So you catalog in the angle you notice/in a vacuum you recharge to record this

All-Star Crackstar Squad, Blogistan and the Wide World of Webs

Orange opening: Somedays, I have hella good timing
Gelato! (Back to business), originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

Wandering around aimlessly in downtown one day, I stopped by one of my favorite little shops, only to see the following sign on its door: UNOPEN. Which is a hell of a lot better than the deliberate finality of Closed, you know? UNOPEN means, We’re taking a little break, but we’re not gone, don’t worry! A return is imminent, within the next 5 minutes, or later in the day, or tomorrow, or in two weeks, who knows, but rest assured, we’ll be back! And that’s exactly how I’ve felt about this website over the last few months – except for the fact that I never talk about myself in the plural.

I can’t believe it’s been nearly four months since there has been a new post here. “Update your goddamn blog,” demanded HijabMan at the end of May. Several of you have left lovely comments exhorting me to update. In mid-July, I was watching a poetry slam in downtown San Jose when HMan called to inform me I was GROUNDED for not updating this website in over two months and “may you never taste a blue slurpee again.” Nearly every other day, the sister says, “DUDE! Update!” Even the blogistanis on flickr and facebook are getting into the swing of things. My excuse has been that I’m “too busy with work and livin’ it up.”

Hashim, one of my favorite flickr rockstars, doesn’t understand the point of weblogs. I tried to address his question as well as I could. Contrary to what my four-months absence may have made you think, I lowve blogistan, and although my flickr response seemed to focus more on the functionality of blogging, it’s the community I love the most. I didn’t spend five days on the East Coast for the “Newunion007” for nothing, you know. [Stories about that coming soon, too.]

Madelyne of Persisting Stars, whom I actually first met through flickr, wrote too many undeserved nice things about me recently, and made me realize how much I missed the blogging community. So, I thought I should come back to this little space of mine to share my stories, silly and mundane as they often are.

So. What do you what to know? Mainly, it’s been a summer of hellos and goodbyes and hanging-out sessions in the sunshine. I once wrote the following about my lovely friend, H:

H#4 (I have too many friends with “H” and “S” names. I swear I’m going to start numbering them like this) tried to talk me out of skipping class one day by grimly informing me that, based on her calculations, each time I skip one lecture, I am wasting $25 of that quarter’s tuition. My friends are such engineering nerds, can you tell?

Now, H – my official Eating & Napping Buddy – has left for graduate school in New York state. When we got too scared talking about how cold NY will be in the winter, I comforted her by saying, “Don’t worry, buddy boy. We’ll all come stalk you!” She will hold me to it, though: Over dinner at her home, the night before she left, we laughed about the two photo albums I had brought for her (a birthday/going away gift, filled with hundreds of photographs from the last several years; “You’ve documented my entire college career in here!” said H. “This is the best birthday present ever!”), and nicknames (“It’s so funny to hear you call her Yasmine,” H said to her parents. “Why, what do you call her?” they asked. “I call her ‘Yaz,'” she replied, then added hastily, “But you’re not allowed to call her that.” “Why not?” “Because only my yaars call me that,” I drawled), and my propensity for photographing food (“Yaz even takes pictures of french fries!” H told her parents). I ate three servings of fish, and two of potatoes, and one bowl of soup; when her father urged me to add some white pepper, his favorite, to my soup, H said, “Try it! It’s so good!”

“I bet you’re going to miss it when you’re in New York,” I said smugly.

“No, I won’t. You’ll bring it for me when you come visit.”

And that was the theme of the evening: “If all my sweaters don’t fit in my suitcase, you can bring them when you come visit.” “When you bring some oranges from your tree over for my parents, make sure you bring a few extra ones for me to New York.” “Oh, those photos you forgot to print out? Don’t worry, you can bring them with you when you visit me.”

I miss her, and those afternoons in college when I would climb the stairs to her apartment and sprawl on her couch, studying biology and physics while she pored over engineering notes, laughing as she pulled one tupperware container after another out of her fridge and freezer and demanded, “What do you want for lunch? Let’s eat!” We watched daytime TV (psycho soap opera dramas), traded music CDs, dozed off and took naps on that comfy couch. H gave me so many HIGHFIVEs that summer, as I passed one neurobiology quiz after another, much to my amazement and my friends’ collective refrains, I TOLD you, you could do it! Now I’m the one sending her highfives through GMail chat, as her status messages update us on negotiations with her landlord and newfound internet connections and settling into her apartment.

A left just a few days ago, too, back to Jeddah after a decade of school and work and play in the U.S. I’m going to miss his voicemessages, all of them with some variation of: “Hey, cracker. I know you’re a busy lady, but call me back!” I called him the other evening to say goodbye, since he is one of the few people with whom I enjoy having lengthy phone conversations [the others are pretty much Somayya and 2Scoops]. “Come visit!” he said.

“Saudi? Sure,” I said sarcastically.

“No, I really mean it!” he said. “When you come for Hajj. My sister lives in Mecca. And we have family in Medina, too. Stay with us. We’ll take care of you.”

“Lookit you all, A, taking over the WORLD!” I laughed. And although I’d rather stay close to the haram while on Hajj, it was a sweet offer and much appreciated, thoroughly in character with what I’ve come to expect from A, who is sort of the big brother I never had.

We always laugh about how we first met – last fall at the ISNA convention in Chicago, where he was tabling and translating at Haji Noor Deen‘s booth. I struck up conversation with A while waiting in line for the Haji to pen some calligraphy with my sister’s name, then lost patience with A as he kept mispronouncing her name. Finally, I grabbed a pen and scribbled it in Urdu/Arabic on a sheet of paper. “It’s like this, see?”

“That’s what I said,” he replied blandly – before repeating it incorrectly all over again.

The next afternoon, I saluted A on my way to stalk HijabMan at his booth, then backtracked for some conversation with A. “Long day,” he commented tiredly, then shrugged in that quintessential way he has. “But it’s okay. My friend and I will be hanging out in downtown this evening.”

“ME, TOO!” I exclaimed, all excited. “I’m going to a poetry slam with my friends. You should come with!” And that is how A and his buddy T became my new favorite friends.

Over dinner that evening, our lively conversation faltered into silence as B rapped the table and called out, “Okay, we need introductions! How does everyone here know each other?”

The silence was deafening, as we all looked around in confusion. “Uhh,” I said. “Well. I guess it revolves around me? I work with B. D is my jummah-buddy, and H is her friend from San Francisco. And these two guys…” I paused. “Well, I don’t really know them. But I invited them to the poetry slam in downtown Chicago. The one that WE ARE MISSING because you were all so damn hungry, THANKS A LOT.”

Even a year later, after ISNA2006 and hanging-out sessions in both San Francisco and New York and mile-long, reply-to-all “ISNA buddies” email threads and incessant text-messaging, none of us have forgotten the the fact that we missed a poetry slam in favor of “fine dining” on Devon. I have made sure they are periodically reminded of this. Okay, maybe constantly.

But even amidst all the goodbyes, there are friends still here. D, my favorite swing buddy from college, is now in the Bay for graduate school, and I’m looking forward to our future hanging-out sessions at the park.

And J, the one whom 2Scoops had said sounded a little bit like Malcolm X when I wrote about our interview, is in the Bay now for grad school as well, so I foresee an expanded circle of South Bay shenanigans.

And then, my phone vibrated the other evening with a call I hadn’t expected. I stared at the screen in astonishment, then flipped open the phone to shout my friend’s full name: “K____ A____, is that YOU?!” K is one of my favorite ex-coworkers from our old downtown Sacramento job, sort of another little brother to me, and it felt so good to hear him laughing at the other end of the line: “It’s me! How are you, buddy?” It’d been a long time, and I felt surprised and honored that he called me of his own volition. Scrolling through my phone again just now, I found three text messages I had saved from K:

1. [“Happy new year” in Farsi. At least, that’s what I think it is:] Eyde noruz mobarak. Omidvaram sale khubo khoshi dashte bashid.
2. “Hey, G is organizing a fashion show. Call her and bug her to be in it!”
3. “Hey, how is everything? Long time no see. By the way, give me back my hole puncher that I stole!”

Clearly, we will never tire of conversations about office supplies.

It’s been a summer of rockstars and reunions, as you can see. I shall have to tell you all about them.

Meanwhile, I’m back! SweepTheSunshine is OPEN for business, buddy boys.

[+]

NOTE: I will be in Chicago (for ISNA, naturally) over Labor Day weekend. You guys were not happy campers when I neglected to tell you last year, so I hope this is enough advance notice. If you want to hang out, let me know! [My email address is on the About page.] I foresee a Newunion, Part Two, to be had, since I’m coordinating hanging-out sessions with blogistan buddies and flickr folks and all-around rockstar friends. So, if you want a ready-made entourage, get in touch. Maybe we can even manage to make it to the poetry slam this year.

It’s not as easy as willing it all to be right

(3)BeautifulThings, Bibliothek, Blogistan and the Wide World of Webs, Rhymes and unrhymed lines, Rockstar and Crescent

"What are you doing?" asked my friend, after I had finished praying and was still kneeling on the floor.
Originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

I’m so tired of constantly feeling so tired – I don’t sleep enough, I fall asleep holding books I once could have finished reading in a single day, I sleep crookedly, and my neck has been aching for over a week. Also, there’s that drama that enters my head once in a while: “Am I doing constructive things with my life? Let’s switch it up again!” Clearly, I am my father’s daughter, bored too easily and always wanting change. And yet, too much standing still while questioning my next step, mired once again in indecisiveness and lack of direction.

It’s too easy to get lost in progress, or lack thereof, so here are three beautiful things to remember from last week:

[+]

Poetry reading by Mohja Kahf at the Arab Cultural & Community Center in San Francisco last Monday. It was a wonderful evening, not in the least because I got to see the beautiful ladies, Momo and Baraka, again. And also because Mohja Kahf is hilarious, and that must have been the first time I laughed so much at a poetry reading. She writes candidly about topics such as sexuality and motherhood in a way that’s quite refreshing, as is her take on historical figures that become more approachable and human through her poetry – Asiya, the Pharaoh’s wife, sitting with her husband at a table of Neo-Cons; Asiya written up in the tabloids, dismissed as “crazy.” I picked up copies of Mohja’s poetry collection, E-Mails from Scheherazad, as well as her new novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, and asked if she could sign my sister’s copy of E-Mails from Scheherazad: “I’ve been specifically instructed to tell you that you’re her favorite poet.”

“Ooh, instructed,” she laughed. “Should I add some exclamation points to my signature?” And so, she did.

While I was waiting in line for the books, one of the women on the ACCC staff asked, “Do you write poetry?”

“No,” I said hurriedly, thinking she had confused me for RC, one of our rockstar Muslimah spoken word poets here in the Bay. (It wouldn’t be the first time; I think it’s the headwrap that confuses people.)

“You should,” she said. “We’re trying to organize some more poetry events here at the ACCC, and we’d love for more young people to participate.” She wrote down her name and email address for me.

I remembered how, the week before at the Poetry for the People reading at UC Berkeley, D had asked the same question, “Do you write poetry, too?”

“Ehh, no,” I said. “I only write maybe one poem a year, when I’m forced to.”

“But they’re always such good poems!” interjected my sister.

The day after the Mohja Kahf reading, my buddy A harassed me about my refusal to participate in the open mic at Blue Monkey, too: “Only losers don’t do poetry readings at an open mic.”

So now, apparently, I need to write more often.

[+]

Writing travels the world: Maliha’s beautiful essay, Necessary silence of being made its way to me not only via Blogistan, but also through an email listserve I’m subscribed to. I emailed her to let her know, and received the following reply:

I’ve been lurking around your site and wish you, missy, will take a break from all the messy and beautiful chaos around you, to write a bit more. But with spring weather finally here, and the greys and storms dissipated, I totally don’t blame you for sweeping specks of sun rays rather than blog.

So, there we go, another reminder to write more often, from the beautiful lady who excels at it. It’s too bad that, as I explained to Maliha, writing these days means, for me, too many incomplete posts saved as drafts, and too many scribbled bullet-points in my little moleskine notebook that need to be turned into real posts. And, yet, my buddy Z exclaims: “How did you blog so soon after the last one? How do you have enough material?” It’s not for lack of stories, clearly.

[+]

Explanation of the photo that accompanies this post: Ayesha my love and I canceled our dinner plans last Thursday, so I was left with a free evening, and was actually rather looking forward to being able to go straight home from work.

But then: “Come over to my place for dinner!” said R.

“Who else is going to be there?” I asked warily. I was not in the mood to socialize with people.

“Me!” said the co-worker-in-crime, B.

“And?”

“Just us,” assured R.

“It’s not some fancy-schmancy thing, is it?” I asked. ” ‘Cause I won’t be able to stand it.”

“Not at all!”

So, I went over to her apartment in Fremont after work. We had dinner, and then it was time for maghrib, the evening prayer. There was no awkward questioning: Will you be praying? Will you not? Should we wait for you? Instead, it was all so matter-of-fact: Here’s a rug; the bathroom’s at the end of the hall; I have an extra scarf, if you need it. I appreciated the straightforwardness – needed it, in fact.

R pulled out a prayer rug for me to use – it was short and narrow and golden-yellow, the perfect size for my frame, and something about the beauty of it moved me nearly to tears as I was praying. When I sat cross-legged afterward, hands raised in supplication, my knees jutted over the sides of the slender rug. It had been so long since I had prayed (much less, regularly), and there was something bittersweet – ridiculous and yet so fitting – about the fact that a yellow sunshine-colored rug made me want to pray more often.

“What are you doing?” asked R, after I had finished praying and was still kneeling on the floor.

“Taking pictures of your rug,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s so pretty!”

“And what are you going to do with the pictures?” she asked, puzzled.

I almost replied, Put them up on flickr for the world to see, but said instead, “I’ll look at them!”

She rolled her eyes, picked up the prayer rug off the floor, folded it swiftly, and placed it on top of my purse. “Here. You can have it. Now you can look at it all the time.”

I hadn’t expected this, but I was too giddy with quiet delight to politely question her decision with, Are you SURE?

We sat around afterward, drinking mint tea (okay, I just experimentally sipped a little bit of it; “Will you be offended if I don’t drink this?” I asked R and her roommate L, but they assured me they would not be). “That’s fresh mint from Zaytuna,” L said proudly.

I nearly choked on laughter. “Were you skulking around Zaytuna, picking mint leaves in the dark?” Indeed, she had been. She also shared stories of living in Kuwait and Los Angeles. B and I were fascinated by her Kuwaiti/Lebanese/Hungarian heritage, so L brought out her laptop and began showing us photos.

“Dude,” I said, “these are beautiful pictures. You really need to get a flickr account and upload these.”

“I do have flickr!” she said. Oh, internet, how I love you. L went back to her room, and returned with her camera. She and I sat there scrolling through her photos, while R and B just shook their heads – especially when I started taking photos of the tea-glasses again.

B made fun of us: “Yasmine’s going to come to work one day and say, ‘I quit! I’m leaving to become a professional photographer!’ ”

She needs to stop giving me ideas.

City days: River, culture, speech, sense of first space and the right place

Conversations and Encounters, Rhymes and unrhymed lines, Rockstar and Crescent, Salaam Namaste, Travels and Travails

I thought this was the question I most despised...
Near MACLA, downtown San Jose, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

I was taking BART into San Francisco one Sunday a few weeks ago when a young man got on the train at the MacArthur station and glanced curiously at me for much longer than I was comfortable with as he made his way down the aisle.

A few minutes later, I heard someone call out, “Excuse me!” I looked over my shoulder, as did several people in my vicinity. It was the aforementioned young man. The train was packed, so he was forced to stand in the aisle, a few rows behind me, from where he delivered his bombshell question to me: “Excuse me, what language do you speak?” Everyone’s head expectantly swiveled my way, waiting for an answer.

Being asked, “Where are you from?” generally annoys me. But I hadn’t known until that morning that being asked, “What language do you speak?” could make me so furious. Was he serious? I wanted to ask, “What the f*ck do you think I speak?”

Thrown off guard, I stared over my shoulder at the guy, mentally calculating my possible responses – my totally b.s. Pukhtu, my fluent Hindku, my ever-dwindling repertoire of German, my passably conversant Urdu. But then, still angry, I responded as coldly as I could: “English.”

“Yeah? Well, I just wanted to say that…” – here, he paused to swing his arm around his head and torso – “your style is really beautiful.”

“Thank you,” I said shortly.

“Where is that kind of style from?”

“Guess,” I snapped, and turned around to face the front, eyes forward, jaw tight. Apparently, a red&white wrap-around spring dress from Forever21, and flared jeans, and dangly earrings and flip-flops, and, oh yes, the headwrap, are all exotic items that have no space or sense of belonging in American fashion.

I understand that I look different, and that this will raise curiosity wherever I go. I understand, too, that some people are genuinely interested in learning about others. But I have a right to be angry about how such interest is sometimes articulated, and the manner in which such questions are sometimes posed. Really, I was fuming over being asked – point-blank and in a completely rude manner (how is it okay to make that the very first question you ask anyone?) – about what language I spoke.

Goddammit, I’m surrounded by effin’ MORONS.

I comforted myself with the thought that at least he didn’t tell me how great my English was.

Several people got off the train at the next stop, and, next thing I knew, Mr. Smooth & Charming had found a seat in the row diagonally across from mine. “Hey,” he whispered loudly.

I ignored a couple of the Heys, but I didn’t have a book with which to pretend to distract myself, and, up and down the train, people’s heads started swinging back and forth from me to the guy, so finally I turned my head, eyebrow raised challengingly.

“So, you’re not going to tell me where you’re from?” he asked in a wheedling tone, sounding a bit hurt, as if I were doing him a great disservice.

“No,” I said, spitefully spitting out clipped responses. “You just keep guessing over there.”

I turned around again. A minute later, he ventured, “Are you Gypsy?”

“No.” I didn’t even bother turning around, but could still feel him staring.

“They’re the oldest race, you know.”

I sighed, raised my eyebrow again, tried to give every indication of being uninterested, but couldn’t help asking, “Who? The Gypsies?”

“No. The Egyptians.”

“I’m not Egyptian, either,” I said.

I felt like I was actively participating in a guessing game, in Twenty Questions or something, and the ridiculousness of the situation (and, perhaps, of my antisocial – even defensive? – reaction) started to hit me. Everyone on our side of the car was silently watching our childish exchange. I tried to suppress a smile, and he must have noticed my face softening, because that’s when he made his smooth and charming move: “You’re very beautiful, you know.”

“Ha. Uhh, thanks.” And I was trying not to laugh, because somehow, in his cocky yet completely bumbling way, Mr. Trying Too Hard To Be Smooth reminded me very much of my co-worker from my old Sacramento job, and I couldn’t wait to get off the train and call H#3 and say, “Guess what idiot on BART just reminded me of you?”

I turned my head to the left to look out the window. From my right, Mr. Smooth added loudly, “Your beauty will never fade.”

Mein Gott, can we get to the city already? This is killin’ me.

A young mother of two, sitting in the seat across from me – and directly in front of Mr. Smooth – smiled. Most of the other people seated in our vicinity smirked as well.

“Did you know that?” he repeated loudly. “Your beauty will – ”

“Yeah,” I said hurriedly. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“When?” he challenged.

“What?”

“When will you keep it in mind?”

“Forever,” deadpanned the man behind me. I started laughing, and so did he, and Mr. Smooth, shameless flirt that he was, smiled winningly, as if his charm had finally achieved victory over my cold war. I was still chuckling a few moments later when we reached the Powell St. station, and something about laughter as a letting down of the guard put me in a good enough mood again that I even saluted Mr. Smooth as I stepped off the train, calling out behind me, “Have a good one!”
Continue reading City days: River, culture, speech, sense of first space and the right place →

I hear in my mind all of these words

Rhymes and unrhymed lines

People's Park, Berkeley, CA
Poetry in People’s Park, Berkeley, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

My new buddy recently introduced me to the poetry slam at MACLA and upcoming open mic nights at Blue Monkey in downtown San Jose [Blue Monkey! The name just makes me laugh and think of Baji, my favorite robot monkey pirate], then I also attended the Poetry for the People reading one evening last week in Berkeley, and will be at the Mohja Kahf reading in San Francisco this Monday, so April has been all about poetry appreciation. I hope you knew that April is National Poetry Month, otherwise, that’s it, we just can’t be friends anymore. I’ve been subscribed to receive a Poem-A-Day from Poets.org in my email inbox since last year, and what’s even more rocking is coming across pieces of poetry on my usual online haunts like weblogs and flickr.

[Click each of the direct links below, to access the poems in their entirety.]

Brimful, who writes so beautifully about San Francisco like no one else can, posted Reverie by Bhikshuni Weisbrot:

Then breathless,
I may take a moment or two
to settle and see the multicolored
glory of fall,
gold-fanned leaves
pressed flat and sodden
after a day of rain,
a season at its peak of beauty
full but fragile
so you know from experience,
bound to disappear.

The next day, she shared Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet by Eavan Boland:

what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

Ganesh posted Louise Glück’s Averno: Part I, Poem 4:

How privileged you are, to be still passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestoso, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

The New York Times review of “Averno” also quotes some lovely lines from Glück’s various poems; I think I shall have to buy this book.

Baraka’s Poetry Monday focused on Su’ad Abdul-Khabeer:

Young men in fitted caps
whisper
“Damn”
deep in sly glances,
Others offer courtesies in appreciation.
Women honor us openly or
with their arrogance,
And the press
can’t get enough of us.
See, clothes do not hide the woman
They announce her.

To cover or not to cover
Is not my battleground.

I don’t know how I never found Madlyne on flickr until two weeks ago, but her jarring photograph was captioned with Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, Kindness, and I knew we’d have to be friends:

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Finally, a comment on Anna’s weblog led me to The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

And everything is plastic, and everyone’s sarcastic

Casa420 and Familia, Glorious mundanity

Weather that just can't make up its damn mind
Originally uploaded by yaznotjaz

This is just a public service announcement/placeholder post to let you know I’m here! and alive! And I have bajillions of stories to share with you all, but not nearly enough time to type them out. So, give me a few days. Also, I’m sorry for being such a bastid about never replying to the comments you all leave on this weblog; please know that I do appreciate every single one of them. Thank you for being such rockstars, and putting up with me.

In case you’re interested, this was my itinerary for last Saturday alone:
– Memorial service
– Baby shower
– Wedding reception

And then, on Sunday, I tried to finish up a project for a work deadline, but didn’t make much progress. Two days later, I’m still in limbo and not going anywhere with that, and all I really want to do is crawl beneath my desk and sleep for several days. Meanwhile, the world is falling apart – as always, and in so many, innumerable ways – and this is my wish for you: That you may never have to attend a memorial service with your little brother, and watch him watch his 22-year-old friend in a coffin. Parents should never have to see their children in coffins, either.

But still, the glorious mundanity continues. This GMail IM from my sister made me laugh yesterday:

I was walking behind this dude who had the price tag still flapping out behind his shorts and it made me think of you

Here’s hoping you’re finding things to laugh about, too.

Your light shines brighter than the best

(3)BeautifulThings, Casa420 and Familia, NineToFive outside the 925, Rockstar and Crescent


Pencils so pretty, it makes you want to eat them, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

My (3 or more) Beautiful Things posts always contain snippets from a single given day of the week, but, in this case, I haven’t written in a while, so the following is a compilation of things from the past couple of weeks:

one. While driving to work the other morning, I saw a car with a bumper sticker pasted to its back corner. The long, thin strip simply stated mournfully, MY LIFE IS IN RUINS. Seeing as how the driver was at the wheel of a Jeep Cherokee and in seemingly good health, I felt it was safe to smile. Something I thought of just now, while typing out this paragraph: Maybe he’s quite a dedicated archaeologist? (Where’s Ayan with his puns?)

two. Although it’s been two weeks, thinking about the email from my friend about a recent halaqa trip in which I couldn’t participate still makes me laugh. The subject line: WE NEED YOU! The email:

i was just thinking that we can’t do this trip without you.
who will take the photos of every little thing that everyone else will not think about taking a photo of???
yasmine!!!
who will remind us to eat everytime our stomachs growl but the rest of us are too embarrassed to admit that we are hungry… again…

It’s good to know that even though I’m infamous amongst friends for often forgetting to eat real meals, I’m also paradoxically infamous for my shameless love of food. Oh, and at least someone doesn’t make fun of me for taking photos of seemingly trivial objects (like the evening at the Berkeley Marina, when my friend’s sister said snidely, “That’s just a water faucet.” I felt like stabbing her with someone’s fishing pole. Okay, must concentrate on beautiful things…)

three. I saw a man at the San Ramon gas station who was completely absorbed in leaning against his drivers-side door and reading a book while gas was being pumped into his car. Oblivious to the rest of the world, he remained standing like that for minutes after the pump clicked to signal that his tank was full.

four. Two weeks ago, I walked up to a familiar-looking young man at an event and asked, “Did I meet you at a conference in Oakland?” We established that I had not. He emailed me a few days later, asking if we could meet, since he was curious about my work as well as about my everyday life as a Muslim. I suggested we meet one evening for coffee and talk; we agreed on a time and place. (And I was pleased when he appended his note with, I like the endings to your emails. “Have beautiful days” seems to ensure that there are more to come.)

“I’m going to a coffee meeting with a guy,” I told my work buddy, B.

She was puzzled. “You don’t even drink coffee.”

“Yeah, I know. But saying, ‘Let’s meet over hot chocolate or cranberry juice’ doesn’t have quite the same ring.”

The guy and I met up yesterday at the gorgeous San Jose Museum of Art downtown, and walked over to the Peet’s down the street, where it was quickly established that neither of us are really coffee fans. We laughed and shrugged and ordered frozen blended drinks anyway, then walked back to the outdoor patio tables at the Museum, where I tried to answer his questions about my work and Islam to the best of my ability. In return, he told me about growing up in Iowa (“I have a friend from Cedar Rapids!” I said), the three weeks he spent in Spain (someday, I, too, will visit), and the summer he traveled to Greece to meet his relatives for the first time.

Also, he mentioned the time he and his college wrestling teammates were in the Czech Republic for training, and ran into an Arab team from the UAE, also training for some sporting event. He invited them to dinner with his team, they accepted, and the evening was mostly filled with nods and laughter over good food, since there was only one translator and he couldn’t fulfill everyone’s verbal communication needs. My new friend shrugged, “We didn’t have internet access, so I couldn’t Google them to see what the UAE team was doing in this tiny little city in the Czech Republic.”

I laughed. “Well, if it was three years ago and you still haven’t gotten to it, then just consider it serendipity, and a rocking evening spent making connections with strangers, while eating. You can’t go wrong if there’s food involved.”

Flipping radio stations while driving home, I came across another form of serendipity: KQED Radio broadcasting the Spirituality and Social Change: An Interfaith Roundtable, inspired by the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that was held at Stanford University in January. [Audio, video, and transcript are available on the website linked above.] Imam Zaid Shakir clearly and articulately touched on so much of what I had been struggling to explain to my new friend all evening. I drove home captivated by each speaker’s thoughts on spirituality and social responsibility, compassion and human connection. I remembered telling my friend that in Islam, we are encouraged to think critically, to question, to seek and analyze answers as one way of deepening our own spiritual growth. During the course of the Aurora Forum roundtable, the Rev. Dr. Warnock said something (in reference to Dr. King) that resonated:

For me, critical reflection is an act of worship. It’s part of what it means to be a person of faith, and he’s a thinker, but he’s an engaged thinker. I do think the first act, in a real sense, is what the liberation theologians call praxis: you’re engaged in the world; you’re actually involved in the effort of trying to make a difference.

five. Over dinner, my father was grousing about his recent speeding ticket, which he received while driving with his colleague to the Friday congregational prayers. “I gave him a guilt trip,” said the daddy-o. “I told him, ‘I always drive too fast, but you heading out of work only five minutes before the sermon begins doesn’t help matters, either.’ ”

“Did he offer to pay for part of the ticket?” I asked with interest.

“No,” he said, surprised. “I didn’t even think of that.”

“My friends would have been more considerate, and offered to pay half, I bet you,” I said smugly.

“Oh, yeah?” He raised his eyebrows. “Would you offer to pay, if you were with your friend?”

“If they were running late and speeding because of me?” I almost said, Hell yeah!, but swallowed those words and added instead, “Of course!”

The daddy-o laughed and raised his hand for a high-five. “See? That’s because I raised you well.”

I just opened up my eyes, and let the world come climbing in

Conversations and Encounters, Loss and laments and letting go

Abandoned
A child’s shoes on Muir Beach, September2005, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

At the start of every single week, I think to myself, Let’s go to meditation this week. The last couple of months, I have had to defer my personal Wednesday evening preferences in favor of work-related meetings and events. Last Wednesday was different: Today is free, and all mine, I tell myself, and off I go to meditation. The familiar rituals of 7.30pm: Park at the curb, shoes off at the door, enter the darkened hallway, down one carpeted step and find a seat on the cushions already laid out on the floor of the dimly-lit living room. Close my eyes for one hour and focus on breathing, relaxing, dhikr, reflection, even inadvertently napping, as used to happen when, as an exhausted university student, I’d regularly drive two hours from Sacramento just for this lovely experience.

Then, one hour of sharing thoughts. We talk about pain, and I am reminded once again of my friend H, and the strength that lies in professing our vulnerabilities. I am so tempted to pass on sharing my thoughts – I even joke about this when the mic makes its way around the room and is finally handed to me, because the three people before me chose to pass – but then I take a deep breath and decide to jump right in. So, I talk a little bit about emotional pain, because our default association with “pain” is usually the physical, and that’s the sort for which I have a high tolerance level. Emotional pain, however, is a whole other thing as far as I am concerned – public displays of tears and weakness have never come easily to me, and I am not one to focus often on awareness and acknowledgment of my emotional vulnerabilities and insecurities.

The people around the room nod as I speak, whether in understanding or encouragement, I don’t know, but I find it reassuring. I pass the mic down the circle.

One young woman, a kindergarten teacher, relates that someone once told her that people remove their shoes when they enter sacred spaces, and how moving it was, then, when she arrived at this place tonight and found a sea of shoes at the front door. I think about the fact that even in this space, a living room in the heart of Silicon Valley, people have created an environment that is reflective, compassionate – and, yes, a little bit holy. I think about how there is peace here, and grace, and light in everyone.

The kindergarten teacher continues her story. “Bear with me,” she says. “This may be a little bit of a stretch.” But we are all leaning forward attentively. “There’s an elephant tent in my classroom,” she says – a tent shaped like an elephant. She has turned this into a private space for her students, a place they may enter when they are feeling particularly lonely or upset or worried or angry or hurt. She has promised her students that this is their space, and she will not infringe on it in any way. The children have readily adopted the elephant tent as theirs, and treat it with care. They take turns stepping into and out of it, instead of fighting and struggling over who’s been using the space.

It is a little bit reverent for them, this ritual. They honor everyone’s right to use the elephant tent, and are respectful of one another’s emotions, needs, allotted time, and privacy in times of pain. The children practice diligence and care towards that space, even if they aren’t usually as mindful of the rest of the classroom: “Just this morning, someone left a tuna sandwich on the radiator,” says the young teacher with horror, and the rest of us laugh out loud.

And somehow, her students have silently, unequivocally, decided to remove their shoes before entering the tent.

Their teacher references Nelson Mandela and the concept of Ubuntu, which she is teaching her class. A popular definition is: “The belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity.” Desmond Tutu explained it this way:

A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

Nelson Mandela described Ubuntu in the following manner:

A traveller through our country would stop at a village, and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu but it’ll have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to improve?

There is no specific translation for Ubuntu in English, it seems. But Ubuntu is about relationships and sharing, about unity, about connectedness with the rest of humanity.

The teacher tells us how, this afternoon, she ducked her head into the tent and found something created by one of her five year old students: the word UBUNTU written shakily but in reassuringly large letters, on a sheet of paper taped to the inside of the elephant tent.

Just give me moments/Not hours or days, just give me moments

(3)BeautifulThings, All-Star Crackstar Squad

Tomatillos at $1.99 per lb
My life is little things that make me happy – like tomatillos at $1.99 per lb.
Originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007 – Beautiful things: The mid-week edition

one: flickrphotos. I get to work, check my emails, and the first thing I find is a facebook message from my sister’s friend, which makes me laugh and pretty much makes my day.

two: hanging-out sessions! There will be dinner with the lovely A this Sunday, and a hanging-out session with rockstars in San Francisco the Sunday after that. And, even better, when I email 2Scoops with yet another small-world connection I have found which concerns him and our mutual friends (“So check this – this is a funny story [well, sort of, since I am easily amused]…”), he replies to say he will indeed be in the Bay soon, and ends with the best postscript ever: “Work is stinky and overrated and you need a break which we will be taking the week I’m there.” Yes! I foresee gelato in my near future.

three: touching base. I have not mentioned my friend H on this weblog in years, I believe. He was always part of what I called our “core group” while in college, but then he graduated the year before I did and returned home to Los Angeles, leaving behind those days of shuffling our belongings from table to table, trading batteries and CDs, sharing books and lecture notes, practicing Arabic calligraphy on white boards meant for neurobiology review. We initially remained in close contact, but lost touch in the last year and a half or so, after he settled back into life in LA and stopped returning our emails and phone calls. Then, last month, after I forwarded an email to “my favorite SoCal buddies,” he unexpectedly replied back with his new email address. I was elated, but, in my usual Yasminay way of doing things, never got around to emailing him back.

Today, H comes up again in a conversation I have with Somayya. “He couldn’t have changed,” I tell Somayya. “In that email he sent me last month, he still started off by calling me ya Yasminay.” It has always been one of my favorite things about H. “I’m disappointed in him,” she says, and I remember all those months when we were worried sick, not knowing where our friend was, and how to reach him. “I know,” I reply, but I also understand what it’s like to be disappointed in yourself, to distance yourself from those who know you until you feel you’ve made something of your life.

I sit down and email H back to say hello and catch up, and, as a pointed reminder, give him my cell phone number again. During the course of the day, I have two missed calls from him. The next morning, he calls again while I’m driving to work, and I answer the phone, laughing: “H, my friend! How goes the life, buddy?” Even now, years later, there is no one else I know who can say “Alhamdulillahhhhhh!” [All praise is for God] with such gratitude and enthusiasm as H does. I am so glad to have this friend back in my life, this young man who still speaks so quickly and punctuates his breathless sentences with the same familiar shout of laughter.

four: chapstick. I have just enough time after work to swing by Target and pick up a couple of my favorite Dr. Pepper-flavored chapsticks. Lip gloss is too much of a process sometimes, and I don’t believe in lipstick, so chapstick it is. I do believe in color, though, which is why I always buy the Dr. Pepper-flavored chapstick, which has a nice reddish tint to it. But I always peel off the blatant Dr. Pepper wrapper, otherwise I’d feel like a twelve year old. Still, I’m amused I’m not the only one who’s thought of this. Months ago, visiting my lovely Hindku-speaking buddy N one evening, we sat talking on her living room floor, and she stared at me when I pulled out my chapstick and quickly swiped it across my lips. “Where did you get that?” she asked, almost accusingly.

I stared back in bafflement. “Umm, from my bag?”

“Oh,” she said, relaxing, laughing. “It’s yours? I have those, too! I was so confused.”

five: citrus scents. Against my better judgment, I also stop by the earrings section at Target, but nothing catches my eye. So I buy citrus-scented perfume instead, because I love citrus-scented things, and I believe in smelling good, no matter what idiotic boys say. This one’s called Tuesday. What are people thinking, I wonder, when they decide to name perfumes after days of the week?

six: meditation. This one deserves a separate post of its own.

We pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear

Rhymes and unrhymed lines

Light upon light
Light upon light, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

[When I transferred all my weblog archives from Blogger to WordPress, I found nineteen DRAFT posts amongst the lot. NINETEEN! I’m working my way through them, trying to figure out where I had been going with each of these. Meanwhile, here’s something simple I had been meaning to share last spring, but had never gotten around to elaborating on.]

Wendell Berry is one of my favorite poets. As I commented once on Baraka’s post, his poetry collection, A Timbered Choir, is gorgeous, and I especially love the poem “To my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust Museum…” Here is a reminder for those of us who wish to live our lives in the light:

.
.
.
But remember
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine

though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be

the light of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.

A few more great Berry poems may be found here. I particularly like Do Not Be Ashamed and What We Need is Here (from which comes the title of this post).

This is the “six degrees of separation” version of finding Yasmine online, when it should have only been one degree

All-Star Crackstar Squad, Blogistan and the Wide World of Webs, Links to love, Rockstar and Crescent

Trying to be difficult
Trying to be difficult at the Berkeley Marina, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz

Yesterday morning, I checked my emails and found the following facebook message from my sister’s friend and classmate (this makes her my friend by default, too, I think). S wrote:

hooooly, lardki!

omg omg omg, i just discovered your mad photo hobby. ummmm, what?? you take photos?? so i found this link to muslim-a-day photos, right?? and then i was like, hey, i want to do this! so i was reading up on the contributors, right??? and then i was like, hey there is a link to someone’s photos! so i clicked the link and it took me to yaznotjaz’s flickr photos.. and i was lookin at it and i saw a picture that said “today i am 8” and i was like.. hey, that looks like it was taken at the marina and then lo and behold there was another photo that was OBVIOUSLY the marina, and i was like, hey, this person knows berkeley. and then i clicked on a photo of the photographer’s reflection, and i was like, hey, that looks like… like… omg… i know that wardrobe. and then there was a comment that said, oh, there’s another picture of my face ish, and i clicked it and i was like, HEY THAT’S YASMINE ______!! HOLLLY!!! hahahahah… so i just wanted you to know that i got a pleasant surprise and it’s all your fault. :) and your photos are exceptionally beautiful. yeah.. i think i have not left anything out.. so
salaam alaikum !

Wasn’t that great? Yes, indeed it was. As I was telling S, I couldn’t stop laughing to myself all day.

This is also an apposite time to encourage you all to stop by Muslim-A-Day, which has stunning photographs every single day. The project, a brainchild of the ever-creative HijabMan, strives to keep ignorance away by “debunking the myth of a Muslim Monolith.” On the About page, he writes:

The main thrust of Muslim-A-Day is simply to show the multiple facets of Muslims’ lives. The best ideas always seem to be the simplest ones, don’t they? Here we are, you and I, presented each day with images of Muslims as the enemy… the veiled, bearded, mysterious enemy that worships a God named Allah.

That’s where Muslim-A-Day enters. Muslim-A-Day aims to provide you with a photograph of a Muslim everyday. Here, you’ll find Muslims in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Some have piercings, some wear the veil, some are clean shaven, some are even Malaysian (Imagine that!). They all believe in Al-lah. Literal translation? The [One] God.

When the opportunities presented themselves, I captured the faces that touched me. I love to witness the reflection of the Divine in all that I experience; I love to make you a witness by posting these photos.

I added one photo back in February (it was taken during the ISNA conference in Chicago, and originally uploaded here). I really need to get on the ball. While I get my life together and try to be more diligent in uploading photos to flickr and elsewhere, why don’t you add some of your own? Muslim-A-Day is always looking for contributors. Also, stop by the website and check out the beautiful photos and say hello to everyone else who lurks around there.