June 11-24, 2002 This fortnight, bracketed like the previous one with eclipses, marked out its time for me in Turkey, England, and Germany. It was a lovely week in Cappadocia, particularly our visit to Rumi's tomb in Konya, and meeting a Sufi there. The next night we went to watch dervishes whirl at the Sarihan caravansarai, constructed in 1249 for camels and traders, most apposite today for the sema (whirling). After the performance the semazenbasha (leader) of this group spoke to us about Sufism at length; what has particularly stayed with me from that conversation was his recounting of Rumi's advice to ignite the fire of love in the tandur (clay oven) of the heart, then bake yourself therein until you are done.

From Turkey to London, and a ride in the London Eye, the giant observational wheel on the Thames, followed by a trip to Body Works, the controversial exhibit created by Prof. Dr. Gunther von Hagens, who specializes in plasticizing human corpses, then arranging them in tableaux: ideal for anatomical studies, and as a reminder of mortality's imminent ubiquity.

The next afternoon, to the premiere of Jacob Jacobson, a play written in 1930 but never performed until now, the first play entirely in Yiddish to appear in London in decades. The producer, Helen Beer, being a friend of mine, I elected to attend, and despite knowing but a few words of Yiddish (meshugginah!) the program notes and supertitles gave me enough of an idea of what was going on to magnify the joy of listening to talented thespians declaim in an alien language.

The following evening I caught the final dress rehearsal of Bombay Dreams, Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber's latest blockbuster, music composed by A. R. Rahman of Bollywood fame, most of the cast young Asians from the UK. An excellent spectacle, music, sets, and performances all told. Should it ever reach a theater near you, and should you ever want a typical Bombay experience, don't miss it!

Thence to Germany, and sightseeing in Frankfurt, a city I'd never really visited before but now appreciate, particularly the ambiance and the apfelwein. At a posh clinic in Bad Nauheim with an Ayurvedic ward I watched the US bravely lose its quarter-final World Cup match to Germany (though even the Germans present did admit that on that day the Americans outplayed them). The weekend passed on the Feldberg, the highest "mountain" (825 meters) in Central Germany, and the lovely conference center there that abuts parts of the old Roman wall that sought in vain to keep the Teutons out of the Empire. This center has an Ayurvedic department staffed by a doctor & therapists from Sri Lanka, and a hot oil treatment made the seminar go by as if on greased wheels.

By the next eclipse I was in Ireland, which is yet another story..

June 10-11, 2002 As my mother's portion of Texas has not yet succumbed to the rampant suburbanization that is destroying such great swaths of our arable land, wild fauna are always presenting themselves for observation, like the butterflies (monarchs?) who show up for a day or two annually in the course of their seasonal migrations. Suddenly one day they fill the lawns of courthouse and library with thousands of identically brilliant black-streaked miniscule orange plumages, and just as suddenly they are gone, but for the corpses of their siblings who they leave behind.

There's a little silver snake who lives in a hole under the redbud tree near my mother's driveway, and one recent morning as I drove my mother into town I saw him (or her) standing straight up, halfway in and halfway out of his hole, raptly attentive to some prey or some danger that I couldn't identify. Half an hour later he was still there, as motionless as before, like some microcosmic image of Kundalini Herself expressed in the argot of small reptiles.

Thanks to my father's tireless exertions fig trees dot the garden that extends behind the house, but it is the parent of these many offspring that remains more prolific than its progeny. That tree resides in my aunt's yard, between her house and my mother's. Figs appear in early June, and since my aunt is averse to them, her neighbors collect them. When I went out for this year's first picking I found on the tree two overripe figs entirely covered by corpulent, pied beetles who jostled drunkenly for position, entirely oblivious to my presence, as they slowly and deliberately gorged themselves on the rich fig juices. There were ants as well, who were either sharing the fig paste with the beetles, or consuming the excretions the beetles were dropping, or both. The sultry 90-degree heat made the whole tableau seem an apt statement of summer.

Thence to Florida, and England, where World Cup fervor had taken hold, and on to Turkey for another week of rejuvenation at the Gamirasu Cave Hotel, the 10th Century Byzantine monastery that is now a watering hold for the likes of yours truly. That's where the eclipse of June 10/11 caught up with me..

Link to News of the Past