Okay, Lady
The Importance of Eating Ice Cream
“There is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation, satisfaction, or joy.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
My friend May came to visit. We hadn’t seen each other in 6 years, but picked up as if it had been yesterday. She’s a spiritual-archeological nerd like me, so we began with Istanbul’s Greatest Hits, sweating determinedly through the heat and stopping for ice cream as many times as possible.
There’s something to be said about sharing your stomping ground with someone who’s seeing it with new eyes. May’s delight at rainbow displays in the sweet shops, the ancient history just lying around, and even ice cream brought me to a sharp awareness of some of the jadedness I’ve been carrying around. Her enthusiasm woke me back up to so many of the reasons I love this place.
And my god, did we laugh.
I believe that if we meet one person in this lifetime who can make us laugh until our sides hurt and we need the loo immediately (the latter comes easier with age, of course), we are lucky. For me, this person has always been May. When we first met in New Zealand, we almost got kicked out of a spiritual workshop for setting each other off into fits of cry-laughter. Here, she makes me double over on my kitchen floor; snort audibly in the quiet of Topkapi Palace; nearly pee myself in the middle of a sunflower field in Cappadocia, where thankfully we had already stopped to pee, after not passing a single car for over an hour, when suddenly three came along from different directions.
On a cliff overlooking the phallic rock formations of Love Valley, in Cappadocia, May insists on getting yet another ice cream from another loud, tourist-trap ice cream vendor. These guys are famous for making a huge display and performing tricks with the gooey Turkish stuff, and this guy doesn’t disappoint.
“Okay, lady!” he yells, flipping her cone back and forth, dangling it in front of her face and then yanking it away. He rings the bells above his stand. “Hella hella hella OOO-PAH lady! No problem lady! Bye bye lady!”
I would normally steer clear of this type of thing, but May won’t allow it.
“Video this right now, Karneef!” she orders. “And you’re getting a cone, too!”
I comply. It’s delicious.
I have been to Cappadocia before. It’s touristy as hell, but so stunningly beautiful and stepped in wonder and hot air balloons that I vowed then to come back. I can’t think of a better person to do this with than May. Out of respect of her sensitivity to heat (“I’m Scottish—it’s in my genes”), I booked us a hotel with a pool, which offered a breakfast spread that took 10 minutes to traverse. We did a day tour of the valleys and an underground city, wandered happily through the tourist shops, and drove a 7 hour round trip to Catalhöyük, a 7500-year old Neolithic settlement first discovered in the 1950s, to stare slack-jawed at the ancient homes being excavated. We did a hot air balloon ride at sunrise, rising through the silent sky above the fairy chimneys. It was the first “real holiday” I’ve had in a very long time. It was glorious, and sometimes really hard.
Taking time to experience pleasure, rest, and wonder—to be nurtured by friendship and laughter—seemed selfish, like something I shouldn’t be doing when the world is falling apart at the seams. I’ve been studying and teaching pleasure activism and mindful pleasure for over a year in meditation classes and Tarot, but I still struggle with this one. I’ve talked about it with dharma teachers, and know on an intellectual level that more people suffering is not better than fewer people suffering; that topping up our reserves makes us more resilient when times get tough. But it was something I had to remind myself of every day, several times a day.
Back in Istanbul, on the last day of May’s visit, I took her to a hamam in the old city. We sweated in the steam and got scrubbed down by beautifully-bellied ladies in black bikinis, then sat around the relaxation room, people-watching and feeling like our bodies had melted. May savoured every minute.
“Such a safe space! Look how relaxed all these woman are in their bodies! My god, doesn’t it feel gorgeous to have someone wash your hair for you? It’s like we’ve walked back in time!”
We were exhausted all the exploring and she had to leave to catch her flight at 4:00 the next morning, but we sat on the couch talking until almost midnight. May and I first met living and working at a meditation retreat centre, and having been transformed by the experience, we’ve dreamed of opening a similar kind of place somewhere else in the world, preferably Europe. But talk about daunting. Where do you start with a project like that? How? With what?
But.
“We’re not getting any younger,” May pronounced, on my couch.
And the situation on the planet is not getting any better. And the teachings we’ve been given are specifically to withstand these times, and should be made available to as many people as possible. We both know, in our bones, that this is what we want to do. So together, that night, we came up with some steps we could take to move the idea forward.
The next morning, I saw her off in the darkness. Even though she’d only been in it a few nights, the apartment felt so empty after she’d gone.
“I feel excited about life again,” she texted, from the airport. And I realized that the same was true for me. And that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t take this time to pause, wander, wonder and be filled up.
Ice cream!!! It wins Every Time! Also true, open hearted, creative friends. It makes things better always. Tha ks for this beautiful reminder. Xo