The Ice Cream Question: Continuing the Sohbet

Blog post brought to you by Laila Katie Helms 

Last week, a reader wrote us a reply at 2am that we haven’t stopped thinking about. If you haven’t read it yet, start there — “On Love and Craving” [link to the love and craving blog] asks a question worth taking our time with before reading any further: Do we know the difference between loving and wanting to have?

I don’t have a clean answer. But her question deserves more than a nod, so here’s an attempt to keep walking with it rather than close it.

There’s something worth noticing in how the question itself is built. She doesn’t ask “Is craving bad?” She asks whether we can tell the difference — which assumes the two can feel identical from the inside. That might be the real difficulty. Craving doesn’t announce itself as craving. It shows up wearing love’s clothes, using love’s language, feeling every bit as urgent and real as the thing it’s often mistaken for.

So maybe the test isn’t a feeling we’re supposed to detect in the moment — “ah, this one’s craving, that one’s love” — but something closer to a direction. Craving pulls toward having. Love, the kind Sidi points to, pulls toward giving everything, toward the yearning itself being the gift, not the getting. The Guide’s words she quoted say it plainly: the yearning “transforms the depth of poverty in the slave’s need and longing to give Allah everything.” Not to get something from Allah. To give.

That reframes the ice cream question a little. It’s not that wanting ice cream is shameful, or that the dress or the beauty of another person is some kind of trap to feel guilty about. It’s that craving, left alone, only ever points back at itself — I want, I want, I want — while love, even love for something as small as ice cream, can become an opening if it points somewhere beyond itself. Maybe the practice isn’t eliminating desire. Maybe it’s asking desire, again and again, where it’s actually taking us.

As for the withdrawal phase she named so honestly — the burning, the not-finding-Allah-where-the-craving-lives feeling — I don’t think that’s a sign of failure. Perhaps it is exactly the kind of work the gathering is for. Not a place where craving magically stops, but a place with enough held space, enough people walking the same direction, enough dhikr and sohbet and zawiya time, that the redirection she described becomes possible in a way it rarely is when we’re alone.

So, what does it take? She named it already: strong transmission, strong dhikr circles, true sohbet like this one, khalwa, zawiya time, and himma. I would add: maybe it takes doing this together, out loud, messily, the way we did here — rather than each of us quietly wondering alone whether we know the difference between loving and wanting to have.

If this stirred something for you, reply the way she did. We mean that literally — write us back, and let’s keep making this into the sohbet it’s already becoming.

Come, take a drink of the Deep Love, in community.