notes from the portal 🔥

on love & rage

I’m nearly a month into this Vermont writing retreat and I cry pretty much every day. Which is to say, I think it’s going well.

Giving myself unfettered time and space to show up everyday to the page, getting lost in thought for hours on end, being in nature — all of it is slowly clearing the fog that shrouds this book idea. In the narrow slivers of clarity, I see a mountain, immense and snow-capped. I’m equal parts thrilled and terrified. 

I’ve been looking back on my writing, what I share publicly and what I write in my journals, and see all the ways I censor or deny myself. How I hold back from showing the parts of myself that are still in progress. The parts I’ve been conditioned to believe are unbecoming or undesirable — my preoccupations, my jealousy, my desperation for being loved and understood with a precision I fear exists only in my mind.

So much of stepping into this book project has been a process of stepping into myself. I think about my relationship to Palestine, how on the page I show up as a benevolent observer. But in reality, I am friend to Palestine — an ally and comrade — irrevocably changed by the friendships I formed there. A mentor I am working with this summer, a writer I deeply admire, helped me understand that. What do friends, allies, comrades do for one another? they asked. They hold each other’s rage.

Meditating on that definition has cracked me open. Within my deep love for Palestine lives an immense grief and rage for its people, my friends, who are imprisoned by physical walls and the enduring lies of the powerful. I write from my heart to transmute love into language. I can see the limitations I’ve put on my understanding of love as something peaceful, non-confrontational, joyful, vibrant. I’m in the midst of learning that love, true and radical, can be a powerful container for the fire of rage. 

I am reviewing my own relationship to anger, how I bypass surrendering to it, stewing in sadness instead.  The question that keeps coming up for me is: Am I a friend, ally, comrade … to myself?

A fiery sunset in Gaza. Photo by Ahmed Ajour.

Like I said, a lot of tears this summer! But these tears feel like a response to the growing pains this book is catalyzing for me. It feels like a necessary part of the process, priming me to write from a more expanded version of the Self. I’m excited, and scared, to invite my anger to the page.

This project is a portal. At first, writing felt like a cool way to document an exciting time of my life. The more I harvest memories, the more I embrace writing as a ritual of remembrance. I'm learning that memory is something very much alive, like a sourdough starter it is fertile and hungry. When I write, I feed memory — a process that with careful repetition and patience unearths emotional truth.

In yogic thought, fire is described as the element of transformation, turning water into vapor, incense into aroma, despair into revolution..

& writer into truth-teller.