A few weeks in…

Merhaba! Hello. It’s been a few weeks, a lot of things to ponder and process, a lot of streets and paths and ways up and down. Speaking mythologically, in the vocabulary and lexicon of myth and poetry, I have observed that this place—Şanlıurfa—feels like a dreamscape. A dreamscape in the sense that a potentiality hangs in or flows through the air, it’s all around. When you leave the house, anything can happen. Not just anything but something— something will happen. Something I needed to have happen that I couldn’t quite have planned. A through-line so far has been all the friendship and connection I’ve been gifted— the welcome and kindness is fairly immense and pretty moving to me. I wandered into the Tourism Office (the official city tourist info center) and I met wonderfully kind and inviting, super interesting and cool folks there and have since been invited to a lovely couple’s house where they shared so much helpful insight about all things archaeological sites, all about the dynamics of the city, all about their experiences living there. The woman who runs the hostel where I’m staying (I joke with her a lot that “I live here now”) is so great and we regularly have work-study hangouts where we sit on the floor in the AC and clack away on our respective computers. These friendships and connections have offered me so much and I remain curious about how easeful these friendships are here, how they just seem to arrive at my door, with me having done nothing in particular. I’ve also enjoyed getting to know people passing through town— a lovely woman from Poland was my travel partner to Mardin for the first time. A very kind man from Germany who came to visit family in Türkiye invited me to a Sira, a traditional/local feast and dance celebration, with beautiful live music and singing. Two darling lovely people, fellow students from Ankara, met me on the bus back from Göbekli Tepe and, even with our phone batteries nearly dead (aka Google translate wasn’t so much an option) we became friends and toured all around the town together for a few days in a row. Heart friends who I hope to see again soon, in the future. One gifted me a beautiful book with her own notes and underlined important parts in it and it meant so much to me. And new neighbors arrived at the hostel this week- a wonderful Brazilian couple who invited me into their Mardin adventure and who are seeking mythic thematic threads of the ophidian, the Divine Mother and the embodied feminine in their travels. We’ve been having an amazing adventure and it felt like total alchemical providence to meet them! I feel so lucky to know these people and, frankly, I feel very cared for by the world/universe/cosmos.

For the first 2 weeks, I’ve was on-site at Gobekli Tepe basically from 7 am to 2 pm, which is the work day for the archaeological team and excavators. What a complete and utterly surreal honor and privilege to get to accompany and observe the excavation from such a close vantage point. This welcome and access is a constant source of wonder to me. It’s also strange to find, in some moments, that standing amidst the towering t-pillars has become normal, a perfectly normal and usual place to be. Then I snap back into the here and now and remember what an unspeakably rarified and special thing it is to be there, right now and also back then, way back then.

I got sick (some kind of respiratory flu thing that wasn’t covid) and tried to pretend I wasn’t sick (just to myself, mostly) and had to sleep for a couple days. I did not like that but I probably needed to do this to down shift to a workable gear, instead of the go-go-push-push-put-put-bang I started in when I arrived. Chill the eff out, ma’am.

I’m now into the phase of my research where I’m inviting and seeking conversations with members of the communities surrounding this site (both in Şanlıurfa and the Kurdish village most connected to the site) on the origins of, the known history of, the associations with and the significance of Gobekli Tepe, and the way in which these conversations always happen at the intersection of me stating an intention aka asking for help and the serendipitous dreamscape mystery swirl which offers up collaborators, narrators, players and mentors here. I’ve had the privilege of speaking with some members of the family that owned the farm upon which Gobekli Tepe is sat, who came upon statues from this distant time and brought them to the attention of the local museum. I’ve gotten to speak with tour guides in the town, to listen into the narratives and metaphors and stories that they can share. I’ve spoken with so many people on the platform (walkway) that surrounds the main site of Gobekli Tepe, inviting conversation with visitors about what brought them there, how the site strikes them, what thoughts or feelings come to mind. I’ve spoken with many people in the town of Şanlıurfa and still feel like I would need 12,000 more years to listen enough. I often leave my house with no plan at all, just knowing I need to get out into a walk before the extra weird extrovert-who-hasn’t-extroverted-enough ennui sets in. As I walk, I experience the concurrent inner journey of the moment, to the tune of hey, I don’t quite worry about whether people are staring at me and look at me, I’m more relaxed here in my own skin. I’ve tried many different ways of looking, different code-switching via dress, and I’ve landed back on the way I generally dress, kind of a utilitarian-enough-covered-up-slightly-obnoxious-BK-hipster-plus-a-shawl kind of style.

I’ve been in Şanlıurfa for basically one month and I have found myself in the silent beautiful overwhelm of days filled with so much newness, oldness, so many new people, so many big questions. I keep asking myself to write and take notes and write blog posts and make videos. There’s a Ferdinand-like sweet-summer-child bull in me that just wants to chew the grass of the experience in silence and doesn’t have anything to say yet. It’s amazing how tangled I can get in my own fears and worries (“What am I even doing here??”/“Does everybody think I’m ridiculous?”/“Does my research make any sense?”/“What do I do with all the plans I made and had to change??”, and so on and so forth) and how much relief I feel when I or other people’s generosity pulls me out of these worries, doubts, inner dramas. And still, I’m trying to study and be present to all the dramas, inner and outer, as packets of symbols, even archetypes, of this experience. I feel grateful for the chance to make my own way here, with so much inspiration and help from all the people around me and from writers and thinkers and imaginations I have access to through books and my comparative myth program, from various sources.

It’s hot out. Really hot, hot like pizza oven. At night it gets a little better but it’s just a warm place in the world. Listen, I know a lot of places are warm on our planet…here, at least I can tell you about here: arriving at a place or at home involves lots of sighing and gulping down water, a communal chorus of relief at things like shade, cold water, or sweet sweet air conditioning.

The progression of my life and schedule and work here has been pretty organic and- I’m convinced- part of an immense swirl of a dreamscape upon which this town was founded. They said “don’t make plans when you’re here” because they’ll change anyway… this feels fairly congruent with my MO anyway, but it’s the letting go of expectations of myself and others— aren’t I supposed to be getting a lot “done”? These are just my senses… that this “City of Prophets,” as Şanlıurfa is known, is a place that draws people to it who have a wish and a desire, desiring for something unspeakable, for something in the past or in the future just out of reach. The way we think about a place, communally, culturally, socially, may create the place itself as a living metaphor, a city of archetypes, and then visitors and inhabitants alike inhabit this landscape and intuit the thoughts of the place through our mythic modes, our human spider senses for narrative, image and symbol. Could these themes have emerged or been present in the mythic landscape of Göbekli Tepe’s builders and inhabitants? How does this theme of desiring, wishing, and hoping permeate and/or intersect with our interpretations, individual and communal or in certain disciplines or camps (scientific, esoteric, etc) of this site? How do we project and why do we project certain stories upon the people of the past? Who do they have to be so that we can be __________?

I’ll write more soon about Karahantepe, about Mardin and Midyat and Buncuklu Tarla. Görüşürüz!