• Sitting in a corner of Bursa’s huge Ulu Cami (mosque), I look through a forest of thick square pillars, ivory blended with simple grey and brown design work, rising and spreading and joining across the twenty domes high above. A continuous red carpet of many individual, human-size prayer mats forms a colourful calm surface across the floor, each mat’s patterns a reminder of the importance of heart, intellect, body and Allah. 
• In the distance, two men facing the mihrab, the direction of Mecca, stand, then kneel and bend foreheads to the mat, then stand, then bend and kneel, again and again. Many others, women and men, have also come to pray, and Turkish visitors and one or two busload tour groups wander the cami, snapping photos of one another … but it is these two men I watch from a distance as they stand and bend and kneel and stand in a column of light that pools red across the carpet around them. What longing have they brought? What discontent? What need to be assured? What else? A nonbeliever, I still find myself deeply moved by these singular, small human figures, as if somehow we could even bring something in common to this place … maybe our mortal, lonely single-bodiedness, so impossible to finally ease.
• Remembering them now, I remember the fragment of a dream: several others are praying in pools of light, at the edge of which wheels of pieces of Turkish trash – water bottles, plastic sheeting, milk cartons – are transformed into a wheel of beautiful tiles of ivory, turquoise and blue that toss and float and fall, fountain-like, around the devout.
• In the distance, two men facing the mihrab, the direction of Mecca, stand, then kneel and bend foreheads to the mat, then stand, then bend and kneel, again and again. Many others, women and men, have also come to pray, and Turkish visitors and one or two busload tour groups wander the cami, snapping photos of one another … but it is these two men I watch from a distance as they stand and bend and kneel and stand in a column of light that pools red across the carpet around them. What longing have they brought? What discontent? What need to be assured? What else? A nonbeliever, I still find myself deeply moved by these singular, small human figures, as if somehow we could even bring something in common to this place … maybe our mortal, lonely single-bodiedness, so impossible to finally ease.
• Remembering them now, I remember the fragment of a dream: several others are praying in pools of light, at the edge of which wheels of pieces of Turkish trash – water bottles, plastic sheeting, milk cartons – are transformed into a wheel of beautiful tiles of ivory, turquoise and blue that toss and float and fall, fountain-like, around the devout.
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