Istanbul Again - Part One

This balloon climbs over Istanbul with a lot more ease and speed than we could.  We can only view the Galata Tower from a distance today.  We, weighed down by injury and pain, are not equal to the climb.

Things are not going as planned, and this is not helping Peter's mood.  Peter is often cranky today.  He has much less tolerance than in past trips.  This troubles me.  Is it his broken rib?  

Our shuttle brought us to a different hotel than the one we booked in.  "There is a problem in your hotel," the manager told us, "so you are staying at this Collage hotel tonight and possibly tomorrow night as well.  Something needs to be repaired, and since tomorrow is Sunday, it is doubtful whether a repairman will be able to come.  You will probably be staying at our hotel until Monday."  

I'm not too unhappy about this.  We have a nice, large room, and Jon has a room of his own in our suite.   There are problems, however, with this hotel, located in the Cihangir part of Istanbul.  I read on the plane that Cihangir is a really cool, trendy part of Istanbul.  The writer called it the "East Village" of Istanbul.  It sure doesn't look it, though.  The buildings don't look like anything special at all, and to get to Taksim Square, you have to climb the steepest hill I have ever seen.  They don't have breakfast for us in our new hotel, either.  "You'll be there in three minutes," promises the manager.  I doubt it.  We have to climb this steep hotel to get to another Collage hotel for breakfast.  Oh, well.  I am determined to take this in stride.  I want to learn lesson four.  I am going to accept what is, and adapt to it.  I won't let a steep climb spoil my mood.  But Peter sees it differently.  I'm going to have to adapt to him, too.  

The manager of our new hotel, who looks like he's still in college, sprints up the hill with us to the Collage hotel at Taksim Square.  He chats with me about Cihangir, the neighborhood the hotel is in.  "This is where the movie producers, movie stars and soccer stars live.  Here it costs over a million euros to buy an apartment."  Unbelievable.  

By the time most of us reach the hotel, ten minutes later, I am huffing and puffing.  Jon and the hotel manager are relaxed.  The manager is used to the climb, and Jon works out each day.  Peter is a block away and seems to be groaning with each step.  His mood picks up, however, when he views the the breakfast buffet.  It is a beautiful buffet visually, with cheese and meats cut into triangles and cream cheese in balls coated in things like coconut and sesame.  There are sauces like tahini, yogurt and honey.   Little crisp cucumbers and tomatoes with mint leaves explode with flavor in our mouths.   

Peter is so exhausted after breakfast, especially after that climb, which must be excruciating with his broken rib, he has to have a break.  About a half hour later, we start out, intending to climb the Galata Tower, where we can have a look from it over the city.  We walk all along the Istiklal, discovering different things than what we saw the last time in Istanbul.  Today we stroll through old shopping arcades, several of them with stained glass.  They have seen better days, but they are still charming. 

A "passage" on the Istiklal

We look for a Sufi school that features sufi dancing at 3 pm, on the last Sunday a month, which happens to be today.  The walk there winds downhill, less strenuous for Peter.  We pass a café featuring chocolate and candles and a building with very peaceful flute music coming out from the window.  Funny how music can transport me, putting me into a peaceful mood.  The walk is pretty, past lute and other music instrument shops and boutiques.  The streets are narrow, hilly, and winding.  We later buy lute - oud  music CDs at a really nice CD shop along that street.  Peter loves the sound of the oud.  He tells me he would love to try and play one. 

The afternoon performance of the whirling dervishes is sold out.  We have to buy tickets for this evening, which means a change in plans.  Another problem - the lines for the Galata tower are so long, we decide to try that another time.  Jon and I walk while Peter limps along to the Galata bridge.  We stop at a fish market, looking out over the water and boats leaving, families out for tea and coffee in the cafes.  There are lots of tourists out there, but also many Turkish families for a day out.  Men fishing on the bridge are later joined by their wives, heads covered, and children.  I see a little kid of about two sleeping in the shade, near his father. He is oblivious to the crowds, to the noise, completely at peace.  He has no difficulty adapting to the day.  Is it because he feels secure?  

Fishermen on the Galata Bridge

We stroll through the Egyptian spice market.  I get ripped off, buying a “sinus” tea – probably 20 grams for 20 lira, which is about €8, or $12.  It is so crowded and I, like Peter am tired, so I don't bother questioning his price.

Coffee and tea at the café where the Orient Express leaves from, the train featured in the Agatha Christie book and film "Murder on the Orient Express", then back across the bridge.

Finally a chance to sit down, during the sufi dancing.  I try and get into the mood, reading about the stages of this dance.  They call this ceremony "Sema", which was partly inspired by Rumi, the most famous sufi master of all.  Here in Turkey they call Rumi "Mevlevi".  

In the first part of this mystical journey, the dancers are dressed in black, to symbolize their original state.  These clothes, our natural state, will have to be shed.  Underneath the black they weare white robes.  The black shows us that we have to shed/submit our natural selves to God, in order to enter into God, who is love.  Before they shed their garments, though, they greet one another and their master.  We need to accept - to greet and welcome ourselves, each other and our darkened state before we can shed them, receiving love.  And then, now transformed by, they can again reclothe themselves in black, joining the rest of creation.  Yes, I agree.  Much of this sounds like the zen journey I once traveled.  It sounds like our Christian journey about returning to life after being born again.  This all sounds very nice, but the music lulls me into sleep.  My soul is not touched by this symbol of a profound spiritual journey.  For me, it is sad to be touched only slightly, in the aestheitic, cerebral part of my brain.  

Sufi dancers begin their "journey" in black.

As I review my day, however, I see that I have been on this journey all day.  What else have I been doing but attempting to submit my natural desire for comfort to the greater need to adapt and grow?  With each climb, I tell myself that I will get stronger, the more I climb this hill.  Discipline is definitely a virtue, and so is adapting to the situation.  We adapted by coming to a later performance, and by walking all over old Istanbul, a very difficult thing for Peter in his state.  We had to put off viewing Istanbul from the Galata Tower.  I blessed myself, even after having been cheated while buying tea.  I have submitted to the day, and Peter has endured it, painfully walking every bit of it

We eat a delicious, authentic Turkish dinner at the Haci Abdullah restaurant, where we ate last time we were in Istanbul.  It’s so nice to hear Jon, who is experiencing Istanbul for the first time, exclaim, “Is this ever a beautiful city!” 

Istanbul Again - Introduction

Caught in the act of living - People, animals and a great deal of life on the Golden Horn of Istanbul

Before I had a chance to continue with my last subject, another trip came up.  Life seems to work that way.  We are in the middle of a project and then something else happens.  Life just does not happen in the order we have in our minds, yet I believe it has an order of its own.  Part of life's lessons is learning to adapt our ideas of order into the order that life gives us.

Life continues to be difficult, as I struggle with this lesson of accepting the situation I am in.  Lesson one, as I listed in the previous posting was:  "Get in touch with me.  What do I need?  What do I feel?  Own it.  Feel it."  There is a great song I discovered one day listening to Last.fm - Elin Synnøve Bråthen, who sings a song called "Feel It" on her album co-produced with Eliksir, "Earthly Things".  This song helps me to do the thing I need to do - to feel what I feel.  A lot of what she sings touches me to the core, including the one song I could find on YouTube - You Must Fly.

We flew to Istanbul a week after my husband had broken a rib and was in great pain.  This trip was planned months ago and we couldn't change our plans.   Our son Jon was traveling with us, and we were to meet his girlfriend Dayeong, who lives in Korea, in Istanbul.  So we traveled - Jon, who is in love, and whose pain of being separated from his love would soon end, me with my internal pain, and Peter, with his broken rib.  Mercifully, much of his pain had subsided in the course of the week, but his pain affected Jon and me.  My job was to let his pain be there, and yet try and get in touch with myself and my own needs.  This is part of what I need to learn, no matter where it is.

This series will attempt to incorporate the lessons I am being confronted with, in the context of being a tourist in Istanbul. 

Giving Up to Get Well - Introduction

Giving up on being bread alone - it's grown into a soup bowl!

Way back in October, I went to England for a long weekend.  Some things in my life journey had led me to an impasse.  I was stuck.  So I went to the place I knew where I could get help, at Christ Church in Deal.  This church has an outreach program with weekend workshops, books, CDs and other helps.  They call this program Rapha.  The people there are amazing and have been a wonderful, integral part of my life pilgrimage, giving me tools to understand the kind of journey I am on, as well as help along the way.  The people who live there are really generous.  I have even heard them say publicly that they would welcome anyone to come there for an extended stay - ANYONE who really wanted help from them, whether they had the money to pay for it or not.  I have met amazing people who have gone there to live because they were stuck in their lives, sometimes from really difficult illnesses like bipolarity or clinical depression.  Some of these people arrived at Christ Chuch's doorstep, broken down and broke, without a plan as to how they were going to pay for the help they hoped to get.  I suspect that the community has helped more than one person out financially as well as helping them to knit their lives together again.  Staying there to live has never been an option for me, but I do keep going back there for the workshops, which have carried me a long way.  In October, I was pretty desperate, but the people there didn’t think my best option was to stay there.  I had a job and a husband, and a son who keeps coming back home for a week or a few months.  Staying there just didn’t seem like a good option for me.  They pointed me in another direction.  

“Noreen, go to America.  Go visit your family.  Take your time.  That will do you good.”  So I did.  I went on a long journey to the United States, and wrote a little about this in my last posting. 

Part of that journey was a 5 - ½ day sojourn at Breakthrough, a holistic treatment center in Pennsylvania.  There, one of the therapists told us we would be taking a journey into “inner space”.  At Breakthrough I learned more about how I got stuck and how to get unstuck by literally rewiring parts of the brain.  This is one of the concepts they talk about at Rapha.  I got practical help so that I could do this, and am in the midst of it.   

I’m one of those people (are we all like this?) who will probably continue to need help as long as I live.  Perhaps this is just part of being humans.  Humans are needy people. 

I had always hoped that my blog would be a place where I could share about this journey into “inner space” as well as the physical sorts of journeys we go on.  The only problem with this is that when dealing with life’s problem areas, it seems that other people are always part of the reason or at least the occasion for these problems.  How can you write about problems without harming those closest to you?  Blabbermouths may feel better for a while, but what happens to all the people whose reputations they've damaged in their complaints?   

I’m going to attempt this without going into detail about the people who cause or who have caused me pain. This subject is too important to ignore, since it is really the essence of my life – how to consciously embark on a thrilling life journey, consciously braving the storms as well as the sunny days, even talking about them.  Storms are just as much a part of life as sunny days.  We are probably all partly sick and partly well.  But I, for one, would really like to live more and more in health, if at all possible.  

I once read a book about mental health where the writer stated that the main cause of mental illness is that the person will not accept the awful reality that has invaded this person’s life.  Better to deny it, we tend to think, better to find some other outlet than to admit the unspeakable, horrible, awful truth.  But that is what makes us ill.  The only hope for getting well is to let hope for the change we long for die.

That is one of the truths I have come to see.  We will not get well until we give up. 

I’m much better off right now than I was that weekend in England.  I’d like to share some of the things with you that have brought this about.  I’m going to write a series about this part of my journey, called “Giving Up to Get Well”.  I started a list of the things that I’ve done, and came up with almost twenty!  That would have been unmanageable, so I’ve narrowed it down to these six:

1.      Get in touch with me.  What do I need?  What do I feel?  Own it.  Feel it.

2.      Grieve over that which got lost.

3.      Start giving it to myself, believing that God is making this possible, allying myself with the God who is good and kind.

4.      Get.  Accept.  Accept the things that cannot change, accept myself, those who have hurt me.  Accept the love of those who can give me some of what I need.  Accept the gifts that God and life have for me.

5.      Get on with life.

6.      Give it away to others.

I’ll be spending the next few postings breaking these down, sharing with you what each point means to me.

Until next time.  I wish you travel mercies.