Notes

March 2006

I don't suppose this issue will be much later than most of them, but it'll be coming from Edinburgh, where I have been attending the 3rd International Festival of Middle Eastern Spirituality and Peace. Good talks, good people, plenty of music and dancing.  Internet access, for me, at the Elephant House, the coffee house that says it's where the first Harry Potter book was written.  

I've checked the Silver City weather during the week, found that it's been in the high 60s or past 70 most days. Here it hasn't got past 40 any day. There's been some snow.

There are now 10 licensed residents of the SSC. Where are they right now? Azima is on the land, in retreat. Krisha Paul is there and in town, sending me news of the bulldozer leveling my home site. Peter writes that he's in Toronto for his nephew's Bar Mitzvah. Susanne is in Dharamsala. Rashad is in Yonkers ! studying and living with his Jerahi community. Selim and Samia are at work in Alamagordo and Roswell. Darren is in Oregon. Sasha is in Oregon. I'm in Edinburgh (without a spell checker.)

Will we be able to get together this year? to grow deeper into our commitment to the work of the SSC? to explore what that means for each of us as our lives unfold in -- usually -- unexpected ways? Here's hoping.

And it will be good to see you, dear Reader, at one of this year's events, or whenever your path brings you to Silver City, around Bear Mountain.

This has been a full, rich, wonderful week. And now I'm glad to be headed home.

With love to all,

Hayra Nur

February 2006

Rashad loaned me Samuel Lewis' Introduction to Spiritual Brotherhood a couple weeks ago.  This stood out:

"Noticing that his disciples could not be freed psychologially from their long-held Western-Aristotelian-individualistic outlook, he [Sufi Inayat Khan] not only gave much attention toward freeing humanity from this outlook, but he also provided, in his Healing Service, a method by which spiritual brotherhood [sic, of course]  could be approached. For spiritual brotherhood is only attained in and through action. The theory of it becomes
high-sounding poetry or philosophy which, in the end, may be entirely worthless. But by institution and ceremony a group sometimes serves and acts as if it were an individual."

I have never really 'got' the Healing Service. I've thought of it as something still too heavily festooned with the  waftings of post-Victorian Spiritualism, seance, and 
Theosophy. And maybe it is.

What I hadn't known or considered is that the teacher cooked it up as an heuristic practice, a way for participants in a "group-unit in the absence of a teacher" (chapter 12) to step out of ego into the One, for the benefit of all.

Something like, in our time, the 'land-based spiritual community' that Moineddin cooked up for us.  Thank you, again, our absent teacher.  Wish I hadn't missed you on this plane.

January 2006

I've been getting used to my new, Sufi name -- Hayra Nur -- for over a month now.

I like it, for a couple of reasons, at least. For one thing I like how my teacher got it.  He just lets his mind go blank, he says (like it was easy) and receives a name when it's time.  I'm happy to be trusting a teacher, who trusted a teacher, who trusted a teacher...

And I like that it's just a name. In my 'spiritual community of origin' I'm currently known as The Rev. Dr. Martha Blacklock. This is the same outfit that called me The Venerable when I was 37.  Some people try to call me Mother; one parishioner doggedly called me Father for months 'because that's what you call priests.'

Hayra Nur comes closer to what Chogyam Trungpa calls 'living without credentials.' (As usual, I'm in town and the book I want is out on the land. Or the other way.) But you know what he means.

In love and trust,

Hayra Nur

December 2005

That's a turtle rock, sort of. Made of stoneware in a clay class at Western New Mexico University in Silver City.  There are 98 more. Each has one of Allah's beautiful names on its underside. 

Here they are on the altar in the meeting room in the Homestead.  From there they're going, one by one, out onto the land somewhere.  Sometimes it takes a while to get from one place to another -- e.g., the last one out of the bucket that brought them from the pottery travelled to North Carolina to a mureeds meeting with our teacher. Thirty some people held it -- Al-Karim -- for a while; now it's up at Moineddin's place.

November 2005

I've been thinking about something Martha Heyneman quoted, from Rilke, in an article in the Fall issue of Parabola: