Like a Whirling Dervish

(image of Whirling Dervishes via Travels with Kathleen & Christian)

When I was really little, we used to play outside all day long. My parents were young and poor and hippies ("No Heather, it was the Earth Movement... it was a very different thing" I can hear my mom's voice in my head... and whatever. I mean, yes, my Dad was in the army in the very very early 70's, but I was also born EXACTLY 9 months after Woodstock is all I'm sayin'). This meant that we had no TV. Almost all of our produce was organic because my parents turned our backyard into a huge vegetable garden (ie, not green living so much as frugal living, although it's funny how life turns out). My mom made all my clothes. The house always smelled like freshly baked home made bread, and at night, she took out her old acoustic guitar and sat in the space between my brother's room and mine, and sang us folk songs until we fell asleep.

I try to remember what we spent our days doing. I remember only coming home when I absolutely had to, at the end of the day, when the sun was going down. I remember getting a bath every night, not just because it was bath time, but because whatever I had done each day had me coming home, happy but covered in dirt and grime.

"You and your brother are like a band of whirling dervishes!" my mom would say.

And maybe that was even true. Because when I try to remember the things we did, I come up with these scattered and fragmented memories:

- Pulling leaves off of the big tree in someone's yard and pulling them apart to suck the white milky sap inside.

- Hanging from a branch of that same tree, upside down, until the world righted itself and it didn't feel like I was looking upside down anymore... and then getting down from the tree and standing up, and watching the world turn upside down inside my eyes.

- Spinning in circles with my arms outstretched, until I fell over, laughing, and smelling the green grass beneath my face.

Somehow, when I was little being called a whirling dervish was akin to being called a Tasmanian Devil.

(yeah yeah, ok I know, not THAT kind, but he's so cute! image via Mr C's Smog Blog)

I read recently, that a Dervish is a Muslim mystic. That the practice of whirling dervishes was an attempt to reach religious ecstasy, practiced by a sect of dervishes from Turkey. That the poet Rumi may have been, at some moment or another in his life, a whirling dervish.

And it seems to me, that it's been a long time since I whirled around in circles, and turned my face to the sun, and laughed until i fell down laughing.