The Heart of Sufism

One of the expectations of a dervish is to be of service. As I entered the kitchen at the Dervish Brothers guest house, I asked the hostess if there was anything I could do. Aiesha said "You are the fourth person who asked me if she could help, and I said no before, but something makes me say yes." So, she sat me down in front of a pile of what looked like weeds. She picked up the end of a bunch of spinach, cut off the white stalk, and then cut it in half, putting the gritty remains in one pile and the other parts in the "keep" pile. She handed me a knife and I set to work.

About ten minutes later she returned to the kitchen, looked at my "discard pile" and told me I had cut off and kept the wrong parts!! "Here, taste this," she said, handing me the end of the spinach greens. "This is the heart and it's very sweet."

I have cut up spinach greens much of my life, but I never even knew that it had a heart. I had continued to cut out the heart and put it in the discard pile, when in truth it was the best part.

Aeisha continued to show me how to access the heart, and said: "In Turkish cooking, we use everything. We respect all parts of the plant. In Sufi practice, we try to find the heart in everything; but you must know what it is you are looking for, and you must know how to access it." I had to go back into the bag of dirt and grit covered greens to find the hearts of the spinach that I had thrown out.

Ibrahim Baba said that sometimes a Sufi may be talking about something seemingly unrelated to "spiritual conversations." He said that sometimes students will be disappointed to hear a Sufi talk about a mundane task, yet, the novice dervish will soon realize that the simplest tasks can contain the lesson for the day.

I surely received my lesson for the day, looking--and finding -- the heart of Sufism practice in a pile of spinach greens.

Location:Konya, Turkey