Every so often someone at the mosque teases me and asks me to interpret their dream. My name is Yusuf, after the prophet who read the king's dreams, so I suppose it's fair. I am very bad at it. I mostly just make tea.
But I'll share one of mine. We're taught to tell a good dream only to people who love you, and this place has started to feel like that.
My grandfather, who died when I was nineteen, was pouring tea in a garden I've never seen. Tulips everywhere, which he never grew. He handed me the glass by the rim, the way he always did so I wouldn't burn my fingers, and said nothing at all. I woke with the smell of bergamot in the room.
I don't need it to mean more than that. He was well, and he was still looking after my fingers.
Right palm up, left palm down
When the semazen turns, the right palm faces up to receive from heaven and the left faces down to pass it on to the earth. Nothing is kept. The whole teaching, in two hands.
I don't whirl much anymore; my knees vote no. But after the evening prayer I sit with my hands like that on my knees and breathe with a phrase a Naqshbandi friend gave me: hush dar dam, awareness in the breath. Every breath in, received. Every breath out, given away.
Ten minutes. Then the tea goes on, as always.
The çaydanlık never rests
People ask why I always have tea on. The answer is a stacked Turkish teapot, the çaydanlık: water boils in the bottom pot while strong black tea steeps slowly in the top. You pour a little of the dark tea into a tulip glass, then cut it with hot water until it's the color the guest wants. Rabbit's blood, my grandmother called the perfect shade. Deep red, and you can see through it.
In my family we say a guest is God's guest. So the tea is never really for me. It's for whoever might knock. Brewing it is a small dhikr: the kettle hums, I remember, I wait.
Come by. There are sugar cubes, and I'll pretend not to count how many you take.
My father's tesbih
Baba is ill in Istanbul, the slow kind of ill that makes a son on another continent feel useless. Last night we were on a video call and he was too tired to talk, so he said, 'Then let's just do dhikr.'
So we did. Him in his chair by the window in Kadıköy, me at my kitchen table in Chicago, each with a tesbih of thirty-three beads. La ilaha illallah, over and over, his voice a little behind mine because of the delay.
We said nothing else for twenty minutes. I have never felt closer to him. Please keep him in your prayers, whatever shape your prayers take.
Turkish tea takes about fifteen minutes in the çaydanlık: water boiling below, leaves steeping above. For years I scrolled through those fifteen minutes. Now they belong to dhikr.
La ilaha illallah, on the out-breath and the in-breath, while the steam rises. Nothing dramatic happens. No visions, no whirling. Just the kettle, the window going dark over the Chicago rooftops, and the slow return of the heart to where it was always meant to face.
The masters say remembrance polishes the mirror of the heart. Mine has a lot of fingerprints. Fifteen minutes at a time, then. Tea's ready. Come sit.