Thinking Allowed: A meditation of rocks

If a group of crows can be a murder and group of owls a parliament then I declare that a group of rocks should be a meditation.

The girls and I left Jakob in Fethiye for a week to explore Cappadocia with friends. It was a fair bit of driving (9.5 hours each way) but we were prepared with a dose of determination, a bag of snacks, a teenager who is excellent at navigating, a cheery sky blue car (didn't see a single other car of this colour on our drive), a half finished audio book, and a fully charged ipad. As much as I enjoy Fethiye, I was also excited to see the more arid and less touristy inland regions of Turkey. I enjoyed my hours of rolling and sweeping brown hills with the occasional lake. And then as we went over a ridge the view of sprawling Konya was as impressive as our one night stay there. We saw the usual tourist things and I was glad we did. I had made the girls research a number of things related to Sufism and it was mesmerising to see the physical meditation of the religion in the form of whirling. The dark, the music, the ceremony, the prayer, and the trancelike whirling were all both inspiring and beautiful. As someone with a weak inner ear I am thinking I need to up my spirituality and self-discipline to attain such circular transcendence.

Cappadocia was equally mesmerising with its colourfully shapes rocks, carved valleys and underground dens. The children liked the underground cities best where they ran into every tunnel and nook in a whirlwind of dust that was both adorable and frightening for the unsuspecting tourists. It was really nice to get to travel with others and the children had just as much fun running around in courtyards and cuddling dogs as visiting sites. The cities and homes carved into rocks don't seem to get tiring. I tried to imagine what it was like to live in a place where everyone could dig out their own home but it was difficult to makes sense of what we saw and how that could be an everyday reality. We got to sleep outdoors one night which was much loved by all the children and a great way to end our stay in the geologic marvel that is the Cappadocia valley.