When I blink it looks like taking pictures with an old camera where the shutter closes each time, or what it looked like when I had my pupils dilated. It must be the light from the month of Ramadan. I can't remember feeling it before because I wasn't paying attention. Purging distractions should be mandatory.
I'm going to a new mosque for Tarawe prayers this year, down near the airport. It used to be a church and was converted to Islam a few years ago. It randomly happened to already be facing the Kibla so the rugs didn't have to be placed diagonally. I have always been distracted by the designs on prayer rugs, which generally look like magic carpets. I collected some wild ones while I was in Brooklyn, most of them have a picture of the Kaaba in Mecca on them. Even with the ones with random designs I manage to find some sort of image that distracts me. The one I have at home has a screaming man. The one in the masjid has a waffle. My brother found an eagle. It's not recommended to close your eyes and if you do, you should open them every once in a while. So my eyelids flutter and I take a stream of photographs in my head of Mecca and waffles and eagles and a screaming man. At home I have three prayer rugs layered over a blanket. Women receive the same award for praying at home in the "masjid of their home" as men do for going to the mosque, and for staying there overnight for a spiritual retreat. Mine will be in my own room which I have deemed Dar-ul-Shifa, the house of healing, complete with a sewing machine, typewriters, tea light candles and a ship lamp. I had to inspect every corner and get rid of all of the pictures of faces so there are a lot of picture frames turned upside down as though I got into a fight with someone and don't want to have to look at a picture of the two of us together smiling next to a waterfall.
When we go down in sajda (prostration), if I keep my eyes open my hands with next to my head make the floor look like a butterly. So I keep them closed, then remember to open, then closed. So I have one picture of a butterfly. Twenty raqas of Taraweh prayer means forty butterflies. Identical ones with different shutter speeds. And for every extra prayer I pray I get to make four more.
There are only ten or twelve women that come to the night prayer and they bring colorful sheets to cover the rugs so our foreheads can touch something soft. They are mostly pink and have flowers in them. I found a small man in the flowers.
There is always at least one small girl wearing a tiny djelleba and headscarf, or wearing a t-shirt and capri pants and a tiny headscarf, and they go back and forth between praying and running around the empty space because ten women don't take up too much space. Long black djellebas and abayas overlap from the fan blowing on them and when we sit down the woman next to me sits on mine so I can't get up until she does, and since the Imam is on the other side of a partition, most of the women take their time before they get up.
Dhikr is remembrance of God and we repeat short prayers in phrases as a way of keeping our thoughts away from worldly things or trying to find the eagle in the carpet. Usually a Sheikh will tell you what to recite daily and you do this daily for the rest of your life. I like the idea of this and so I wanted to construct my own wird, the same way I was a special major in college. Pick and choose certain prayers and tailor to yourself. Except I soon realized that there is a reason people don't assemble their own prayer schedule, and so I'm adopting the one that the rest of my family does and hoping that if I do this I will be more like them and that I will do this for the rest of my life.
These are big words. Promises can be terrifying.
These are holy days and holy nights and sometimes I'm not even sure what to do with myself, so we read the Qur'an and recite our prayers while baking bread and embroiding dinosaurs, and always making the intention that I am doing it for God. Because I think God likes bread, and I think he loves dinosaurs.
As a sidenote, the month of Ramadan is also Stegosaurus month in Dar-ul-Shifa.
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