What Makes a Culture Survive?

What Makes a Culture Survive? October 21, 2011
We drove up into the Alpujarra region of the Sierra Nevada yesterday looking for a good hike. We'd heard that a Tibetan Buddhist monastery up there was a good hike destination and had visiting hours! It's amazing that the Tibetan Buddhist culture, displaced from it's homeland, has persisted and can be found in Northeast Ohio, rural Spain, and around the world. Ultimately, we underestimated the distance to the monastery and never got there. Along the way, however, we stopped in the town of Orgiva for lunch and found another surviving culture of a different sort.

The best looking open restaurant, Cafe Baraka, was packed with people inside and out, and walking in I was transported back to Smokey Joe's Cafe in Berkeley, CA, 1971! Orgiva is apparently a center for hippie culture in the Alpujarras, and Thursday was market day. The Orgiva market looks like the parking lot outside a Grateful Dead concert, and they all go to Baraka afterwards to eat the organic vegan food, drink tea, roll your own cigarettes (or whatever), and enjoy the afternoon sun. Reggae and middle eastern music could be heard behind the conversation, as people as grey as I am chatted across tables with people in their twenties, looking much the same in their colorful cotton shirts, yoga pants, vest, beads, and long hair. The food was fabulous and so welcome after the same old vegetarian meals in conventional Spanish restaurants. We hung out for an hour and a half and felt right at home.

Is this a culture? It is, one kind of a culture. With a recognizable aesthetic, musical style, preferred food, and way of being together, it was as identifiable as the culture of the Spanish wine bar filled with old men we'd stumbled into the day before. This culture didn't identify with any geography, however. Like Tibetans, it is scattered around the world in little pockets. Unlike the Tibetans, it has no common religious identity as part of the glue that holds it together. Or does it?

The owners of Baraka Cafe are Sufis. As we begin to read more about Sufism in preparation for the Rumi Immersion Course in Turkey in December, we remember that there is a joyful mystical non-doctrinal dimension in most faiths, sometimes easily named and identified, like the Sufis, and sometimes not so easy to name, but represented in a culture of people. That culture recognizes each other, perhaps by what they wear or eat, but more often by a look in the eye, a look that says "Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world".