Welcome to May’s Mystery Week and our continued exploration of creative spontaneous combustion. Our Holy Mischief monthly posts and also our Down the Rabbit Hole deep dives around a community question are always done separately. Filiz and I write first and share with each other afterwards … and are so curious about what on earth the other will get up to. Each of us is sovereign in our creativity, but in a resonant field that is revelatory. The process often feels like eavesdropping on our muses who already know what we are getting up to before we do.

This month’s experiment is an invitation to each pick two poems that beckon, to record ourselves speaking them on camera, then reveal them to each other … then to you. Like a poem treasure hunt exchange sort of thing. We are paying tribute to that quiet weave of creative connection that is ever-present in life, but does not always get acknowledged as A Something. The Great Mystery is more of a benevolent friend and resource than we know. We love her … and we know she loves us all. May this offering stir our remembering and celebration of that knowing.

We invite you to weigh in on what you see weaving and stirring between our four poems in the conversation thread below. Your comments are a favorite weekly destination. Looking forward to seeing you there.

❤️ Debra and Filiz

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Welcome to the Mystery Week offering of April. This week we had the pleasure of diving into muhabbet with our guest . Muhabbet in Turkish means love, loving companionship, as well as deep and meaningful conversation.

Taksim is a melodic musical improvisation that usually precedes a performance in Turkish and Middle Eastern music. It’s a playful way of welcoming the listener and preparing the ear for the upcoming musical feast. And this is how our conversation with Berrak opened up: Following our curiosity, and a specific question from Debra about Berrak’s dance performance titled Taksim Taksim. What unfolded delighted and surprised even us.

Berrak, with her impressively diverse cultural background and dance formation, gave birth to Somatic Dialogue® and is committed to cultivating and sharing this gentle and playful teaching of “body and mind in movement” with the world. In our conversation, we explored how this embodiment practice — an invitation for an intimate dialogue with Self and the world around us — is also a holy mischief to break free from the incessant greed and noise of the overculture.

We hope you enjoy this muhabbet as much as we did ourselves.

Here’s the trailer for Berrak’s performance that inspired our conversation:

OUR GUEST: BERRAK YEDEK

Berrak Yedek was born in Istanbul in 1974. She started to dance and study music at the age of 5 in Germany, after which she lived in Saudi- Arabia, Türkiye, England and shortly in Russia, where she was able to extend her dance experience. In Türkiye she completed her university studies at Boğaziçi University in literature and translation and she founded a private dance company. With Kumpanya Bale Türk she produced and created 11 pieces, which were presented in various cities in Türkiye.

Since then she has been working as an artist on the close relationship of movement and music in traditional (Turkish) as well as contemporary forms.

During 1999-2005 she lived in Paris and worked with various companies in France as dancer, actress and choreographer, and she worked as a free-lance teacher; additionally she produced her own performances.

In 2005 she moved to Prague. She worked as a dance teacher and creative work consultant at the Duncan Centre Conservatory until the birth of her daughter in 2010.

She is also a co-founder of the Performing Arts Track of the Management of Performing Arts Department of Bilgi University in Istanbul in 2007, where she taught as a guest lecturer until 2018.

In 2018 she opened Limpid Works Studio in Prague, and has been dedicating herself to the method Somatic Dialogue®, which she has been developing since 2005. In 2020 she started a Somatic Dialogue Facilitator Training, and continues developing this method in various workshops and long term trainings.

For more information, please visit Berrak’s website and her Substack page — .

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Filiz ❤️

OUR GUEST WRITER: BERNA KÖKER POLJAK

Berna is a grief companion and community practitioner working at the intersection of death, grief, and collective care, and one of the founders of the Grief and Death Wisdom Platform based in Türkiye. Her work is rooted in deep listening, presence, and a trust in the natural processes of grief. She is especially interested in community-based approaches that are accessible, human, and relational rather than clinical. Berna lives in Sydney, Australia and continues to explore how we can remain in relationship with grief, with one another, and with the sacred. She is the author of two books published in Turkish: Ölüm Yaşamın Mührü (Death: Seal of Life) & Birikim (Harvest). You can reach Berna at poljakberna@gmail.com and her instagram account.

I am writing from a place where everything appears very fragile, sorrowful, beautiful, and precious.

Before these words unfold, it may help to gently name the landscape they arise from. This is not a place of clarity in the conventional sense, nor one that seeks to resolve or simplify what is being felt. It is a space where contradictions are not pushed away, but allowed to stand side by side — where sorrow does not cancel beauty, and fear does not erase what is precious. In such a space, the human experience is not divided into what should be kept and what should be rejected, but is held as a whole. To remain here requires a certain kind of attention — one that does not rush to conclusions, but instead listens, waits, and allows meaning to emerge in its own time. Yes, the world is also a dangerous and frightening place, but it is precisely here — where all of these coexist — and of course, within this togetherness lives the awareness of human mortality — that the presence of the sacred (which, for me, means God) feels very close.

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Hello Holy Mischievians, late winter greetings to you. The snowdrops, daffodils and crocuses are all blooming despite the strangest seesaw of cold, warm, icy, melty, snowy, rainy, sunny weather. Filiz and I were pondering how to inaugurate our first monthly Mystery Week post … the we-have-no-idea-what-we-want-to-do week until we get there. We are devotees of creative spontaneous combustion. We wandered off into our corners, scratched our heads, put our ears to the ground … and I came face to face with a rabbit. And in particular, a doodle-become-a-one-eared-rabbit named Elbert who had jumped into my life a few years ago. Sometimes you just have to stop what you are doing and recognize when a fellow creature is wholly deserving of an ode.1 A celebration. And really, all this is Filiz’s fault because across this last month, she has been sending me the most luscious photos and videos of the riotous courtship between honeybees and almond blossoms happening in her village. Spring, fertility and new life are in the air … and of course, rabbits are right in the thick of it. Off I hopped after Elbert on behalf of this Mystery Week’s journey … as Filiz waved and blessed us on our mysterious way.

The sacred art of doodling is one of the ways I stay connected with The Everything that was very alive for me as a child. My DebraVerse has always been inhabited by hundreds of creatures. They are a different but very real tributary of family. And I have never felt alone. A favorite poet, Wendell Berry, once said, It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.2 I am of the creature persuasion (though I don’t want to feed any divide, especially in these times.) Elbert wanted some more attention (after all these years) … so down the rabbit hole we went.

My Mystery Week challenge to myself was to celebrate my rabbit friend and:

1. To use materials I have to hand, like cardboard from a FedEx box, recycled junk mail envelopes, origami paper I haven’t touched in over a decade, colored pens, scissors, glue, a hole punch and tape.
2. To create something from my small office (not waiting for a Special Art Space) and to do it in one day.
3. To learn how to do one new thing.
4. To not get caught up in perfection; to focus on making more than what is made.
5. To be willing to show you what I made and stand by it, no matter what it looked like once Saturday rolled around.
6. To be willing to make a mess. (And I did.)

I am a floor person. The carpet in my study looked like a toddler went on the rampage. I haven’t made such a complete and utter shambles in a space in years. One of my earliest life memories is in the kitchen in our apartment in Chicago. I am sitting in my high chair and finger painting; primary colors are all over my hands, the paper, the tray, my bib and the floor. It was exhilarating. Bless my maker mother who encouraged this and didn’t mind cleaning up afterwards. It is that toddler that staggered into my house this week.

Here is my visual ode, celebrating my love of creatures in the DebraVerse, of makers and making, of the emerging spring and of rabbits:

It was striking how I felt afterwards. I decompressed and was more spacious; my nervous system hummed and the hours flew by on hummingbird wings. I rediscovered the freedom that comes from being totally consumed by wooing something out of my head into the physical world … while getting ink on my fingers, strewing little bits of paper all over the carpet, getting glue on my skin, finding tape that has hitched a ride on my leggings, and rekindling a friendship with pens, brushes, a paper cutter and other tools I have long loved.

And when two friends shared some devastating news later that day, I was fully present. Absolutely. Fully. Present. My creative excursion was not in vain (at all).

I am experiencing one of the busiest years in decades. My personal Year of the Fire Horse started galloping in December. But this week I had one whole day of blissful immersion that refreshed, restored and re-reminded me what a blessing it is to be in this exact life with all its particular heartbreaks and joys. It is curious how making time to make (anything) … makes more time. There is some kind of profound quantum physics at play here that is the opposite of what my mind swears is true. For this I give thanks.

Rabbits purr when they are relaxed and contented. In a world full of raw edges and chaos, I purred this week. May you leap into something that has been calling you … even for a few minutes. We need all the blessings creativity can bring to help us show up with love when so much tries to throw us off our stride right now. Happy coming-along spring. May peace find you wherever you, your inner child and your Fire Horse are headed.

May all toddlers everywhere be free.
May all toddlers be safe.
May all toddlers be happy.
May all toddlers be cherished.

Blessed be, blessed love, blessed life.

❤️ Debra

A FEW REMINDERS …

This first once-a-month MYSTERY WEEK offering is free to all our subscribers and then will be available to our paid subscribers only for the rest of the year.

Please continue to send us your burning questions about anything close to your heart which we will explore in our monthly DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE offering. Email them to debra@holybeepress.com and we will pick one to turn inside out with our curiosity, contemplation and conversation.

And lastly but not leastly, our two monthly SATURDAY NEWSLETTERS will continue to be FREE for everyone, everywhere in the galaxy, forever. ❤️