Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Friday, February 06, 2004
A gesture from one man to another, is more noble than pearls and coral. (Ibn Al Habbab, VIIIème s.) Calligraphy by Hassan Massoudy.
Last Sunday we were invited by our Muslim friends to attend the celebration of Eid Al-Adha, the Day of Sacrifice, that comes forty days after the end of Ramadan and coincides with the end of the Hajj. The day is a special commemoration of the faith and submission of Abraham, who was willing to sacrifice his son before God saved him (Muslims believe this was Ishmael, who they consider the founder of their people, not Isaac.)
In a backwater like this area, the Muslim community is small and scattered. When we arrived at the non-denominational campus chapel at 8:00 am, a few of the men where unrolling rugs and mats in a larger room than the usual Muslim prayer room. "How many people do you expect?" I whispered to Shirin as we sat down in the back. She shrugged and smiled, "I have no idea." It was dark in the room, with just the faint morning light filtering in through the Tiffany windows that are the chapel's pride and problem, since most of them were Christian-inspired. This wing of the chapel is mainly used by Jewish groups, and the window shows Moses - who is mentioned often in the Qu'ran and revered as a prophet, as Jesus is. We sat quietly, and in a few minutes the call to prayer began, and the men began chanting the Takbeer. This is a long, repetitive chant used on Eid. Our friend Mohammed from Morocco told us that people leave their homes chanting, and walk through the streets chanting, gradually joining others who are making their way toward the mosque, where you join a throng of people all doing the same thing, and that this experience is very moving.
Here the chant began with three or four people, and gradually more students and community members came in until we numbered about twenty. We were delighted to see a friend and former student who has been living in the midwest after graduation; he looked well and happy. There were six women, Shirin, who is Iranian, and myself, in headscarves; a mother and daughter who are Indonesian and brought their country's typical embroidered white cotton veils that covered the whole body except for the face; an American woman convert who had driven sixty miles with her husband to be there; and the local Lutheran pastor; she and her husband spent the past three years in Jerusalem working with Palestinian refugees. The chant went on and on for nearly half an hour. Shirin sang along, and I tried but I never got the tune exactly or the Arabic words, despite the repetition. But it didn't matter; it was a meditation, and both lovely and calm. Following the chant there were prayers, and then a sermon about Abraham, and six ways in which a Muslim should follow his example. But because Abraham is the father of all three Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - the sermon also talked about our commonality, and encouraged Muslims to reach out, especially on this day, to their brothers and sisters of other faiths.
I was touched by this, and honored to be invited. I was sad that I had to rush off to choir rehearsal before church at 9 am, but J. stayed behind, had tea, and talked. "They always make me feel so welcome," he said afterwards. "Of course everyone mistakes me for a Muslim - it's the beard. But even when I say I am a Christian, it doesn't seem to matter to anyone."
Feeling this comfortable together has taken time - we have known some of these friends for three years now - and I recognize it for the great gift that it is. No one is trying to convert anyone else, btu over time we've shared our religious practices and traditions, explaining them and what they mean to us, and developing both respect and true friendship. It's a small thing, perhaps insignificant, but it gives me hope.
8:46 AM
|
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
METRO
Here in my village, the only thing that's moving is the wind. Today, a sunny bright day with new, wet, snowman-snow that fell overnight, there were stiff winds more like what we expect in March than early February. On my mid-afternoon walk, I had trouble keeping upright against the gusts. Now, from my upstairs window, all I can see moving is the neighbor's picket-fence gate, blowing back and forth behind three feet of snow left by the snowplow.
Although the pace of things in my head is not necessarily akin to what's outside, the slowness and unchanging quality of rural life mean that I'm like a kid in the city, and one of my favorite destinations in Montreal is the metro. I meant that sentence literally: I think of the metro as a place in itself, not just a means for getting between places. Although I am not one who avoids the New York subway, at least in midtown, I love the cleanliness of the Montreal stations, the art (like the stained glass mural above), the wide platforms, the big advertisements, the bilingual chatter, the French announcements of the prochaine station, and especially the singing whirrr of the rubber-wheeled trains.
I know I'm becoming more local because I'm learning which car to get in depending on where the exit is in the destination station. When J. lived in Paris for a year, before we knew each other, he had the entire system memorized and knew exactly which end of the train to get on. Funny - I used to think he was crazy.
Since I read the name of the current topic, the memory of one meal has kept pushing itself forward, like a special dish insistently proffered by a Middle Eastern hostess. I don’t know why. There have been many more spectacular or romantic places, and many meals in which I can remember virtually every bite, every taste. Of this one, I cannot even remember what we ate. But it has insisted that I tell about it, so I will try.
My parents and my husband and I decided, one early summer day, to drive up, away from the lake, into the wild state land ten miles or so to the east. Let’s take a picnic, I said, so my mother and I packed sandwiches and something to drink, and we piled into the car. When we crossed from the regular class C roads onto state land, none of us could remember the way, so we crisscrossed on roads that all looked the same through the deep woods, looking for familiar landmarks. Our destination was a pond, invisible from the road but marked by a small place where the underbrush had been cleared beneath large evergreens, known mostly to people like me who had worked for the state environmental or forestry departments. I hadn’t been there for some years. We stumbled onto a riding encampment where a group was beginning an overnight trail ride; we found the old fossil pit full of shattered shale, and stopped so that my husband, who had grown up in granite-boned New England, could find some fossil shells of his own. Eventually we found the right combination of turns and dips and culverts, and came to the clearing. We parked, and walked in through the woods to the dam at the end of the pond, where we spread ourselves out on the grass, unwrapped the food, and ate.
It was a beautiful day in late June, and the sun had been shining on our grassy couch long enough to send up the fragrance of hayscented fern and Indian paintbrush. The “pond” such as it was, is a remnant, slowly filling in. The dam at this end, built in the thirties by the CCC, probably, was small, only twenty-five or thirty feet long: a grassy knoll with a small stream spilling out on the other side. There were lots of dead trees in the center of the water, and thicker brush beyond, and every time I had visited I’d seen ducks, and often an osprey or blue heron, whose nest you could see in a tall dead tree. Of the four of us, I was the only one who had explored the real secret of this place: from the far side of the dam, an unmarked trail led to a path where a person in hip-waders could enter the water, dark with tannic acid, and carefully wade toward the middle, where, beyond the brush and dead trees, a large, ancient, quaking bog opened like a magical field. The sphagnum moss was thick and easily supported the weight of adults. Tall pitcher plants stood in lethal readiness; cranberries and bog rosemary grew lushly underfoot, and the air buzzed with the sound of thousands of insects. From the dam, all these wonders were invisible; in fact few people knew about the bog’s existence. The only clue close by was a patch of sundews who raised their sticky green flower-pads to the light near the stream behind us.
We ate our sandwiches in silence, watching the life of the pond – the big bullfrog tadpoles and green salamanders that lazily moved on the bottom, the water-striders delicately navigating the surface, the tentative nose of a turtle, the flash and cry of a kingfisher - and then each of us turned to the grass around us and began eating the tiny wild strawberries that we could smell in the sunlight. We ate in circles around ourselves until our fingers were pink with strawberry juice, and then lay back, content. “Food always tastes better outdoors,” my father remarked, and he told a story about a simple meal he remembered when he was a young soldier somewhere in Europe during World War II, hungry and not knowing if the sun would come up another day.
Why do I remember this? Because it was unusual for the four of us to be there together? Because it had always been a mysterious and special place for me? Or perhaps it was simply the condensation of that moment: the sun, the strawberries, the people I love best, all safe and happy, while beyond us, out of sight, continued a prehistoric drama of eaters and eaten, of plants and animals switching roles, of specialized species locked in a dance of survival.
Nothing else happened; I checked to see if the sundews were still there, and we walked out through the woods.
I'm guest-blogging today over at Heart@Work, where Lois has invited some friends to talk about why they blog. I hope you'll visit her place and read the whole series. (I invite you blushingly, however, because she wrote some really nice things about me in her introduction. Thank you, Lois, for your own warm and generous heart.)
1:25 PM
|
