I've Been Bartering My Whole Life, I Just Didn't Call It That

Rugs in Morocco tell a story.

Not in the way a book does, beginning, middle, end, all very neat. More like the way life does, all at once and slightly overwhelming. With a pattern that keeps shifting depending on where you're standing, how long you observe it and the way the light falls.

I've been musing about this since I arrived. Not just the actual rugs — though there are those too, stacked and draped in the souks in colours that make you wonder how something can be both inanimate and completely alive at the same time. I mean the rug of being here, standing in the multi strands and colours of a country so different from mine, of being a visitor with all the questions that come with that, most of which I hadn't expected to be asking.

Here's the thing about a rug though. Turn it over.

The underside is beautiful in its own way, but it's also where you see the imperfections, the knots, the loose ends. The bits that make the pattern on the other side possible but that nobody really wants to look at directly. And you know what? That's also where the dirt collects, the stuff that gets swept underneath until it becomes too noticeably bumpy. It's interesting what you discover when you lift the rug and peer underneath, or at least I have grown to find it interesting.

Since you don't begin to weave with just one thread, they crossover and loop around each other, let's see where a thread leads….

The orange thread — about what to wear

Morocco is a Muslim country. Conservative in its dress, particularly for women. Local women are covered, legs, shoulders, arms and head. There's no law saying I have to do the same as a visitor. Nobody pulls me aside, nobody says a word. But there's an unspoken thing, a social contract you can feel even when it's not written anywhere — that some covering is a respectful thing to do. Especially out here, away from the tourist polished streets of Marrakesh and Fes, the villages in the Atlas mountains are like stepping back in time.

I watch how other tourists navigate this over my mint tea, which is one of my favourite pastimes. (The watching, I mean, though also the tea.) Some people honour the code instinctively — flowing skirts to ankles or trousers, long sleeves, a scarf draped just so around them. Others don't buy into it at all, shorts, strappy tops, skin on show. And then there's the category I find most interesting: the ones who find the loophole. A short above the knee dress, but a scarf over the shoulders. Or a long dress and covered shoulders but the dress is so clingy, they could be dressed in opaque, coloured clingfilm.

The art of appearing to comply while changing absolutely nothing of substance. Humans are endlessly creative when it comes to bending rules just enough to feel like they're not. I'm doing my own version of this, if I'm honest. I have plenty of flowy dresses and trousers, so the bottom half is not a problem. It's the top half where I come unstuck. I usually pair them with strappy tops…and I rarely wear a bra — my boobs are small, I find bras constrictive, apart from a brief phase flirting with matching lingerie, I quietly decided that particular discomfort was not worth it. Europe has no strong opinions about this. Morocco has very strong opinions about this.

So I've been layering a yoga vest top underneath a strappy top, layered with a pashmina around my shoulders in thirty-degree heat, darting from one shady alley to the next while trying to look elegant.

The word that keeps coming up is constraint.

And here's where the rug gets interesting. Because when I follow that thread — which is what rugs invite you to do, run your fingers along them, see where they go — I end up somewhere that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm wearing.

The blue thread — about what things are worth

You can't just ask what the price of something is in the souk. You are immediately asked what you want to pay, which is disconcerting to say the least. All sorts of questions come up — how do I know what it's worth to even begin a negotiation, what if I get ripped off? But it's a game of sorts, the asking price is not to be taken literally. It's supposed to be playful and fun, there's lots of eye rolling and laughter when you give your amount.

To begin with I found this deeply uncomfortable. I want a price tag. I want to look at something, see the number, decide whether it's worth it — or whether I'm worth it — and either buy it or walk away. Clean. Transactional. Done. What I don't want is to stand in a small shop drinking mint tea while a man with beautiful manners tells me what I'd like to pay and I tell him something lower and we meet somewhere in the middle and I leave not knowing whether I've been generous or ridiculous or both.

I bought a necklace, a pendant on a beaded cord, it's a compass, small, silver and embossed with symbols. The blue turbaned shopkeeper told me how his ancestors, Tuareg people, use it in the desert. Not just for direction but also for calculation. The position of the sun, the arc of the stars, your place in relation to both. It represents the four tribes of the desert, he said. I was gone immediately. Camels, nighttime trekking, navigation by starlight. I was negotiating for an object but I was buying a story, and I didn't fully realise that until later.

I got him down to half the asking price and felt rather pleased with myself. Found out afterwards it was probably worth less than a quarter.

But here's the thing I keep turning over: did I overpay? I paid for the compass, yes. But I also paid for the mint tea, the story of the desert, the image of his family, the moment of being transported somewhere ancient and vast and starlit in the middle of a sun-baked afternoon. None of that has a price tag and all of it had value. The transaction was two different things at once depending on which side of the rug you were looking at.

And then I follow that thread and find something older and less comfortable.

I grew up in a house where love was transactional. Not cruelly, it was just the way it was. Be a version that I want you to be and you receive love. The price was never written down but it was always real, and I learnt what parts of me caused withdrawal and what brought warmth.

The people pleaser was born in that economy. The one who gives everything and asks for very little, because asking feels dangerous. Because conditional love teaches you that you might lose it at any moment, so you keep paying in advance, just to be safe. At some point the balance sheet becomes visible. You notice the giving has been mostly one way and that quiet injustice button, the one wired to the six-year-old, starts blinking.

The bartering in the souk made me uncomfortable because I didn't know the rules. But I've been bartering my whole life. I just didn't call it that.

The red thread — about the much older constraint

I have spent most of my life in boxes I built myself.

The good girl. The responsible one. The capable one who holds it and everyone together. The people pleaser. Smaller and smaller boxes, all self-constructed, all given very reasonable sounding names. The fabric over my shoulders in the Moroccan heat is just the most recent version of a feeling I've been living inside for decades. The location is new. The feeling isn't.

And then there's the gender thing, which I keep picking up and putting down like something hot. The men here wear jeans and t-shirts, not all but some. And there's no unspoken code for male tourists to not wear shorts and tees. As I notice this it brings something up in me. Not quite anger, something that lives near it but is quieter and older. Something I knew as a child before I had words for it, this particular flavour of that's not fair. I won't even go down the road of you never see local women in cafes, just the men.

I grew up with a very finely tuned sense of injustice. Hair-trigger, if we're being accurate, and it's come up a lot in my life. So what I notice now, sitting here with my tea and my pashmina and my slightly sweaty yoga top, is that Morocco didn't create that feeling. It just reached into the rug and pulled the thread.

The trigger is never really about what triggered it.

Follow it back far enough and you find the original knot. The place where the pattern started. That six-year-old who noticed unfairness before she had a language for it and tucked the feeling somewhere small and tight and internal, where it has been waiting, patient as a rug in a souk, for someone to come along and tug.

There's no men-bashing here, by the way. It's more complicated than that and also more personal. The Tuareg — the Blue Men of the Sahara, who live out in the deep desert — it's the men who cover their heads and faces. Not the women. Every culture is sitting with its own version of this negotiation. I just happened to land in one that poked an old bruise. Which, when you think about it, is one of the better reasons to travel.

The green thread — about culture being both the thing and its opposite

Here's the paradox woven into every tradition, every custom, every way of doing things that gets handed down through generations: the same thread that constrains can also be the one that connects.

Five times a day the call to prayer echoes through the streets and over the rooftops. Every single time, without fail, something in me stops. Comes back. What am I feeling? What can I actually see and hear and smell right now? What, in this specific moment, am I grateful for? I am reminded, embodiment practices can be found anywhere, even in the middle of a souk in Morocco. Perhaps, especially in the middle of a souk in Morocco.

And breakfast, OMG, we need to talk about Moroccan breakfast!

Breakfast here is a ceremony. A small daily act of joy that takes up the time it deserves rather than being bolted down over a phone or whilst watching the morning news. A collection of colourful little ceramic bowls of olives, honey, jam, olive oil, cheese AND amlou — crushed almonds, argan oil and honey combined in a way that feels almost unfair to every other food. Msmen, the flaky square pancake that you tear rather than cut because tearing is the right way. Warm khobz, a round golden bread that somehow carries within it the entire Moroccan concept of hospitality and community.

And then the mint tea, poured from a height so the bubbles form in the glass. I asked about the pouring. One person told me it infuses the flavour. Another told me it creates oxygen, life and vitality in a glass. I kept the second explanation. Some truths work better when they're a bit poetic.

The thing is, these rituals are also the other side of the very same thread that constrains. Culture keeps alive the knowledge of how to slow down, how to be together, how to mark a moment as worth marking. We've stripped most of that out in the West and called it efficiency. Moroccan families, three generations, eat together, conversations happening at full volume.

I feel the loss of something I can't quite name. Perhaps it's the hunger for community that we are all feeling. Something we traded away without quite meaning to with our nuclear families, fences and polite masks. Here it's normal to ask quite personal questions, there's a curiosity about other people rather than just talking about oneself.

I don't know where the line is between tradition that holds and tradition that boxes you in. I'm not sure the line is a line, exactly. More of a constant negotiation. The rug changes depending on who's weaving and what year it is and what they've been through. But the knots underneath stay.

What the rug knows

There's a version of travel that sits on top of things. You see the beautiful pattern, you take the photo, you move on. There's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes a rug is just a rug.

But if you let it — if you're willing to sit with the discomfort of the heat and the constraint of the pashmina and the tug of the old unfairness and the unexpected ceremony of breakfast — a different country can become a mirror. Not a flattering one. The kind that shows you what's actually there.

The discomfort is the thread. The difference is the thread. The thing that seems to be about where you are is almost always also about who you are and where you came from and which knots you never quite finished untying.

Follow the thread. That's where the good stuff is. Even when — especially when — it leads somewhere messier than you were expecting. The rug on the floor looks like a finished thing. Turn it over and you see everything it took to make it.

I think we're all far more like the underside, even as we pretend to ourselves and the world around us that we are the top side.

Postcards from the Path is written from wherever the road goes. If this found you at the right moment, pass it on to someone who might need it.