out is through

Kazim Ali, "Ramadan"
You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,
and have to choose between the starving month's

nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.
The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter?

If the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets
into the air and harvest the fog.

Hunger opens you to illiteracy,
thirst makes clear the starving pattern,

the thick night is so quiet, the spinning spider pauses,
the angel stops whispering for a moment-

The secret night could already be over,
you will have to listen very carefully -

You are never going to know which night's mouth is sacredly reciting
​and which night's recitation is secretly mere wind-
| Kazim Ali, "Ramadan" from The Fortieth Day. Copyright © 2008 by Kazim permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org

POETIC THEMES
        "Ramadan" is a poem about religious ecstasy (from the Greek ekstasis, the state of standing outside of oneself, to echo last week's entry). The yogic and Muslim spiritual practices that pepper Kazim Ali's poetry facilitate an experience of the body deep enough to transport the practitioner beyond the worldly plane. The "hidden sweetness in the stomach's emptiness," to quote Rumi's "Fasting," is an evacuation of the self that makes way for a more expansive state. In Ali's poetry, identity presents as diffuse and prismatic; now a river, now an angel, selfhood can manifest as stairs, hunger, a bowl for rain, or the rain itself. The shapeshifting seems rooted, paradoxically, in an excruciatingly precise awareness of one particular body. In the first line of "Ramadan," for example, one could travel into hunger so deeply as to "break into branches." One truth at the heart of embodied spiritual practice is that the only way out is through.
          Not surprisingly, what draws Ali to Ramadan is its mystery and complexity, not just in its angel visitations or its spiders weaving protective webs, but even and especially the liturgical ambiguity about which day is sacred. If identity is a shifting field, there's also a temporal unmooring. This might have something to do with surrendering to an inherited faith, where childhood memories flicker inside spiritual practices. The ghostly presence of precognitive awareness or even epigenetic memory engender a multiplicity of view. Ancestors and family members float through Ali's poems, variously angelic or bedeviling. But this shifting field of reference orbits around a strong spiritual center.
         In his gut-wrenching poem "Home," Ali wrestles to expand what might fit within the boundaries of the religious practices he grew up with. He opens up the confines of which languages might be sacred to include Hebrew, Latin, Sanskrit, and Arabic. He finally dismisses the notion that divine messaging could ever even "fit into the requirements of the human mouth." Ultimately, the poem asserts, the divine transcends the limits of language: "I learned God's true language is only silence and breath." Fasting is one way of gaining entry into this extra-ordinary world, where one learns secret skills, like how to harvest fog.
         Among these superpowers is a linguistic or sonic hyper-refinement, where Fasting allows us to access patterns at the limits of language and recitations in the deep quiet. "You will have to listen very carefully, Ali tells us. Listening for God is seen as something that one refines over time. It seems right, in treating a religious poet who stays true to his heritage, to offer a practice of sense deprivation from my own. Quakers, too, regard the realm of silence as communion with the divine.


PRACTICE
          Like fasting, the cultivation of deep quiet stores up the energy we typically disperse with sense experience. And for some, the practice of observing silence has the capacity to reveal God's true language. At Pendle Hill, the Quaker hub of the East Coast, the practice is common; there are even lanyards available fo hang a sign around one's neck that reads "Observing Silence?" I often wish I had that sign to wear at my local food co-op. When I offer a day of silence on retreats, nearly everyone who is new to the practice dreads it, and yet never has anyone regretted having tried it. The practice of silence offers one somatic entryway into communion with the divine, but, like fasting, it requires time. What would be another way of diving deep into the body to be transported beyond it, into the Queer Sublime?
        If you are looking for a practice that takes minutes, not hours, here's a centering technique I learned from Staci Haines and Patrisse Cullors, with a Quaker twist. Haines talked us through the practice of orienting the body on the vertical, horizontal, and sagittal planes to align heart and mind toward our purpose in the world. Practitioners orient themselves downward into gravity. upwaid in dignity, outward toward connection, and sagittally in time (the personal and ancestral histories behind us, the present-moment happenings inside the body, and the future we're leaning into). There's a fourth plane related to an all-over experience of longing, related to touching in with our purpose.
         Cullors named centering as her number one strategy for unlearning her strategic defense of numbing out to challenging feelings. As a trauma survivor, this resonated with me; it was the Zendo, not my home Quaker Meeting, that helped me build tolerance for difficult feelings. Perhaps that was because in First Day School (the Quaker equivalent to Sunday School), no one gave me step-by-step instructions on "centering down," which I've subsequently learned is typically just a simple body scan. The very idea of bringing any technique into worship is hotly contested, not being a part of the ministry of early Friends. The first use of the term "centering" came late, maybe from the controversial minister Elias Hicks, who was the endless source of fascination, verging on worship, for Walt Whitman.
         I can't imagine how I might be different if First Day School had taught me an actual centering technique at an early age, to balance myself down and up, out and in, and between past present and future. I imported the practice into Meeting for Worship, and over the course of a few months, spontaneously my breath began to synch up with my centering. Exhaling outward into connection, inward into the somatic present, backward into the past, and forward into the future, yielded a different orientation. It wasn't my purpose, exactly. It was a transcendent experience where "centering down" became a natural extension of the vertical plane upward into the divine. Perhaps experimenting with centering breath might help you too drop in to sense experience, to be transported beyond.