and these things we do, over & over, wake up, turn off alarm, tuck sheets back in, look at face in mirror, shave on sundays, tuesdays, thursdays, cologne, two drops, deodorant, moisturizer, make black tea, you get the idea, routines, work week, commute, time spent just doing, not thinking, just doing, the opposite, no alarm, rise after the sun, brush teeth, or don’t, journey to fez, azrou, the atlas mountains, merzouga, listen to monkeys playing, wander into sahara, sandy sea, vast, empty, measure time in bus rides & adhan, watch others work, write about how busy everyone else is, take photos, try to understand, life is short, remember the dead, keep traveling from place to place, drink coffee, read a book, take a walk, meet a stranger, speak spanish, ride a moped, or sit in a room, write more & imagine, go nowhere except everywhere, pray to a god who listens, use your words, type, keep typing, life will end, but you were a witness, you were there.
Tag: Islam
Unearthing Cat Stevens
i listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul, where I’ll end up, well, i think only god really knows, there was a time when everyone knew cat stevens, mellow, introspective, perpetually coming of age, questioning the world, wishing for peace, early 1970’s, before yusaf islam, before the muslim allegations, but time has a way of passing, and he’s back on a snowy boarding school campus in the holdovers film, bleak backdrop, his musical return, forget all the wikipedia details, just take a minute, remember his songs, morning has broken like the first morning, he’s now 75, looks like a new dawn.
Moroccan Sahara
In the backseat, we must be going 80 mph, reverberating Berber music like Salat, ritualistic Islamic prayer with drums, voices, sintir strings plucked, boom from the old Peugeot’s speakers, permanent Sahara hair dryer heat fills my nostrils. We left Merzouga earlier in the morning, before that, the Atlas Mountains, Azrou, Fez, Tangier. The road is gone, only sand, like after the first inches of snow have fallen. We stop at the edge, no billboards, no little tourist kiosk, nothing, only a thousand miles of granular fragments, beaten down quartz, dolomite, calcite, sand pixels. I touch its wildness, primitive, uncontainable, not a Tonka truck home, not the domesticated box from my childhood backyard, it looms, immense with dry waves of undulating silence. We walk into it alone, like swimming past the ocean breakers, together, apart. Speechless, it has absorbed our words, sun pulsating, the desert almost asking us to quietly join it, forever. Human shadows elongate, planet rotates, heat ebbs, darkness, then stars. They appear first one by one, little white births, souls of the night sky. Then a torrent, a blanket of speckled light, countless orbs above, total blackness below. I think of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust, children who died. Never thought much about heaven before, alone, surrounded.
Daniel W. Polk 