This morning it began to feel normal: to wake in darkness, to lace up my sneakers, hit the road, all in darkness. I waved to a worker who drives a water truck up and down the streets of Oberlin watering the bowls of flowers that hang from every street light. I see him each morning, around the same time, watering.
Last night as I broke my fast I was not ravenous. I ate some almonds, some berries, drank some water, and then didn’t eat a full meal until about an hour later.
Is it starting to feel ordinary? If it is, there will be time enough for it become arduous again–I’m not even done with the first week of fasting.
But I can use this moment to move into greater attention. The first few days of the fast the fact I was “not eating” became the central focus, an active practice of restraint. That feels like it is falling away a little bit now. In yoga, there eight stages (not really linear but simultaneous), the first of these is yama, or restraint. Following this is niyama, or active practices.
We will see where it leads me.
I noticed on the first day that when I wrote in the afternoon, in the height of foodlessness, my language splintered into short little sentences. Since then I’ve wanted to write in the afternoon and evening but haven’t found my way to it.
This is not the first time I have written a Ramadan journal. The first time was in 2007 and those entries I wrote mostly in the afternoon and evening. I wanted to post some of those entries here, but decided I wanted this to be an immediate writing grounded in present experience.
Fasting teaches you this: that you have to move slowly, that you have this moment, and this moment alone holds the entire universe.
The body is a planet after all–all its strange parts, the wisdom tooth, the cerebellum, the epithelial tissue, the clavicle. Every single thing functions together.
I knew in my bones–literally, I suppose–that there were not “vesitigial organs.” Only very recently have scientists discovered the purposes for both the spleen and the appendix. There are things about the world we are not even close to understanding. “So man has gone to the moon,” remarked Anais Nin with some disinterest, after the lunar landing. “He has so much further to go within himself.”
Yes, I know Nin was talking about not about the physical body but the psyche, but what I mean to suggest (the experience of fasting might be perfect proof) is that those two poles may not be so far apart after all, in fact may not be different things, at least not in the way we think about them.
The body changes and shifts, goes through its seasons, over the span of its life.
My note book of two years ago drifts, a mark of consciousness, a record of a person who doesn’t exist anymore.
But also (of course) does.
The self and the self-that-was, or the self-will-be: all planets revolving around the same sun? Which is the sun and which the planet?
One of the things I wrote about in that old notebook that rises to the surface always: that the fasting month itself, based on the lunar calendar, moves backward and backward through the solar year.
Ten years ago, the last time my mother and I fasted each day together, I was living in Buffalo, NY and Ramadan was in the dead of winter.
When I did my very first fast I was 9 years old and the fast was in July. Every 36 years you revisit your old life through the fast. And throughout your life the conditions and experiences of the fast change.
This is like the inhale and the exhale, or the fast that changes from the beginning of the month through to the end of the month.
But honestly, doesn’t the fast change during the day itself? Sometimes easier, sometimes harder, but always you have to bring your whole attention to it.
There is something about you that changes with every minute, with every second, your physical body refining and replacing itself in a constant state of combustion.
And something about you that does not change.
How perfect then that the symbol for Ramadan, the object in the sky that both begins and ends it, is the moon.
The moon which revolves around the earth and rotates on its own axis at precisely the same speed. The only heavenly object which rests in utter and eternal equilibrium.