After the shake
On hedonism, home, and healing
Mutual aid moment: My friend Hani is a Gazan father of four. I worked with him at Gaza Sky Geeks, where he worked as a host — keeping the office clean, while running our humble cafe. The first one through the door every morning, Hani was the friendly receiver of my broken Arabic while he brewed me Arabic coffee. He was synonymous with Gazan mornings to me. Hani and his family have survived genocide, but he is struggling to find work and rebuild an income. I’m raising funds to help his family while he gets back on his feet. Contribute here.
After the shake
There is a biological moment after a dog emerges from water — a full-body shudder, instinctual and complete, that sends a thousand tiny droplets flying in every direction. It is not dramatic or performed. It is simply what the body does when it is ready to be dry.
I’ve been thinking about that image a lot lately. The past few years have felt like drowning—and now, I’m somewhere above sea level. I feel the earth beneath my feet again, and it’s time to shake off the water clinging to me from survival.
I moved into my first home this spring. A 590 square foot condo in a neighborhood I love, in a building and across the street from some of my closest friends, purchased with the kind of familial support that doesn’t ask for anything back. From the outside it looks like a straightforward story of good fortune. From the inside it has felt like something more complicated — a shedding, a settling, a confrontation with what it means to have, to rest, to take up space in your own life. A happiness I am still learning to receive without shame.
I work in Palestinian social impact. For years, Gaza has lived inside me the way a second heartbeat lives — present, insistent, impossible to ignore. The weight of witnessing, of doing work adjacent to unimaginable loss, accumulates in the body in ways that are hard to name until you’re standing in your own living room wondering why joy feels so strange.
I’m not entering this new home completely empty handed—much of my decor, including two handwoven rugs—has come with me from Gaza. I sip my morning coffee standing barefoot on the rugs, reminiscing about the special experience of going to the weavers’ workshop, the sentimental value that accumulates when art passes directly from the hands that made it into yours. I wonder often if the weavers survived genocide – I wonder about all those I encountered in Gaza whose fate I’ll never know. I wonder how these wonderings weave into sentimental value.
There is a particular kind of dissonance in curating a beautiful life while holding the knowledge of what is being destroyed elsewhere. I have spent weeks in a consumerist reverie — drunk on the full reign of designing every corner of a space that is mine. Color drenching walls in dusty mauve, deep burgundy, and warm sandy neutrals. Running my hands across the silky texture of a chartreuse velvet couch. Awaiting the arrival of a Moroccan brass lamp whose cutouts will cast patterned light on brocade walls in the evenings.
And then, without warning, the other thing arrives. My pleasure-filled musings get punctuated by intrusive thoughts. What would it feel like for the walls to cave in suddenly. For the floor to give out. Not by earthquake but by the deliberate consequences of a dying empire — the kind of destruction that is man-made, deliberate, and chosen. The kind of violence the weavers of my rug likely experienced.
The space I am in right now is hedonistic and it is healing and I don’t know how to hold these two things. I’m not sure I’m supposed to know. I think I’m just supposed to hold it.
What I understand more deeply, one month in, is that home is not just physical. It is the place where the self gets to rest from performing itself. Where you are not building anything or explaining anything or surviving anything — you are just present, in your own light, your own shadow—learning your own soul’s undertones.
My days are filled with choices driven by what excites, soothes, or intrigues me. Textures and provocations I’m deciding to live among. These pleasure-motivated choosings feel like something I had been waiting a long time to do. I sink into that thought and then—the grief crests again.
I don’t think the dissonance resolves. I’m not sure it’s supposed to. Maybe the point is to keep both things alive — the brass lamp and the rubble, the barefoot mornings and the unknown fates. Maybe it’s within these tensions that I build a home.
The dog shakes off the water and walks forward. I am learning what life looks like after the shake.
"home ... is the place where the self gets to rest from performing itself"
Salam beti-
Each morning for almost 3 years since the known sadi$m of the fading empire stripped itself naked, the mind wakes up to know if there is any remnant of humanity left in the “highly educated crats of all kinds”, whose purpose of existence is erasure of others.
Yet, each morning shows that those wanting erasure of others, are being erased in the most humiliating ways.
The weavers of Gaza though erased in body are martyrs, the real chosen ones. They are chosen to show to the world that truth finds its way like water only to crush the mightiest of powers into sand. The story of a biblical storm is being replayed. The trigger was Tufaan Al Aqsa.
The operative word is tawakkal. The same tawakkal that empowered a sixteen years old Ibrahim peace be upon him, to stand up against the idolaters of his time and reject falsehood.
It is about time for humanity to shake off idolaters of our time and reclaim its rights. The sacrifice of Gazan shall bear fruit soon enough, without a shadow of doubt. Inshallah.