Because I Praise

I dedicate this writing to the two most loving and compassionate women in my life:
My grandmother İsmet Telek and my beloved Debra Roberts …

Rose of Jericho. Photo by İrem Oğuz.

O, tell us, poet, what do you do?
I praise.
But the deadly and the violent days,
how do you undergo them, take them in?
I praise.
But the namelessness -- how do you raise
that, invoke the unnameable?
I praise.
What right have you, through every phase,
in every mask, to remain true?
I praise.
-- and that both stillness and the wild affray
know you, like star and storm?
Because I praise.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Translation: Denise Levertov

My earliest memories of praise are of my grandmother İsmet reciting prayers from the Quran during namaz, the practice of formal worship in Islam consisting of a series of ritual prayers performed five times daily. There were also words like Allahüekber (God is the greatest) or Elhamdülillah (Praise be to God) casually uttered in everyday conversations. These words originate from Arabic but have been fully immersed into Turkish language ever since Islam took root in Anatolia in the 8th century.

My grandma used to encourage me to memorize some surahs¹ from the Quran, Arabic words she scribbled onto dog-eared pieces of paper in capital letters. As an eager and curious child, I used to devour these prayers, dutifully yet ecstatically reciting them day and night without knowing what they meant. I loved my grandmother and I loved those holy words in their mysterious language. I was already a mystic at heart, tucked in a little body.

I did not, could not, however, keep that little girl lit with Spirit in the foreground of my life as I grew older. Adolescence arrived with no bigger troubles than usual; I simply went along with the agenda rolled out for the modern individual by 80s mainstream culture in Türkiye, a country which was quickly becoming a hot market for the western gods of capitalism. I succumbed to the rat race with its notions of progress and success; prayers, sadly, were replaced by goals … and then by worries.

I fell off the bandwagon in 2009 when in the span of a few months, some life-altering events occurred: My beloved grandmother İsmet passed away and I got bullied out of a project I had birthed and poured my blood, sweat and tears into … and consequently experienced severe burnout. It felt like a free fall into a bottomless abyss until I realized I had actually jumped or maybe was gently pushed into an ocean of possibility. Slowly, as I pushed off from the familiar shore, I found myself in a strangely exhilarated state, wandering into a vast labyrinth. The veil lifted, revealing the pathless path.

To take a fall is not necessarily bad. This first real descent of my life, of course, was some kind of initiation that brought me to my knees, and therefore close to the ground, to the earth, to my body and to the root system of who I am. Eventually I started developing some kind of navigation system through this new, unmapped landscape which is how life ingeniously courted me towards my destiny. And that’s when both poetry and praise (they are often the same thing for me), slowly but surely, began to seep into my everyday life as my most reliable allies to help me track my soul.

In those early days of the fall, I started with things easy to praise: the olive tree on the hill overlooking the sea, the little bronze Durga statue nested in the little cavity of that tree, the Aegean Sea that took my breath away, the owl in the chimney whose gaze held me like a grandmother, the storm that descended over the forest, bending the trees ferociously and demanding me to pray … oh did I learn to pra(y)ise!

It is easy to praise beauty and perfection in the more-than-human-world, even with its darkish wild side: Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?², as beloved poet Mary Oliver reminds us. Yet, praise is about so much more than just appreciating a form or an experience that pleases our senses. It is our honest labor and humble attempt, as a drop of divinity in a mere human form, to grow a Self-container to receive a life in its frightening complexity, magnificence and unknowableness.

Praise is blessing what life serves us and how it serves it and making a delicious feast out of it and feeding it back to life. Martin Prechtel calls it “To give life to what gives us life”.

“Praise is not a goal, but the constant purpose of being alive. We praise by ritual, by walking, by grieving, by eating, by kissing the babies, by admiring the conniving bull snake for trying to take the flycatcher’s hatchling, admiring the hatchling’s parents for diverting the snake away from the nest, by seeing and speaking out loud, singing out loud, hammering and painting art, cooking, gardening, sewing, cutting wood, making fires, weeping over the land we have to plough, and still weeping for joy over the food the grieved-for land sends us from its steel-ravaged heart. Praise has to be in all we do and try to think.”

Martin Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust, Grief and Praise

I wonder, dear reader, how do you praise this precious life and all that you love?

Let me bring my words to a close with two fine examples of praise.

Please go ahead and look at the photo on top of this text; what you see is a plant called Anastatica hierochuntica, also known as the Rose of Jericho, Mary’s flower, or Fatima’s³ hand. This plant has been used during childbirth by traditional midwives in the Middle East and North Africa for centuries:

“Labor begins, and the midwife places a small dry twiggy rosette in a bowl of warm water near the mother. Labor continues, the mother gently perspires, her cervix is softening and opening, and as it does, the ball of twigs begins to soften and expand into a woody flower. She takes a sip of the medicinal water, and, breathing deeply, she watches as the ball fully blossoms. Soon enough, she’s ready to push…”⁴

Please enlarge the photo by clicking on it and you’ll see Mary’s flower which had been recently immersed in water during a childbirth; look closely to the tips of the branches. Do you see little women’s figures raising their arms and slightly bowing their heads in reverence? As if they are celebrating and praising the miracle of birth and creation? I love this imagery that comes alive when a dry, desert plant meets water.

My grandma İsmet passed away in early 2009. Nearly four years later I met Debra on a spiritually significant journey; she immediately struck me as someone who knows in her flesh and bones how to pra(y)ise. I caught this magical moment on video during our last pilgrimage in Türkiye in 2024. We were walking the empty streets of the ancient village of Assos (by a Northern Aegean shore) on our way to visit the Athena temple. Suddenly the call to prayer blasted from the nearby mosque. Debra, who absolutely adores this musical invitation to commune with the Creator, stopped to receive the moment, the sound, the invitation … to receive life. And once again, like in my childhood, I was in the presence of a woman who embodies praise. I am forever grateful for that.

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1. A surah is a chapter in the sacred scripture of Islam, the Quran.

2. A line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Peonies”.

3. Fatima is the daughter of Prophet Muhammad.

4. Quote from the midwifery website by Krystina Derrickson, CPM.