When the fast flattens out my desires, the manic motions of my mind, the sharp edges, I think: maybe I could fill a bowl of this and carry it into the night, carry it into the part of my life when I am eating, functioning again.
So far I am trying and failing. Each night soon after I’ve eaten–the glorious gratitude for food again!–I’ve gotten upset about something, or irritated. I’m either saving up all the fire that has been on slow burn throughout the day, or the body, accustomed now to functioning without the energy of food, is completely disoriented by the influx of sugar, calories, other energies.
The body and the mind: which is responsible for the moods of the self? Likely both. And my yoga study reminds me that the “moods” of the self are not the self, the self that abides.
I think there is a self that abides. A version of me skulking inside watching everything that happens. Like in classical Indian music: there is a plucked melody but also a drone in the background, a constant note.
It’s not one nor the other that makes the music but the two, the thing that changes and the thing that doesn’t.
So the fast doesn’t bring you to your true self; no, it just tries to shine a light a little bit on the part that doesn’t change, the constant part, the part you don’t always see because you are governed by the passions of the physical and the temporal–of course that is the part of the body that depends on food–to stay alive, to function.
Each day is another chance to try.
This morning I woke to a rich Spanish tortilla (not like the little chip, but a thick omelette made with potatoes, onions, spices and other forms of goodness) made by one of my housemates. As I ate with gratitude I thought about the three other people I live with, that I haven’t really sat down with them to try to talk about the fast, what it means to me, what happens to me as I undertake it.
It, like so many Islamic practices, is a community practice. But I don’t have too much community here. I have invited the Muslim Student Association members to come to iftar–evening fast-breaking–each Friday of the month. But mostly, on a day-to-day basis, I am on my own in the practice. My friend Craig tells me the word for “one” in Arabic is “wahid,” the word for loneliness, “waheed.”
Always when I was growing up, once I was able, my mother and I fasted the full month together. It was something we shared, a secret we held between us. Waking early in the predawn, eating food, washing the dishes together.
Then throughout the day you knew there was someone else in the house who is in the same condition as you were.
And at the end of the fast, at the beginning of darkness, we would prepare food and eat together. I would watch her as she ate her first mouthful.
In all the distance since then–all the time that has passed, all the miles between us, when I remember those moments, I only feel intimacy, the immediacy of that sharing.
It is odd for me, because I have always been a loner. Always been lonely. I’m not much for the group practice, don’t really go to community prayers that much.
Even in my daily life: I’m garrulous, a talker. You would never know how alarmingly secretive I am, how much I don’t want people to know what I am really thinking. How almost ashamed I am.
But when I fast I always reach out around me. I want everyone to know what is happening.
I feel there is something in my hands that I have to spill.
And by fasting, perhaps, I am not emptying the bowl of myself, but filling it, filling it, filling it.
Food and attention to it disappears, so what rushes into that space?
Filling myself, yes, but with what?