Language

Life post Rumi immersion doesn't always take me further away from my experiences in Turkey, but sometimes helps me to understand parts better. One memory has stuck around for a while and is begging "blog-space:"
After eating out at this exquisite restaurant in Konya (I am still not over the delicate and perfectly spiced eggplant dishes in Turkey!), some of us decided to go to this zikr several blocks from the Dervish Brothers House. This was our first "zikr out." We walked down this side entrance walk to the glass sliding door where we could hear the drumming. The zikr was well underway. There were restrooms outside and Laurie and I exchanged glances after using them- we'll just say they weren't the cleanest in the world, and the good, old fashioned squat down style. (Actually, I think the squat down style is much more efficient and ergonomically correct than seated toilets).
We had to wait just a few minutes before we could enter for some people to leave (they had reached the carrying capacity of the room). And, actually, It was a good think we went pee, because there was hardly any room to breathe inside, let alone have a full bladder! We sat down in the back (the women were in the back, and the men in the front, close to the instrumentalists and the Shayk.
It was a hot zikr. (Hot, not in temperature, but in energy). People were swaying their heads really strongly and some people were sweating. I just sat there, annoyed with my legs and wishing I could dig a hole in the floor so they would have some place to go. A woman started gasping for air behind me, more urgent and stronger than people do when in the midst of a chant. I looked back and realized she was in another room, separated by a half-wall, and I could not see her. From what I could see, people in the back room were surrounding her, helping her calm down. It was kind-of scary. I was actually convinced that she was in labor and about to give birth, right there, in the middle of a zikr. (I later realized this was not the case). I returned to absorbing the scene of the zikr around me.
After forty five minutes or so, the zikr ended and some people left, but others stayed, talking and sitting around. Shams, Cathy, and I waited to see if something else would happen. Something else surely did happen, and it was really fun trying to figure it out, as the clues dropped, one by one. A couple people came out with rolls of butcher paper, throwing the roll down the room and making a long strip of paper spread on the floor. Oh! Body painting?? Line dancing? They did this two other times to make three rows. People gathered around the rows. Then other people came out with plates full of fruit- oranges, apples, and bananas, mangoes, kiwis... Napkins and knives for cutting came out. Then, people just started cutting and peeling the fruit. Just as soon, pieces of fruit started getting passed around. I had already started on an orange for myself, so I refused the first couple of offers. But I soon realized that the point wasn't to fill up on fruit. The point was to give food to other people. Folks were almost funny with how much they wanted to share the fruit. There was so much fruit getting cut up and passed around, people couldn't eat all of it. People started tossing apples slices across the room to the other tables of paper. The people sitting next to Cathy, Shams, and I were from Germany or some Scandanavian country, we believe. They knew a little English, so we spoke a few words to each other. But more than words, what I remember about our interaction was our communicating through the sharing of food, and their seemingly silly (from my individualist U.S. perspective) desire to share with abandon.