Wah Wah Taysee
She reminds me that each wound that is healed, is healed as far back as the wound comes from.
November 2021
Years ago, while ambling along doing whatever job was in front of me and likely complaining about it too; I found myself spending some time with what would become a human of great significance to my life.
Now there are obvious humans of great significance in life — they sometimes might even be the usual suspects; parentals and other assorted kin, friends from intense life periods of study, work or partying and sometimes this is all the same bunch.
This human of great significance could be a random you found on a balcony overlooking a little park in a cold northern village that hums day and night. They might be the Italian-speaking bar human on a balmy, quiet afternoon in a busy tourist trap city. It might even be the ephemeral human who spent hours walking you through several types of grasses in a Midwest prairie, that Wenonah.
It might end up being the guy at the petrol station (garage — if you’re from the holy land) who smiles and assures you that it’s all going to be ok after you’ve filled up only half a tank. He’ll pray for you. You’ll still have to pay but at least you’ll have the confidence that your currency is backed by some higher power.
If you’re American or Israeli it might be war mates from those many times when you were busy dispossessing random non-white people of their homes and livelihoods.
It could be that innocent face smiling up at you from their pram while their significant human studiously voids your existence by not acknowledging your presence an elbow away. If you’re in the east coast seaside village of the holy land — maybe you went past that sign on the southbound side of the M4 saying don’t be a Richard and that was all that was needed to change your path forever.
Maybe you just woke up like that and have always known that the ruts made by those before you were never going to be the path for you. That you wanted to get on the grass and cross it barefoot and know what else there was and where and how and why and wherefore and so many things you could never be allowed to imagine if you just followed in the ruts of those who have gone before you.
The human of great significance taught me so very much about art, life, artists, love, being, creating, holding on, letting go, building magnificently and breaking painfully. Gliding on the rarefied air of shared hope and drowning in the asphyxia of unadulterated hate. Of the pathways she had sought and made and found and shared to the ancestors’ hearts and the trials and joys of striking out where there was no path.
She taught me (not directly I’ll admit) that when we make that choice to veer off the path laid out for your given name, gender, race, class and a million of the other perceived defining features — you will find resistance at every single level. That resistance would not just be a general discouraging but an actual, real, active and persistent challenge to everything you are made of — and want to be.
The fight back from not following in the ruts of those that have gone before you comes rapidly, this hydra rears itself consistently and it never tires. Sometimes the hydra is everyone and everything around you and on other days the hydra you’re battling is yourself. Each new dawn is then that blessing of gratitude to rise and manifest your own ruts; crisscrossing the paths of those who have gone before. Sometimes straying so very far away, that no plane can ever bring you back and she who does eventually touch down is themselves so changed, the land could be anywhere. Not just this little section where a low fence defines where the blood and bones of those who made the ruts you were destined to follow in, now lie silent.
On a good day, I imagine their gaze wondrous at the being of their being that has gone where they could not dream and do those things they dared not even imagine and fulfill the restless wildness they had subsumed for what was laid before them. Maybe their gaze is benevolent upon this being of their beings who remembers their names morning, noon and night and invites them to join them at their board and sit with them; to remember the beings of their beings that came before them. To know that the thread that stretches back to those whose names she keeps alive in their mouth, though their hands and with the love washing over their heart. The joy manifest from seeing and doing and being what was unknown to us for so long.
The standing still; not always bent in labour, the sitting quietly; not always in the space of some chatter, the deep knowing of existence given space to breathe, not stifled by dull ache of being a mere chattel, owned by another — indentured, enslaved. Pretty much tied to a stake, the breathing body at the whim of another lord — a human one with a gun, King and a flag.
I recount these reflections days later to the Dervish. She reminds me that each wound that is healed, is healed as far back as the wound comes from. That if we feel the wound in the present, it is our duty to sit with the wound. That no would, trauma, pain, or hurt is to be rushed towards anything — much less healing. ‘To sit with what aches is the real test. To let the hurt pulse, breathe, exist. Like we allow the beauty of another sunrise to wash over us and sit with it peacefully. Similarly we must invite our pain, our dark to sit with us. Until we can do that — we cannot heal a thing’.
‘But when we do’, the Dervish went on; ‘then know that the wave of healing that follows; will ripple and fade and turn and eventually wash gently over all the names going back — and forward to those still to be said out loud’. She reminds me that when you stake your claim on a path of your choosing and making, ‘that claim becomes a beacon; it’s your own beacon — it’s your lighthouse, your safe haven and at the same time, it is the ship's light heading towards a hidden reef and death’.
‘It is as Gibran said both beauty and the mirror at the same time. You are your own wah wah taysee’ she said, ‘every little flicker is itself a sunrise, a full moon over water, the light of untrammelled love coming down the ages into your hands, in this present’.
Wah Wah Taysee was inspired by a shared reading of Longfellow’s, The Song of Hiawatha (1855) but what inspires the wisdom of the Dervish is anyones guess.
© Jesh Baker, 2021 for Stoep Stories All Rights Reserved
