolate chips in the pancakes and watched the batter seize up. Once in a while, slogging uphill with a dolmar of gasoline over my shoulder, my breath sunk into a rhythm a little like Zikr: la ‘ilaha illa Ilah. Someone stooped to lift a salamander off the path. But I forgot to tell you the important part. This happened in the Dergah around midnight on a Thursday in November, 2018. We had finished whirling and everyone sat on the carpet, feeling glowy and warm. In the silence before the Shaykh spoke we could hear the rain outside, the taxis honking, and people coming out of the bars on either side of us, drunk, laughing loud.
“We can hear the revelers outside,” the Shaykh said. She stopped on that word and smiled. “There are many ways to revel in the light.”