This episode includes a series of Sufi teaching stories that address change, loss, and renewal, and the power of story to shift our perspective and life the spirit.
Includes Nasrudin and the man with the sack, Fatima the Spinner, Nasrudin and his neighbor, and one of my favorite poems by Rumi, “The Guest House.”
“With its concentration, among other things, on awareness and psychological balance – “mindfulness”, if you like – Sufism is a natural antidote to fanaticism.” — Jason Webster
Transcript of Shipwrecks, Donkeys, and Holy Fools
Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to your life today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
One day Mulla Nasrudin was walking down the road to town when he came upon a very unhappy man in worn clothes. The man was sitting in the road moaning. “What’s wrong?” Mulla asked. The man held up a tattered bag and sighed, “All that I own in this wide world barely fills this miserable, wretched sack.”
“That’s too bad,” said Mulla. Then he snatched the bag and ran down the road. The man burst into tears. Mulla ran around the bend. He stopped and placed the man’s sack in the middle of the road where he would have to come upon it. Minutes later, the man rounded the bend and saw his bag sitting in the road. He laughed with joy and ran up to it shouting, “My sack! I thought I’d lost you!” Watching through the bushes, Mula smiled. “Well, that’s one way to make someone happy!”
This little story about Mulla Nasrudin and the man with the sack is one of many Sufi teaching stories. Stories are important tools for conveying wisdom and sparking a change in perspective. You may have heard some of the Buddhist jataka stories that I’ve shared in other episodes of this podcast, which serve a similar function. Stories give you something to think about and something to feel, and they are often the best way we have, to communicate experiences and truth that are beyond words.
Now, one thing about teaching stories is that they often seem a little bit obvious, right? Many of them are parables. They’re short and sweet, with a clear lesson. And this story about Mulla Nasrudin that I just told you, and lots of the stories about Mulla, seem to fit into this category. Honestly, I sometimes hesitate to share those with you on this program because they’re kind of corny. And to one way of thinking, they’re only corny. I’d like to suggest to that that perspective is a kind of jaded and calcified form of rationality, that is immune to wonder, and afraid to laugh. And also afraid to admit to any of that kind of silliness, or foolishness in the self. Which is one of the reasons that teachers tell such stories.
Because in the tradition of the holy fool, which includes Nasrudin, you have nothing real to lose by cultivating the beginner’s mind. That is, by approaching everything freshly with curiosity. And in fact, the longer you let the story, even one this brief ,percolate in your consciousness, the more you consider it, the more that you will find the clear lesson is only one level of the story.
I want to tell you a longer story from the Sufi tradition. You can versions of it online under a variety of names. I call it “Fatima the Spinner.”
Now, I invite you to sit back and relax and let the story take you where you need to go right now. Note the moments or details that catch your attention. Whatever this is, this is an opening into the meaning this story holds for you right now, a meaning that may well exist below the surface lesson, or moral of this story.
Fatima the Spinner
There once was a prosperous spinner who had a daughter named Fatima. The Spinner was very proud of his daughter, and he taught her everything that he knew about his craft. One day when she was a bit grown, he came to her and said, “Daughter, we’re going to go on a journey. I have some business dealings in the islands in the middle sea and I’d like for you to come with me to learn what I do. And who knows, you might meet a handsome young man along the way!”
The two of them set off and traveled from island to island. The father did his trading. But one day, when they were on their way to Crete, a huge storm blew up. The ship was destroyed. Fatima washed up on the seashore near the city of Alexandria, barely conscious. Her father was drowned. Everything that they had on the ship was lost. She was utterly destitute, and so traumatized and exhausted by the experience that she could barely remember her name. Fatima was wandering around on the beach when a family of weavers found her. This family was not at all well off but they took pity on her and took her into their home. As she recovered, they taught her their craft.
Fatima learned how to weave and eventually made a second life for herself. Time went by and she finally had some happiness again. But one day when she was back on that same beach, a band of slave traders landed and captured her. They carried her off in their ship along with some other captives. She begged them to let her go. But of course, the slave traders had no sympathy for her. They took her to Istanbul to sell as a slave.
The day that Fatima arrived as a slave for sale in that marketplace, there weren’t very many buyers. There was a man there who owned a woodyard. He made masts for ships. This man was looking for a slave to help him and yet there was something about Fatima, maybe the sorrow in her eyes, that made him decide to buy her. He thought that he might be able to give her a little bit better life than some of the other men who were there in the market looking for slaves, and took Fatima home to be a serving maid for his wife.
When they got to his house though, he found out that he had just lost all of his money. The ship in which he had invested all of his cargo had been captured by pirates. Now he was broke and couldn’t afford to pay his workers. The mastmaker, his wife, and Fatima had to survive and keep his business going on their own, including the heavy labor of making ship masts. Fatima had to work very hard at this new trade, but she was grateful to her employer for rescuing her. He was a kind man and she worked hard, and before long she became his trusted helper. After a while, she started to feel a little bit settled and happy again.
One day, her employer said “Fatima, I want you to take a cargo of ship masts to the island of Java. I want you to go as my agent and make sure that you sell them at a good profit.” Fatima took up this responsibility and soon set sail. Alas, a huge storm came up when her ship was off the coast of China, a seasonal typhoon which wrecked the ship.
Once again, Fatima found herself washed up, bruised, destitute, and alone, on the shore of some foreign land. When she came to consciousness, she wept bitterly. It certainly seemed that nothing in her life was ever going to go according to her expectations. “Why is it,” Fatima cried “that whenever something starts to go right for me, something comes along to destroy it? Why do my efforts end in grief? Why and how, do I attract so much bad luck?” There was no answer from the cosmos to her questions. Eventually, Fatima gathered herself together, got up from the sand, and started to walk inland.
Now, nobody in China had ever heard of Fatima. They didn’t know anything about her troubles or her background. However, there was an ancient legend that one day a stranger, a woman, was going to arrive, who would be able to make a tent for the Emperor. No one in China yet could make tents and everyone looked upon the fulfillment of this prophecy with anticipation.
A number of Emperors had tried to find this stranger. Heralds and messengers were dispatched to search and collect news of strangers arriving in the country. This practice had gone on for some time and in fact, a herald from the Emperor arrived at a town by the seashore on the day that Fatima stumbled in there. This was not a large town and the people immediately knew she was a stranger and sent her to the herald. Through an interpreter it was established that she was going to have to go to the Emperor.
When Fatima arrived at the palace the Emperor asked “Lady, can you make a tent?” Fatima thought about her travels, the different cities that she had lived in, and her memories of tents. “I think so,” she said. Fatima asked for rope, but there wasn’t any to be had. Remembering her time with her father as a spinner, she collected flax and made ropes. Then Fatima asked for strong cloth for the tent, but the Chinese didn’t have any of the kind that she needed. Drawing on her experience with the weavers, Fatima made some sturdy tent cloth. Now, she needed tent poles. But there were none in China as they had never built a tent before. Fatima drew on her training with the mast builder in Istanbul, and made the tent poles.
Now Fatima gathered a few helpers, and remembering the tents that she had seen in her travels, instructed them in assembling a tent. When this wonder was revealed to the Emperor, he offered Fatima the fulfillment of any wish. She chose to settle in China. At some point, she married a kind and handsome man, and they had children. Fatima remained in China, in happiness, until the end of her days.
So, this seems like a story that carries the message that nothing is wasted right? That no matter what happens to us, if we keep going, if we learn from it, that it will all be useful. That there’s a point even in the situations that appear to bring us only suffering.
In the spirit of what I said at the beginning of this episode, about there being other possibilities and levels, I want to walk through a few other things that have occurred to me about this story, in the hopes that it may help you go a little bit deeper with this. One thing that I notice is this motif of the shipwrecks, and I can’t help but think about all of the times in the last year or two or three that I have read or listened to commentaries about the great changes underway in our societies and in the world and heard them described in the metaphors of storms, and big currents and winds. The shipwreck idea, that image of having something be utterly and completely overtaken and broken, and of managing to wash up someplace new and secure, far away from any familiar bank. Well, it feels to me to be of a piece with some of the images that have been used to describe our current situation.
And in my own life, I can think of a few occasions in which I have felt just like Fatima, crawling out of the water exhausted, wondering where I am, and whether or not I’m happy even, to have survived. And then I think about the skills that she learns, in particular spinning and weaving, which have very deep mythological connotations and are frequently used again, as metaphors for different kinds of creation.
Spinning and weaving fate, or life stories, or worlds, even the spinning of the world. And that leads me to think about what prepared Fatima to fulfill that prophecy. I mean, on the one hand, it seems that the technical skills that she gathered, were her preparation. And certainly, they were essential. But, you know, she needed to have been paying attention and needed to have the memories of the tent. And beyond that, she needed to have imagination, right? The imagination, to see herself making a tent, to see a tent in her mind’s eye that she could construct for the Emperor.
And then I think about the nature of a tent, a temporary, usually, gathering place, right? A place where people come together. A place in many times and cultures, that people come together to hear stories and share stories, to socialize, to build community. In the deserts, people came to a tent for refuge, or for rest. And what a great need we have right now, for tents, for places to gather. And this temporary nature of a tent feels really relevant to me in this time, this in between time, when I think it’s really too soon, don’t you? To pretend that we know what’s happening, and try and create something permanent, when the ground is still shifting under our feet. And yet, we do need places to come together. We do need a tent.
You could probably go in a lot of other directions with the story. I’m quite confident that I haven’t exhausted its possibilities. But the longer that I sit with this with Fatima’s journey, the more that I find in it. So much can be found in a simple story, my friend, it really is a matter of perspective, and, and maybe a little bit of practice.
I have a course that I offered last fall, called Step Into the Fairy Glen which is designed to teach you how to tap the power of story to live your symbolic life. That term “symbolic life” I borrow from C.G. Jung to describe the life of the soul, the life of the imagination, the ability to connect more deeply with yourself. Self and the world, the world around us, the world within us, and even perhaps to dissolve some of those distinctions. This course is two weeks, it’s online, largely self-guided. It is going to start on February 11th with the rising of the new moon and follow that two week moon cycle, ending with the full moon on February 26th.
So, is it time for you to take up this kind of work? Only you know! If this sounds interesting, the details and registration information can be found at my website, mythicmojo.com.
I want to give a shout out today to two people who’ve been patrons of Myth Matters for several years, through thin and thick and back to thin again, Rags Rosenberg and Amy Kelly Hoitsma. Thank you so much my friends. Now I know that Rags and Amy and the other patrons and supporters of this podcast are primarily motivated by the desire to support my vision and their love of the stories that I share here with you.
But there are other benefits to making that small monthly contribution to the podcast and keeping me going. For example, patrons were invited to take the Step Into the Fairy Glen course for free!
Enough housekeeping and announcements. Before I close today, I want to share one of my favorite Rumi poems. It’s helping me, like the story of Fatima the Spinner, to navigate turbulent waters. Maybe it will do the same thing for you. It’s called “The Guest House.”
The Guest House by Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture.
Still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. Well, those are words for me to steer my boat by these days, my friend. I want to share one other short little story about Mulla Nasrudin before I leave you today.
One day, a neighbor who Mulla Nasrudin didn’t like came to see him. The neighbor asked Nasrudin, “May I borrow your donkey?” Mulla didn’t want to lend his donkey to the neighbor he didn’t like so he told him, “I would be very glad to loan you my donkey. Unfortunately, my brother came yesterday and asked me the same favor. He has taken my donkey to the next town to carry his wheat harvest to the mill for grinding into flour. So sadly, the donkey is not here.” “Oh, that’s too bad. Thanks anyway” said the neighbor, and he turned around to go home.
The neighbor had taken only a few steps when Nasrudin’s donkey, which was in the back of his compound all the time, let out a big loud bray. The neighbor turned back around. “Mulla Nasrudin” he said, “I thought you said your donkey was not here.” “He’s not” said Mulla. “But I just heard him bray” said the neighbor.
Mulla Nasrudin turned to his neighbor and said, “My friend who are you going to believe? Me, or a donkey?”
And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, happy mythmaking and keep the mystery in your life.
Useful links:
Link to Idries Shah, Tales of the Dervishes
Link to The Essential Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks
Link to Jason Webster’s article in the Guardian, “Sufism: ‘a natural antidote to fanaticism’”
