I’ve been feeling kind of meh these days. A case of the blues that’s dragging on. I want to flip to future chapters of life and see what happens. It’s no wonder that I really don’t mind spoilers. I love watching a story unfold knowing the outcome. And I hate that I love that - all of it is an embodiment of my deeply rooted impatience.
When I feel I am balanced, I understand how the dots of my life connect. Recently and suddenly, it’s as if I lost that understanding. So I’m left with dots, disparate and confusing. I think about this fixation on having a through line and wonder what unlearning and relearning I can do here. I think about the dots as beads, separate and self-contained, beautiful in their own rite. I think about stringing the beads together to form a chain. The beads are still beads, but as a collective they transform into a satisfying unit. Right now in life, I feel like the thread has snapped, beads flying every which way. At the same time, the beads are still there, still mine, and it’s up to me to re-thread. A feeling both liberating and scary.
What happens if I take a moment to pause here, gather beads, and hold them in my palms? What gets lost in the rush to rewire, the rush to jam the beads into formation?
I want to play with these questions through writing. Rather than a crafted essay, I offer beads – thought bubbles, vignettes, musings – that reflect the me of right now. I want to practice calming the reflex to engineer a narrative, to strive to make things fall into place. I want to let moments of life stand on their own - perfect, complete, mysterious, meandering - and trust that the threading, the connecting, has an intelligence of its own.
Last month in LA, I experienced a sensory deprivation tank for the first time. The pod is tiny, so finite. But when you’re inside it, devoid of light and sound, floating naked and weightless in salt water, you become immersed in infinity. I think about how infinity is everywhere. I see it in the spiral of a rose, or the ripple of water. Or in a bougie spa in LA. I can hold infinity everyday in my palms.
A few weeks ago, I guided a yoga class for the first time. It was like meeting a whole new version of me I didn’t know existed.
Last weekend, I went down to DC to meet up with my friend Rand who was visiting from Palestine. Rand and I ambled through various neighborhoods, chatting about nothing and everything. Consumed by conversation, we paid little mind to our route, letting empty crosswalks and mandated detours chart our path. In a moment of spatial awareness, I noticed we were standing outside of Pret a Manger in Farragut Square. Lights off and shut down, it looked like a dormant movie set. Pointing at a table in the center of the cafe, I told Rand it’s a meeting I had there that enabled our lives to cross paths. It was there in this unremarkable cafe where I first met Ryan, my former manager and current friend, who told me about his first few months on the job in Gaza. I remember that phase of my life, one similar to now, where I was itching for change. Hearing Ryan speak so genuinely of Palestine inspired me to lay out my cards without hesitation: “If you ever need any help with the stuff you’re doing, I’d be down to join you out there.” A month or so later, I accepted a job in Gaza. Six years later, Rand and I peer into a dark Pret a Manger on 17th Street NW.
What I appreciate about astrology is that it offers recurring, cosmic themes for reflection. We dismiss these things as 'new age,’ but they’re ancient and rooted in indigenous wisdom. Before light bulbs, the human experience of the night sky was incredibly vibrant. Our ancestors looked up regularly with awe, and then alchemized that awe into stories. Born under the sun in Gemini and moon in Libra, my cosmic themes are duality and balance. It’s not in magazine horoscopes where I find guidance, but in my own intuitive contemplation of these themes. Cultivating duality and balance in my life allows for seemingly conflicting thoughts to co-exist within me. I remind myself that I can hold both contentment and longing. Astrology reminds us that there is guidance in looking up.
My people’s trauma - the partition of the Indian sub-continent - happened in 1947, and Palestinian collective trauma - the Nakba - happened in 1948. Equidistant to seismic trauma, I note for further contemplation. I get so fixated thinking about how trauma is passed down, I forget that strength, resilience, and healing is inherited too.
I just said trauma four times in the span of three sentences.
Lauren, my former college radio co-host, showed me this clip of Jamie Lee Curtis being Jamie Lee Curtis, the same day we floated in sensory deprivation tanks.
I think about how Palestine radicalized me. This doesn’t feel like something a brown Muslim girl can write on the internet, but allow me to explain by way of quoting Palestinian-Jewish-American writer Dylan Saba. In a stunning personal narrative that I come back to again and again, he says: "The Palestinian call for return can be liberatory. But this will require a different relationship with time: a commitment not only to undoing the world as it is, but to remaking it as it should be." A free Palestine necessitates a shift in mass consciousness towards worshipping love over power. It’s funny to me that honoring love above all is radical.
I’m ready to leave my hometown and start again. My daydreams take me to a few places. I see a short winter visit to Ramallah to curl up next to a R2D2-shaped space heater and write from Succariya, a smokey, limestone cafe with large, arched, turquoise-trimmed windows. I also see a cozy treehouse-like apartment in DC, where I hang up my set-of-three posters called Fishes of Gaza printed in earnest by Palestine’s Ministry of Agriculture, Directorate General of Fisheries. I want to nest and make biryani for my friends beneath the fishes and their English, Arabic, and Latin names.
In the span of one week, Sarah and Kris handed me a set of keys to their apartments, one in Brooklyn and one in DC, in a “this is your home” gesture. Love and its languages are infinite. They fit on a key ring in the palm of my hand.
An authentic, human, brave pouring of the heart to own life and live with a noble purpose to rebuild the world as it should be ; to worship love 🙏🏼♥️