On acceptance 🕯️

& the practice of resilience

There’s a heat emanating from my third eye. I cupped my palm over my forehead as I spoke to my somatic healer over Zoom. It feels like holding a hand just above a candle flame.

There is a heat inside me that does not scorch, but insists on being felt. I’ve been sitting with it, tracing its source. It does not feel like the fire of rage, vengeance, or hatred. Those fires consume. This one clarifies.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the difference between acceptance and defeat. How easy it is to confuse one for the other. How often we’re taught that acceptance means passivity, that to accept the world as it is means to approve of it. But real acceptance, I’m learning, is a necessary ingredient of resilience. We need to let the world break us now and then for the process of resilience to take hold. Like the way muscle needs to tear to grow stronger.

Spring is arriving, the season of renewal. The air smells of thawing earth. Flowering trees stun with incredible blooms. There’s something ancient about this cycle—this turning toward life after a season of stillness.

As the earthly world outside softens, the world of power hardens. The United States is shedding the pretense of democracy at a terrifying speed, revealing the machinery of fascism underneath. Laws criminalizing protest. Broad daylight abductions of pro-Palestine advocates. Storied universities trashing academic and civic freedoms to curry favor with genocide enablers. AIPAC-bought senators expanding their egos and grandstanding with 25-hour speeches that provide no meaningful blockage of harmful legislation—that impressively skirt any mention of the true elephants in the room.

All the while, Gaza continues to burn. Did you know that just a few days ago Israel executed 15 Palestinian paramedics — shot dead in the chest — and left behind in a mass grave? Did you know that Palestinian parents are burying their children without heads? Do you know?

This is a season where true courage becomes unmistakable. Not the performative courage of political theater, but the courage of those who have no choice but to resist. The courage of families in Gaza still finding ways to laugh with their children between airstrikes. The courage of students putting their bodies between police and their peers. The courage of workers organizing under the threat of termination. These are not performances. They are stakes in the ground. They are acts of survival and love.

My friend Wisam sent me this video of children being children beneath the sounds of war in Gaza. In the distance, rubble anchors Gaza’s sunset:

To accept the world as it is—the brutality, the betrayal, the unbearable losses—is to see it clearly, without illusion. It’s to stop flinching away. It’s to say: Yes, this profound ugliness is happening. Yes, this is the world we live in. And then, from that grounded place, to decide: And still, I will love. And still, I will resist. And still, I will build something better.

I used to think resilience was about staying unbroken, about standing firm no matter what. But I see now that letting myself break is part of resilience too. There is strength in knowing when to yield, when to grieve, when to let the weight of it all bring me to my knees instead of fighting to hold it at bay. I let my beloved, pained Gaza break me, and in that breaking, I have become someone who can hold it more fully. Someone who carries it with the tenderness it infinitely deserves.

And when I don’t know how to hold it—when the grief swells too large, when my anger eclipses my clarity—I turn to Allah.

To forgive me for my moments of looking away.

To guide my moments of courage, leadership, and resistance.

To give me the strength to make peace with the unknowable.

And to endlessly give thanks for making Palestine an inextricable part of my life and soul’s journey.

I return, often, to this prayer:

رَبَّنَا آتِنَا فِي الدُّنْيَا حَسَنَةً وَفِي الْآخِرَةِ حَسَنَةً وَقِنَا عَذَابَ النَّارِ

Rabbana atina fid dunya hasanah wa fil akhirati hasanah wa qina azab annar.

Oh Allah, grant us what is blessed in this world and in the afterlife, and ward away the punishment of Fire.

I used to think of the fire only as an external force—punishment, destruction, something to be feared. But I’m starting to understand that the fire can live inside us too. There is the fire of hatred, of apathy, of willful ignorance. And then there is the righteous fire—the fire that illuminates, that strengthens, that purifies. The fire that burns in my third eye. I pray that I am always equipped with discernment between righteous fire and the fire of illusion.

Spring reminds me that fire is not the final state. That even the land scorched by war and winter will green again. That even the trees burned to their roots will send up new shoots. The same cycle that brings fascism to its breaking point will, inevitably, bring its fall. The same world that can destroy itself can also heal.

And so, I will keep my hands steady over the flame and steady in supplication. I will let it warm me, but not consume me. I will not turn away from the world as it is, but I will also not forget the world that is possible. Because to accept reality is not to surrender to it—it is to meet it head-on and decide, with unwavering clarity:

This is not where the story ends.