When Deepa Patel was a child, one of her favourite places to be was to sit in her grandma’s lap as she was meditating. That image will stay with me from last night’s conversation, along with a thought about the ways our childhood experiences set us up to encounter the world. Because, for both Deepa and me, it seems there is a connection going back to childhood between a sense of injustice – that things in the world are not as they should be – and a sense of there being “something else”, that reality exceeds what is ordinarily presented as “all there is”.
“Mysticism is very practical,” Deepa said to me, quite matter-of-factly, as we were about to begin the call. And perhaps that is a way of naming the same connection: how a relationship with “the ineffable, the complete, open, unknown mystery of life” can animate a practical engagement, leading you towards the places of brokenness in the world.
Our conversation ranged across these things and a good deal more, including the relationship between music, improvisation, conversation and the mysterious sources of abundance that I think of when we use this language of an “open secret”.
As we headed into the time of questions and answers, there was a recognition of the absurdity of trying to talk about any of these things, an invitation to “get the joke and be the joke” of these ways of using language.
And then, towards the end, another unforgettable image, when Deepa spoke about sitting with a Syrian refugee in a camp that was close enough to the fighting that they could hear the bombs dropping. When she asked him, “What do you want?”, he answered, “I want music to stop war.” Can we stay with the audacity of that statement, Deepa asked, without reducing it to the superficiality of organising a fundraising concert?
As is customary, the first forty minutes of the recording are available free – while to watch the Q&A, you need a paid subscription to Writing Home, which will also allow you to join us live for the fifth in this season of “overheard conversations”, when I’ll be talking to
of about her new book of the same name. That session will be on Sunday 19 May at 8pm CEST. (Check your local time here.)Paid subscribers will find an audio version of the full recording below the paywall on this post.
Shownotes
Deepa is a guide and teacher within Inayattiya: A Sufi Path of Spiritual Liberty, the order founded by Hazrat Inayat Khan.
“Music is what I often call home” – Asian Dub Foundation, Nitin Sawhney, Talvin Singh
The expression, “an open secret”, is used by Jalal al-Din Rumi and is the title of one of Coleman Barks’s books of translations of Rumi’s poems.
Alan Garner tells the story of Vishnu and the Jewel of Absolute Wisdom in several places, including this lecture.
The hadith that Deepa quoted: “I was a hidden treasure; I loved to be known, so I created the creation in order to be known.”
- offers the words “relationships good enough to trust” to convey the sense of pistis, the word in New Testament Greek that is usually translated as “faith”.
“I’d rather not speak about things about which I understand so little, but which I enthusiastically believe and claim the right not to have to defend.” — Ivan Illich, The Rivers North of the Future (p.214)
