instead of a picture, multiplication table adorns my kitchen wall.

I have 8 arms like an octopus reaching in every direction.

Nobody can worry as much as I do.

There is always some stain on my clothes that detergent won’t remove.

I am a mother,

my notebook has dinosaurs drawn on it

the wall of my bedroom a little artist’s exhibition.

Me and my cell phone fall apart too often.

I lose my keys every other day.

I am a mother

and a pediatrician though I never went to medical school.

I play the cook, the nurse, the teacher, the driver, the singer

selfless like the rain, the earth, the sun.

I am a mother,

small things make me cry for joy.

like little notes that say “luv mom”

or sketched portrait with ugly teeth and fuzzy hair,

every line reflecting admiration and care.

I am a mother,

my heart deep and vast like an ocean.

I am a mother,

paradise lies under my feet.

Mirkena Ozer pursues MA in creative writing at the University of Georgia, Atlanta.

In our interview with Dr. Charles Townes from California, a Nobel laureate, the core message of the lead article is further developed; Townes notes “the most fundamental and human question is the meaning of life.” According to Townes, religion and science are much more consistent with one another than people think and questions like “why are we here and what should we do? How did life begin, why is the world the way it is?” can be answered by studying both.

In this issue we have two pieces on music. In our interview with Dr. Jeffrey Thompson he notes that sound is used in all cultures on earth “as a prominent technique in healing or religious rites or as a means of attaining a change of consciousness, one way or another.” Starting from being a fetus in our mother’s womb, human beings are first exposed to sound at a younger age and more predominantly than other senses, like sight. Sounds can provide a form of relaxation therapy when the right tones are found and played in a way that connects us to our primordial state, taking us away from the din of our daily activities.

Julie Ann Cunningham discusses the healing power of music in human history and today. She explains how healing was made possible in ancient civilizations from the priest-physicians of Egypt to musicologists and mystics of India to Abu Bakr Razi, who treated patients suffering from depression more than a thousand years ago. For Cunningham, “music is a language that crosses the barriers of human vocal languages.”

“The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger, the second time you are an honored guest. The third time you become family, and for our families we are prepared to do anything, even die.”

This astonishing book is a nonfiction tale of those three cups of tea Greg Mortenson had with the people of Korphe, a remote village in Northern Pakistan. Co-written by acclaimed journalist David Oliver Relin, the 368 page long book met with enthusiastic acclaim, and since its publication in 2006 has sold more than 2.5 million copies in 29 languages. Moreover, in an official ceremony in March 23, 2009, Mortenson received Pakistan’s highest civilian award, the Sitara-i-Pakistan (The Star of Pakistan) for his courage and humanitarian effort to promote education for the last fifteen years.

Mortenson’s story begins in 1993, after a failed attempt to climb the world’s second highest peak, K2, to honor the memory of his younger sister Christa, who died from a massive seizure after a lifelong struggle with epilepsy. Alone, exhausted and emaciated, Mortenson wandered into the impoverished village of Korphe, where the villagers took him in and nursed him back to health. “They had very little but they gave me everything they had, and I was very touched by their hospitality” said Mortenson in an interview to CBS News .

While he was recuperating in Haji Ali’s – the chief of the village – home, he learned more and more about how people lived in this part of the world; that the nearest doctor lived a week’s walk away, most of the children suffered from malnutrition and one out of three children died before their first birthday. Mortenson felt he owed the people of the village, who had already begun to call him “Dr. Greg,” although he was a nurse. He thought at least he could get some supplies for Korphe’s school. Yet, taking him to an open land, Haji Ali explained that they didn’t have a school, and a teacher cost one dollar a day, which was more than the villagers could afford. Mortenson watched boys and girls kneeling on the frosty ground to write out their multiplication tables by scratching in the dirt with sticks. “I felt like my heart was being torn out. Can you imagine a fourth- grade class in America, alone, without a teacher, sitting there quietly and working on their lessons? I knew I had to do something,” Mortenson recounts in the book (p. 32). At that very moment, notes from Mortenson’s heart translated into a commitment. He put his hands on Haji Ali’s shoulder and said, “I will build a school here, I promise.”

Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time traces Greg Mortenson’s efforts to fulfill this promise. Along the way, he encountered enormous obstacles. Upon his return to California, he sent 580 letters to celebrities asking for funds for the school, which yielded only one reply, a $100 check; he sold everything he owned, lived in a car to reduce his expenses and accepted donation in pennies from schoolchildren.
In spite of the challenges of raising funds, separation from his wife and newly born daughter, and an eight day kidnapping by the Taliban, Mortenson eventually succeeded in building the school. From his earnest promise grew Central Asia Institute, which built more than fifty schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. “I see education least invested in, that can bring the most change” says Mortenson. In this respect, he is convinced that extremism and terror must be fought with books, not with bombs. He places particular emphasis on educating girls; their education, he believes, can affect the whole community. He gives the example of Jahan, the first educated woman in Skardu, who, after completing her studies in healthcare, could help reduce the mortality rate of women during pregnancy from about twenty a year to zero.

Along with recounting Greg Mortenson’s personal determination to build the school, the book also makes frequent mention of the villagers’ passion for education and their many sacrifices. In one instance, Haji Ali hands over twelve rams – half the wealth of the village – to Haji Mehdi, a mafia boss who ran the economy of the region and didn’t want the school built. “Don’t be sad,” Haji Ali told the shattered villagers. “Long after all those rams are dead and eaten this school will still stand. Haji Mehdi has food today, now, our children have education forever” (p. 153).

In another instance, he shows the Koran to Mortenson, and asks: “Do you see how beautiful this Koran is?”

“Yes” replies Mortenson.

“I can’t read it. This is the greatest sadness in my life. I will do anything so the children of my village never have to know this feeling. I will pay any price so they have the education they deserve.”

Mortenson’s story is uplifting in many ways. It is a story about “compassion in action, not talk” as Mortenson puts it. It is about taking notes when our hearts begin to speak and leaving our comfort zones to achieve what we deem right and necessary. In Brokaw’s words, his story is proof that “one ordinary person, with the right combination of character and determination, really can change the world.”

There are other stories of anonymous heroes all around world, who pack up their lives into a suitcase and move to remote places to turn stones into schools. Their stories are yet to be told.

Notes

1. http://www.threecupsoftea.com/greg-mortenson-bio-and-professional-photo
2. ttp://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/04/sunday/main4697362.shtml
3. http://www.threecupsoftea.com/2009/01/21/msnbc-jan2009/
4. http://www.blogs.targetx.com/wildriverreview/penworldvoices/2008/02/greg_motensons_mission_to_prom.html
5. Three cups of tea One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a time, Greg Mortenson and david Oliver relin, 2006, Penguin Books, review of tom Brokaw.

The sound of the sun

Sound waves are seismic waves which cause up-down and forward-backward movements. According to some scientists with poetic hearts the sound of the sun is like the sound of the heart beat. When a human’s heart beats, it makes varying sounds by contracting and relaxing, and cardiologists use these sounds to determine if there is a problem with the heart. Like the cardiologists who listen to our hearts, helioseismologists (scientists who research the sun’s seismic waves) listen to the sounds of the sun to learn more about its structure and mysteries. The power produced by these sounds makes the sun oscillate like a bell or tremble like someone suffering from a high fever. Another interesting point is that millions of different sounds have been discovered to emanate from the sun and every sound oscillates on a distinct frequency and displays a different pattern on the sun’s surface. If we compare the sun to a piano, a piano has 88 metal wires which produce sounds with varying tones, whereas the sun produces ten million notes. So the sun is like an enormous piano with ten million notes producing sounds at roughly five-minute intervals which create harmonic acoustics resembling the heart beat.

Scientists are trying to decipher these ten million different sounds, which brings us to another interesting point; we cannot hear the sound frequencies because they are too low (between 1–4 millihertz) for the human ear (the lowest range of human hearing is 20 Hz). 1–4 millihertz equals to a time span of 200–1,000 seconds, meaning that the sun oscillates once every 3–16 minutes. Even if our hearing ability was suitable, the sound would not reach us because there is no air or layer of gas between the earth and the sun to convey sound. If we could increase the sounds of the sun by 20,000–40,000 times, the sound humans would hear would only resemble a whisper. The sun is like a musical instrument that plays a continuous concerto of ten million notes every day in the sky above us, and we do not even perceive it. Can you imagine the astronomical music if we were to include the galaxy’s 200 million stars?

Scientists gather important information about the sun’s core by studying the echoes that appear on the sun’s surface from the energy produced from these ten million notes. The solar oscillations are divided into three categories called the p, g, and f modes. The p mode is the pressure of acoustic waves, g mode is gravity and the f mode refers to the surface-gravity waves. There are ten million of the p and f modes alone and the combination of these modes produce ten million different sounds.

In Bediüzzaman’s Risale-i Nur, his explanation of the letter “Lam” in the verse 36:38 in chapter Ya Sin in the Qur’an, affirms that everybody obtains understanding of this chapter according to his or her own spiritual senses and every chapter of the Qur’an contains thousands of aspects from which everyone benefits according to his or her own depth of understanding, from the common public to scholars, from scholars to the philosopher of the cosmos. In The Words, Nursi goes on to say, “Precise and wise scholars consider li to be causal and adverbial. They understand that since the All-Wise Maker operates behind the veil of apparent causality, He has tied the planets to the sun by His law of gravity and causes them to revolve with distinct but regular motions according to His universal wisdom. To produce gravity, He has made the sun’s movement on its axis an apparent cause. Thus a resting place means that “the sun moves in the place determined for it for the order and stability of its own (solar) system.” Like the Divine laws, that motion produces heat, heat produces force, and force produces gravity. … The sun is a light-diffusing tree, and the planets are its moving fruits. But unlike trees, the sun is shaken so that the fruits do not fall. If it were not shaken, they would fall and be scattered. They also may imagine the sun to be a leader of a circle reciting God’s Names, ecstatically reciting in the circle’s center and leading the others to recite. Elsewhere, I expressed this meaning as follows: ‘The sun is a fruit-bearing tree; it is shaken so that its traveling fruits do not fall. If it rested, no longer shaken, the attraction would cease, and those attracted to it would weep through space” (Twenty-fifth Word).

It is interesting that the sun’s oscillation, which modern science discovered in the 1960s, was mentioned much earlier by Bediüzzaman. In fact he went further and even explained the wisdom and necessity of the sun’s oscillation as a law of gravitation keeping the earth and the other surrounding planets in orbit. This is a subject which has only recently begun to be researched by scientists of the present. If we were to look further into the history of the valuable discoveries of Imam Rabbani, Ibrahim Haqqi of Erzurum, Ulug Bey, and many other scholars, we would be sure to encounter many other scientific facts.

References

1. “Solar Ellipticity Fluctuations Yield No Evidence of g-Modes,” J. R. Kuhn, K. G. Libbrecht and R. H. Dicke, Nature 319, 128 (1986).
2. “The Excitation and Damping of Solar Oscillations,” K. G. Libbrecht, B. D. Popp, J. M. Kaufman and M. J. Penn, Nature 323, 235 (1986).
3. “What do Observations Tell us about the Excitation of Solar Oscillation Modes?” K. G. Libbrecht, Proceedings of IAU Symposium 123, Advances in Helio- and Astroseismology (1988).
4. “Seismology of Solar Oscillation Line Widths,” J. Christensen-Dalsgaard, D. O. Gough, and K. G. Libbrecht, Astrophys. J. Letters 341, L103 (1989).
5. “Frequencies of Solar Oscillations,” K. G. Libbrecht, M. F. Woodard, and J. M. Kaufman, Astrophys J. Supp. 74, 1129(1990).
6. “Advances in Helioseismology,” K. G. Libbrecht and M. F. Woodard, Science 253, 152 (1991).