Ancestral Pilgrimage Part 9: Konya

In June of 2022, I embarked on an Ancestral Pilgrimage searching for my distant European roots. Below are my poetic reflections from the ninth part of my journey- a final stop to connect with my spiritual lineage at the burial place of the mystical sufi poet Mevlâna Jelaluddin Rumi.

My plane touches down at sunset

Taxi driving into pink clouds

My heart leaping

I catch glimpses of highway signs pointing to

“Mevlâna”

Our master

Rolling my suitcase through the square at night

Sacred geometry under my feet

Red roses, pink roses, everywhere

Turning and turning under the stars

I can’t stop singing

Alhamdulillah

لا اله الا الله

The Rumi hotel embraces me with deep red carpets

Windows with views of minarets

Birds chirp me awake

Every moment has prepared me for this one

I am the sum of every moment I’ve spent in prayer,

in silence

in tears

making love

seeking to understand this world

in heartbreak

Tall parted red curtains

make way for me to enter

I drop to my knees

The tourist stream is static

People reach over each other for the best staged profile pic with Rumi

A quiet corner calls me and I sit

Palms up

Surrounded in tombs

Delicately covered in deep green velvet cloth

Arabic calligraphy

My heart breaks open

Tears pour down my cheeks

There’s something in the air

Visitors swarming

My body tingling

I begin soaring

Turning

This high

This ecstasy

Just from sitting here

Drinking in the scent of apricots squishing under my feet fallen from trees

Turkish coffee and cigarette smoke

Roses grow around every corner

A belly full of dolmas and ayran

Roasting in the Turkish sun

Stray cats quarrel at restaurants

People walk the street with their tasbih

I’m drunk on love

Eventually the chickpea

will say to the cook,

“Boil me some more…”

Ateşbaz-i Veli Turbesi

Mevlana’s legendary cook

Tomb glows lime green

Nearly white roses bloom outside

Green vines crown over stone archways

Sacred geometry carved in metal doors

YA HU

Ibn Arabi transmission lives on

On my way to mail postcards

A prayer rug shimmers deep red, gold, violet

“Your grandchildren will pray on it” he insists

I return to Mevlâna twice a day

Children and adults pass by

I never have been able to hide but especially here

The guard nods at me

He knows, sees me

“In our town they don’t call you a sufi if you escape the pain”

My heart is breaking

I don’t belong here

Unless we belong everywhere

Here the tall white girl covering her head praying at the feet of a sufi master is laughable

What if I could tell them that it confuses me, too?

Does it matter?

My skin grows thicker

as my heart breaks wider

Shams Tabrizi

I sit on the red carpet overlooking his tomb

I stumble along pretending I also know these motions

The elder woman next to me looks at me with loving eyes and speaks to me in Turkish

I smile lovingly back even though I don’t know what she’s saying

I feel her love

We pray

Our purses in front

I love being in the presence of only women

I exhale

If I spoke Turkish I would give her my phone number and adopt her

Her smile eases my daily outsider heartbreak

It is one thing to read about a place

Everyone is human

Allah is everywhere too

This air is undeniably intoxicating

Roses will never stop singing

My daily dispatches echo

“I’m so in love”

Can’t stop turning

California dreaming

Contagious bliss

Alhamdulillah

Spinning in circles until dawn

I carried a small white tin across borders

Collecting dirt from my ancestor’s decomposed bones

in the soil of Stonehenge

the cities of Copenhagen

streets of Sweden

This is the final stop of my ancestral pilgrimage

A journey of searching for what I’m made of

who I’m made of

After hours of sitting at his tomb turning in ecstasy

I find a place in the rose garden outside

Gazing up at minarets

This body is made from flesh and bone

I reach down and place one rose petal in my tin

Mevlâna is my ancestor too

The one who will always perfume my heart