Dearest Z1.

Dearest Zeynah,

 Sometimes I find myself in tears at the thought of the pain your mother is feeling. I cry and I mourn having to let go of you here and I cry at the pain of the possibility of what this might feel like. And then I cry more tears because I can’t believe the weight of this grief, and I cry for the pain I try to imagine, but have not tasted for myself, because even the smallest thought of it brings me to my knees.

Ya Allah, with every ounce of my being I pray for the light of your love and mercy to enter Maryam’s heart.

To fill her father’s heart with the everlasting knowing and awareness of her transcendence, and her comfort and safety in the palm of the Most Loving.

 

I see your mother, and I feel her fierceness, energy, dedication and commitment to make all of your dreams come true. And to building a beautiful community for you, one that grieves, and cries in the late hours of the night for the beautiful lessons your life and death have taught us.  

I see your father, and I feel his courage, devotion and steadfastness to make sure you are protected and comforted forever. I watched this man ever so delicately lay the ground for you in your departure of this world. I watched in disbelief at the strength and courage of the men of your family and community who one by one laid the earth to protect you for your final rest.

“God is with the broken hearted… the breaking of the heart is what opens it up to the light of Allah.

The dunya is designed to break your heart. To crush it. “

What is there left to do but to submit and lay ourselves on your doorstop.

Mercy, you are the nourishment my heart needs when I am starved of hope. I long for your sustenance.

 Oh Allah, bring mercy to my lips, so that I may taste the beauty of this promise.

The other day I was reading about Maryam (AS) or ‘Mary’, mother of Isa (Jesus, AS). I was reading about Maryam, because I was thinking of a Maryam. A mother whose Tawakuul (faith) was so beyond my comprehension, who embodies the trust, the ultimate test of love and faith in her Lord, the one who made us possible, and to whom we shall all return to.

What type of trust does it take to listen to a nurse recount, with such joy, never without also sorrow, that the ‘heart, kidneys, liver, pancreas, and eyes…” have found a match. Watching your eyes filled with tears, rejoice at the joy of knowing she will be able to continue to give the gift of life, to others, even as we sit amidst her, knowing her hour has arrived Subhanallah.

“If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wife unto the body life. For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one” (Gibran, on death).

And so, Hannah, mother of Maryam, was gifted a baby despite not being able to children, she vowed to Allah that if she was given a baby, it would be devoted to Allah, and so Allah gifted her a child and Hannah gave Maryam to serve God.  Hannah made a simple du’a from the pure intention of a mother’s heart, and Allah answered it so completely that Maryam (as) is remembered to this day for her excellence, strength and purity. There is nothing more powerful that the sincere prayer of a mother. Maryam (Mary) actually means, the one who serves. And also, one who is equal to two men. Maryam (as) had amazing strength in serving Allah and getting through intense tests. Allah made Maryam (as) a joy to be around, well liked amongst people, and put her in the care of righteous people.

As Maryam (as) began to experience an unimaginably difficult test, she was pregnant in isolation, while knowing people were slandering her and speculating about her. She embarked on a lonely journey to Bethlehem to give birth to Isa (Jesus). During this trial, her pain was so great that she wished had died instead of experiencing it. I want  us to understand that Maryam (as) was one of the best people who ever lived. She was chosen ‘above the women of the worlds’, she was as perfect as a human being can be, yet even she felt so much desperation and anguish in her test that she wished to be completely forgotten. And yet  Allah gave her the opposite. Maryam is mentioned alone 31 times in the Quran, she is the only women mentioned by name, and Allah mentions her when he isn’t telling her story, “Isa, son of Maryam”, Jesus, son of Mary”. It is through her pain and sacrifice that Prophet Isa was born. And so we may ask, how many people were guided to God’s light through her test? How any people have been inspired, comforted or strengthened through her story?

We don’t know why Allah has sent us a particular test, we may ever know why Allah gave this test to Zeynah’s family, but we are witnessing in front of us a divine and beautiful patience and gratitude for the beautiful life she lived here, and the life she gave to so many others.

The Prophet Muhammed (saw) said, ’The greatest reward comes with the greatest trial”. And so we know deeply, that “When Allah loves a people He tests them”.

Oh Allah, we pray that our tests are a means for us to please You and draw closer to You, and we pray that You give us even a fraction of the Tawakkul and strength of Maryam (as), ameen.

We pray to remain illuminated in Your beautiful light, and that the bitterness of loss, and the unfathomable pain it brings forth, is quelled by your mercy and the sweetness of faith.  We pray that in the place of sadness, our faith and trust will strengthen us and put peace in our hearts and strengthen our resolve in the truth that Allah knows best, that he will never burden a soul beyond what it can bear.

And this divine love is such that “He pushes us to the edge of the cliff when He wants us to learn how to fly” (Helwa, 2020).

And Maryam, you must be so loved, the beloved of Allah, to be tested with a trial so seemingly impossible that only the most righteous amongst us could bear its weight, and yet, you have smiled, you have laughed, and you have made us whole again, even in your most impossible moment, you have shone your light for us to see that in fact, “what you are weeping for, has been your delight”.

And we prayed for mercy, and we prayed for a miracle, and we prayed for the light… and what is left, but to accept that,  indeed, as you said, Maryam, Mother of Zeynah, as we held hands and I looked at the beautiful baby girl you made, she was ‘too good for this world’. And we knew that she has returned to her creator, the Most Loving, The Most Merciful, The Most Knowing.

May Allah grant you the highest level of Jannah Maryam, to rejoin with your beautiful baby girl in the freedom of God, and I pray as you journey onwards, you always know, that Love has no finality, it knows no bounds, and each beautiful sight you witness here, she will witness with you, and rejoice knowing that she is free of any pain, worry or doubt.

In fact, we know that her life hasn’t ended  it has just begun. The end of this world is the beginning of the next. It is reborn into the akhirah away from the pains and suffering of dunya (worldly life). It is in the impossibility of this reality that we see that there are things we were never meant to make sense of, there is no understanding, there is only surrender, deep submission, and acceptance for what which we may never make sense of, but that which we feel deeply.

Everywhere I turn I see how loved you are by your community, by people you meet in passing, and by people who remember you for your generosity and openness. When we would finally meet, you told me, “come see my Angel”. And, I was so afraid to go to the hospital, I thought, why me? Of all the people who should be there, not me. But I knew that our meeting could have only been in that moment, destined, because I needed it more than you know. And I came for you, and instead I have been the one gifted, the experience and awareness of tawakuul and what it feels like to be in the company of someone whose Iman is so elevated that their energy sweeps you in like leaves in the wind, and gently soothes you, like a cool breeze, at once.

And what for us then, where do we go from here? Since becoming a mother, I have struggled every single day with the fear of loss, the losses I experienced throughout my life have haunted me but I have fought every single day to embody the truth that while we are a part of their stories, we do not write them. As Gibran once said, “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you”.

I pray that each tear you shed awakens your spirit to liberation of life. Allah swt says, “the life of this world is only the enjoyment of deception” (Quran, 3:185). Temporary, but also the most incredibly beautiful illusion, so beautiful indeed that it brings us to tears, and imagining the afterlife brings us to our knees.

Without measuring your life by a linear notion of time, embrace the depths of your existence and the details of your vision, for what which you seek awaits your embrace. You may live 100 years devoid of any life, and you may life 9 years in a depth unknown to time.

Rest in beautiful peace Zeynah. Your life and death have left us changed forever.

And one promise I can offer you Maryam is that the “deeper the sorrow carves into your being, the more joy it can contain”. And I know that you know now that joy and sorrow exist together, everlasting, they are inseparable, and one is no greater than the other.

And Zeynah, thank you for showing up here for your mother to witness, in the song of the morning bird, in the dew of the new grass and in the sparkles of light around us. We have work to do here, and we pray that we make you proud with the life we have been gifted here, in your memory, always.

Indeed we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we will return (Quran 2:156)

6 years and a million tears later.

Six years feels long and short. It feels like everything has changed, and yet so much is exactly the same. The world is infinitely new, it moves too fast, it is digital, connected, easy and yet so complicated. It is impossible now to imagine you in this world. Your soul feels like a relic from the past, one who was confined to a set period, and whose life here expired right on time.

Subhanallah.

Everything in divine timing.

I see and feel it more than I can explain.

And the things that remain exactly the same are the pieces of my heart that will be broken forever, the pieces that nothing can ever put back together. And the sadness that remains in every memory my heart holds for you. It remains in the pain I knew you felt every day, and the longing that you could never quell. And it hurts me today, as it did that day, that I can’t touch a thing of yours, that I don’t have anything of you, and yet I am that which I seek and it still feels out of my reach.

#22 Click of a button.

#22 hurts the most today for some reason. It represents the pieces of our old world and reminders of this new world, the one in which you don’t exist, and the one in which all things are possible, and yet there is nothing left to do for you. And I am reminded of all of the times you would call me crying that you were hungry and you needed food, and I used to cry inside at how much it hurt to know that you couldn’t manage to feed yourself. I used to fight so much anger inside of me, like a child, I used to stomp my feet, yell and cry and I was so mean, so much of the time. I used to rush to you, afraid, anxious, anticipating, and every time I would find you different, nothing was ever the same, sometimes you would just lower your head in shame, and sometimes you would beg me to come inside. One time I remember that I came and you were so proud of what you had managed, of the clean room, the laundry, the roommates. And it hurts my heart so much to know that I was too afraid to stay, and so I had to go but I hope you know how happy I was for you, and that I know how hard it was, and how much it took for you to reach those heights.

And I pray for forgiveness for all those days where I couldn’t go, and for those days when I was mean, and cruel and afraid and too scared to sit and talk. Forgive me because I didn’t know then what I know now. I am sorry I couldn’t do more for you when you were here.

oh, how I wish I could have saved you but instead I have to mourn the complicated grief of knowing there was nothing more I could do, and yet wishing I could have held you here and now.

oh, how the emptiness is filled with the possibilities of a life we could never have had.

 I am sorry for the difficult life that poverty creates, the poison that loneliness generates, for all the suffering and pain that an illness like addiction enables and for all of the thefts it initiates. I wish for you a dignified return to your maker and I pray for forgiveness for you…and for me… for all the things we felt in our heart, but that our actions may not have always upheld.

You will forever be etched into my heart and I pray that I can remember your love the way that I can feel your pain with me.

There is a brokenness to this heart that I feel will never be whole. And the more time continues, the more I realize that accepting this allows us closer to seeing beyond the deception of this world. I am thankful for this broken heart, enabling a human experience that allows a depth of living not possible without the journey of traversing between darkness and light. The burden and blessing of this truth is in the tension we must inhabit, having known what we know, having felt what we have felt, and trying desperately to accept what we have been chosen to know.

May God grant us forgiveness, shower us in His mercy and purify our souls through these tears.

May He bring ease to our hearts with His full and complete love.

May He allow our minds to rest in our faith with the sacred relief we find in feeling/knowing the true beauty of divine timing and the liberation that comes with its acceptance.

Everything that is now, was always meant to be.

There is no other way it could have ever been.

I feel that today. Alhamdullilah.

divine love.

Dearest baby boy,

On the the occasion of your birth day, seven years ago I write this as a testament of the love you embody + have shown me. And as a reminder that you have everything you ever needed, just waiting to be found. Search deep within yourself when you are lost, and where you find love, you will find the Divine.

From where does one begin a story of creation, unravelling, and piecing back together? From whole to shattered to One. Is there a specific moment that ignites and puts healing into action. The truth for me, is yes. It was you. My son. The most generous gift I have ever been given. Your birth ignited in me a pain that I did not know was hurting and limiting my spirit, to the depths that I have uncovered since then.

You came into the world with all of the excitement and anticipation of any blessing to this magnitude, but your birth left me so far out of control, agonizing in pain, without you to hold. The sterile field saw you ripped away from me, and as my pupils dilated, I asked, “are you happy?” to your father, on another planet, I asked about earth, this is good right? we are happy?

But despite this obstetric violence, baby boy, you were perfect. You were so beautiful. You were so unbelievably small and chubby. Your cheeks, as they continue to persist, were the perfect consistency of plush and soft, that any girl has ever dreamed to snuggle. You were the most generous gift I had ever been given.  My sweetheart, you were the catalyst that set into motion a series of painful remembrances, and unravellings, the façade that had gently concealed these pains was broken and left exposed were the wounds.

My sweetheart.  For these seven years, I fought for us. I fought for myself. And I continue to fight for you, my world. There is no pain greater than my love for you. I believe, however generously naïve, that I shielded you, but the truth is, inside of your body, you hold with you the truth, and not the knowledge, as much as the awareness of how deep love can be.

Motherhood as it occurs as part of an inheritance, means that we do not exist outside of the context in which we are grown. Not bound, but carrying with us, histories and legacies that we inherit and must often contend with in our own journeys into becoming mothers. Within this complex landscape however, our knowledge of our selves remains limited to the bastardized existence we live in lands foreign to our spirits. We know ourselves in relation to a world in which we are not considered as fully human, and so we find ourselves lost, confused, and often disconnected from our whole-selves. Furthermore, we are not only limited in knowing ourselves, but we must also contend with the markings of generations of colonial, capitalist violence. And so, we continue to fight as we become mothers. We fight to know ourselves and to live in the fullness of our potential, in what we innately contain. In God’s image, with fullness of divine love + mercy. but it is hard. it is exhausting. it takes so much work. and sometimes we give in. and we often want to give up. but your love, nourishing and whole, feeds our spirit, and gently nudges us back onto the path.

True love, is for me, in this context about healing. A love with the power to transcend the limits of wordly life and to transport your spirit from the narrow confines of the finite to the divine, sacred, wholeness of the universe. I used to say that your birth gave me the greatest gift I had ever been given, the gift of my pain realized. But I am learning now, that this was just the beginning, because the true gift wasn’t the ways I was being broken. It was what the breaking made possible. The opening. To open oneself to divine mercy. The ultimate act of love. The truest, purest, most honest, vulnerable.

Indeed, my heart was broken, and I was searching to be made whole.

And this wholeness. It is made possible only by learning how to excavate the love you embody in your being. Not something external to you, not something you must gain,

or grow,

or get.

But a clearing, a cleansing, a purification of the heart, away from fear, sadness, guilt, and towards learning to love and trust your own heart as the guide. Beautifully taught to me as “what we refuse to accept, persists. but what we accept, we transcend” (Benoit, 2022). And love as a sacred practice, means too accepting that endings can also be the beginning.

Your love makes me whole. And in our love, I feel divine love and mercy. Beyond knowing, it is an awareness, it is a transcendent love, that is embodied, beyond the mind, and towards deepening consciousness. This awareness, overwhelming and blissful.

And learning to live with joy has been hard, it continues to test me, and yet, what feels the most uncomfortable is actual the most natural feeling we can have. This world meant to harden, distract, poison your heart, can be purified with the right intent, and submission to the will of the Most Loving. And so, as you fight to embody these principles of divine love and mercy, be gentle. It is about becoming, by retunring to ourselves, and allowing the fragmented pieces of our histories, selves and divine traits to become unified and whole once again.

My generous baby boy. I love you to a measure beyond this world. Beyond the limited knowing that we fight against. You are my greatest love and my biggest test wrapped into one. And what could that be other than divine love and mercy? The sacred unravelling of self and simultaneous creation of wholeness.  This love sits in the space where I end and you begin, my love, we sit together in this feeling of oneness with the grace and beauty of the Divine. My beloved. My love for you is this sacred connection to God, boundless, everlasting mercy. That breathe, a little too late, but just in time.

Love may then, not only be about others, but about opening oneself up and allowing yourself to feel the full joy of divine and sacred connection.

And so, be patient and gentle, everything in divine timing.

May Love be your guide.

And so, I ask for you consider the following questions, how can we conceptualize wholeness without gaining something outside of ourselves? How can excavation act as a powerful tool in sacred healing? Furthermore, what is divine timing? How can we follow a sacred rhythm outside of the limits of modern conceptions of ‘time’? How can Mercy fill the voids of guilt and shame we carry as mothers, doing our best and never enough? In what ways can this ultimately allow us to see motherhood as an active becoming of self in relation to sacred love, as nurturing and embodied practice?

tasting mercy.

Last time I posted I wrote about my breathes. I could not stop counting each one. I could not help but feel as though each new breathe came a little too late, but just in time. Somewhere it was happening. I was preparing for this moment. Somewhere I knew it was coming. In many ways I have been waiting for this moment for my entire life. To finalize the loss my spirit had always known, and that I only recently understood.

In my letter to you (Dear D.A.D.) I told you. Somewhere I had to believe. I had to accept the painful possibility that,

One day I hope to be swimming back towards the shore and I will look back on you.

Struggling.

Maybe drowning.

And that will have to be okay.

and that is what happened. very literally. your lungs filled up with liquid. you could no longer take a breathe.

in a sense, you drowned, ever so slowly.

I hope that you know that I did everything I could do for you. But, knowing this doesn’t mean there is not more I wish I could have done. I will always live with this. Not in regret of what I could have done, but rather, what I WISH I could have done. Those may sound similar, but they are immensely different. One is based on tangible, lived, everyday realities of what is possible, and one is based on the dreams of possibility.

And so I am pulled between painful and sad dreams of possibility… what if, what I wish, what I long for- and the great promise and beauty found in the possibility of the dreams we have.

Today I felt a slight relief.

It is getting colder outside. You can feel the change in your bones. Night by night. The darkness is longer, colder, and quieter. The leaves are falling. The trees are letting go. They are preparing to rest.

This is the first winter I will not wonder if you are cold. This is the first winter I will not hurt from imagining your pain. This is the first winter that I will not buy you a jacket. This is the first winter I will not worry about your shoes being wet. I will not cry imagining the grey, cold, wet, slush knee high, trudging through, waiting for buses, walking, stumbling, alone. I will not feel this painful imagining. I will not pray that you do not fall on ice and freeze. All of this will not happen, because you are no longer bound by the painful reality of the senses. You will not be cold. You will not be hungry. You will not feel pain. You will not cry. You will not be afraid. You will not yell. You will not feel lonely.  You will not beg. You will not walk, head sunken into your chest. You will not wish for me and be denied. You will not feel shame.

So where do we go. where do we go from here? You return back to the elements from which you emerged, back to the universe from which you came. And me… ? where has this journey taken me so far?

It is said that grief is like an earthquake, when it hits you, your world falls apart. When you put your world back together again there are aftershocks, and you never really know when those will come. The waves through which grief is expressed in my days is very difficult to explain, let alone anticipate. Most of the time I simply do not have the words. In particular, the sadness wells up in my body and often has no where to go. Even when I try to let it out, it can not escape. It is this overwhelming physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual experience that leads to the taste of mercy.

These weeks have been so immensely painful.

Grief. Sorrow. Regret. Broken dreams. Painful realizations.

Rage-filled awakenings.

I think I knew this day was coming. I think I was feeling it coming really soon but I was hoping for something else.  There is so much happening in my mind. I feel relieved that you no longer suffer here on earth, I feel sadness for the longing of another hug, I grapple with guilt for thinking of what more I could have done, I feel angry for what this illness does, I feel disgusted by how little we offer those who need our help the most as a society, I feel frustrated by a system that fails someone so desperate. I feel my head pounding constantly… my body is aching everywhere… I’m exhausted from sadness…but more than anything… my heart. It’s crushed.

I am not without guilt. No matter how many people tell me. No matter how much I know. My body aches from the possibilities, which it never knew. It is exhausted from the wishes that were never realized.

Our last phone call was too long ago. I called you after a month or so of worrying. I wasn’t receiving your incredibly overwhelming and frustrating hourly calls anymore. My voicemail was just empty, a thing is had never known. “Hi Dad”. “Beta” you said while crying softly, “I knew you would call me. I knew”. Right now I can’t even remember the last time I saw you. But I remember so much. It’s painful to know that I will never see you again, never hear your voice, never wipe your tears.

Every time I could, every time you asked, every time I knew you had nothing and were alone…my heart has broken a thousand times for you, for us, for what was, what could have been, what never was, what always will be. The possibilities of it all.

I will always wonder why you didn’t call me yourself. From the constant barrage of calls and messages to the silence. It may well be in fact, that you knew. And you wanted me to survive. You wanted me to remain on shore. You knew that as much as I tried to believe that I wasn’t making a choice. I would never have not tried to save you from drowning. Maybe you knew it was too dangerous for me. I will believe that you wanted to protect me. You wanted me to survive. It’s part of a fantasy that emerges every time I see my daughter in the arms of her father, feeling protected and safe in the grips of his love. This is the place I will leave your final days.

DO NOT MOCK A PAIN YOU HAVEN’T ENDURED

You know Dad. I always had a dream for you. That you would not suffer. But it never came true in the ways I thought it would. In the ways I wanted it to, on earth. You never tasted the peace I dreamed for you. Would it ever really have been possible? For what possibility exists for a life of regret, loss and broken dreams. A life where every single day you felt alone, you were reminded of the greatest losses of your life. And where you could never find the way back. Lost. Your death. Filthy. Painful. Lonely.

But then I realized.

You were in your own space.

You were not hurting anyone.

Simple. Alone. Independent. Generous. Dignified.

And if I were to imagine your dreams, what would they be? I know one for certain. Perhaps the only one you had. The dream that, in the depths of your lonely suffering, you would call for me… and I would come. One last time. Every time. Again. And Again.

How do you breathe without dreams?

Maybe. Just maybe. You let go of that dream. And that liberated you from me. I was both the last breathe and a push further under. And my dream for you in this moment is that you got a taste of mercy from the depths of decay. And you knew you could let go. Of me. Of this world. And you walked unafraid towards the warmth, cleanliness and light. Submitting yourself. I hope the cold, dark, smell, fears, filth, the complete submission to the overwhelming possibilities of the prison of your senses has finally been set you free.

What do you really possess, and what have you gained in this life? What pearls have you brought up from the depths of the sea? On the day of death, your physical senses will vanish. Do you have the spiritual light to illuminate your heart? When dust fills your eyes in the grave, will your grave shine brightly? 

I hope you are enjoying your freedom, “the release of the spirit from the prison of the senses into the freedom of God. Just as physical birth is the release of the baby from the womb into the freedom of the world. While childbirth causes pain and suffering to the mother, for the baby it brings liberation” (Masnavi III:3556-60)

And for me.

You suffered. And created suffering. Your life. It is this type of life that seems at first to be the exact opposite of ‘a life well lived’. At many moments, well meaning friends expressed the idea of “Despite it all… Despite your difficulties… in spite of it all… look at where you are” and I understand it now, sometimes there are those amongst us that suffer for us. It is not in spite of… It is because of… It is because of your suffering that I have met compassion. It is because of your death that I now have tasted the beauty that is Mercy.

I can only hope that mercy brings her compassion to my lips so that I may taste the beauty of her promise, for myself. That when I am alone and I can finally journey to possibility, it is with promise and not only despair. My heart pulls me towards dreams of possibility. To the fantasy that possibility cries. And so I dream. And I mourn the impossibility of the fantasy. But perhaps, in your death, part of my suffering dies too? And so I wish to mourn the longing and fearful side of imagining, and to embrace the beauty of possibility in another time. In another place.

Set me free. Not so that I may run. But so that I may remain standing.

Be responsible with those hearts who have been entrusted to you. And for this, you will need to practice compassion. For yourself. And for those around you. Do not mock a pain you haven’t endured. And remember how lucky you are to have loved.

I GOT TO LOVE YOU.

And that is due to one person. A Women. Young. Determined. Afraid. Alone. Kind. Generous. Loving.

Asha ~ Mama ~ Hope.

You let me love him. Despite how hard that must have been for you. Your heart had to let go of so much to make this possible. I know now the strength that it must have taken. To trust the world. To believe in us. To know that the universe had a plan for us. You are the women I hope to become. You seemed to know so long before I realized it. Mothers know somewhere a sacred truth about their children, and must accept it in order to be free, “You are apart of their story, but you do not write it”. Thank you for allowing me the great blessing of feeling this pain. There is so much beauty in suffering. There is so much compassion to know. There is so much mercy to embody.

Two days before I found out I said it out loud.

“I’m ready. I finally feel strong enough. I am going to call him next week”

So I had to journey into desperate and painful places to heal my spirit from the unknown pain that I body carried and that which weighed so heavy on my heart. And just at the moment that I found myself at the shore, I looked back… and that is when it happened. you were gone.

Watch now the autumn leaves fall. Following the sacred rhythm of the earth. Knowing that when leaves die, the tree remains. We cannot resist that which cannot be resisted. We must let go of that which is not meant to remain. The tree when “well planted cannot be uprooted, and what is well embraced can not slip away”. Autumn teaches us to let go. Each new wind brings possibility. And as we rest this winter, remember that soon the leaves will sprout towards the heavens again. Nothing is lost. As they say, love never dies. It continues on.

Letting go in order to remain doesn’t mean stop dreaming.

Allow yourself to dream. And you will find possibility.

Show yourself compassion, and you will have tasted mercy.

There is beauty in all suffering.

You are beautiful beyond what you may have ever known.

You are loved so much more than you ever allowed yourself to believe.

I got to love you. And now that you are gone what does this mean for me? If part of me dies alongside you, does part of my suffering die too?

Sometimes I feel alone.

Sometimes I feel empty.

How do I fill this space inside of me where your suffering once laid?

I am not afraid anymore. I know she will find me.

spiritual theft.

For the past few weeks I have been taking a writing course through U of T’s school of continuing studies. The course was meant to teach memoir writing as a spiritual practice. Last week there was a guest speaker of sorts who shared with us her history as a writer. This woman began her 45 minute reflection by recounting her time as a hippie European traveller who braved ‘Muslim fundamentalist’ nations along her route, which ultimately led her to her beloved Tibet. In Tibet she was able to study in Buddhist temples and grow her spirituality, even prompting her to consider becoming a Buddhist nun (thankfully she reconsidered) because, as she told us, ‘even’ Buddhism was too hierarchical and patriarchal for her. So instead, she took her experiences and trinkets and decided to spend her life excavating concepts about the ‘divine feminine’ so she could teach us about how our languages were too patriarchal to liberate these goddesses from the cultures that they grew in. Ofcourse, the most difficult part of her writing journey, has always been that of having to ‘write about the broader context’. So all religion is inherent hierarchical and non-western cultures so patriarchical that she needed to purify them and teach them back to us. It was a violent experience. And when I called it out in the class, I was met with the silence of my peers, a half attempt from the prof (a SA women), and some solidarity for the guest speaker from a women who claimed she was Palestinian. This hurt my heart for so many reasons. I hope that if this reaches you, you can find peace knowing it’s okay to be mad, and to grieve the pain you have felt. and that you know that you deserve to determine your own analysis and not allow others to define that for you. Here is the letter I sent the professor after she wrote me, the ever so common, solidarity email behind closed doors. “I understand what your saying Alisha, let’s speak of them more informally one day”. Aka “let’s discuss this privately so I don’t upset the white people in the room”. I’m sorry for her too, sorry that you have to put on this performance. It must be so exhausting. I miss my YorkU people.

This is the type of violence we endure in the making of new age spirituality these days. And then today we are being asked to save Europeans from the facism they have cultivated. As Cesaire taught us, “…It is not the head of civilization that rots first. It is the heart”… and we watch in agony as the world runs to the rescue while we suffer and die with only a look of lust for more violence and bloodshed in our homes. And as Fanon taught us, “They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how”. Why would it? We can never be fully realized in this humanism. We don’t even have the ability or language to mourn our deaths. Ps. Sorry for the grammar and spelling. I just need to share this.

Dear Dr. R.P.

Thank you for your email. I didn't have the space to respond back right away. I needed to take some time to reflect upon what happened during our last class. I appreciate your comments contextualizing the remarks made by Hallie. I also appreciate your acknowledgement of how this affected me. Indeed, I would be open to discussing this further, but what does speaking privately do in regard to the very openly racist remarks that Hallie made without even missing a beat? I have made the decision to no longer continue on in the course, but I would like to just highlight for you a few of the reasons why her comments should not be so easily dismissed.

The erasures and sweeping generalizations she made are a type of discursive violence. This involves practices that script people or places in ways counter to how they define themselves but also it is about obscuring the very real power relations which shape the creation of knowledge about subordinated groups. I hope you will receive these comments from the place of love that they come from. It is a love from my community, from my solidarity with marginalized communities globally, and from those of us whose histories have been disfigured by the kind of physical and discursive violence wrought by colonizing powers. People like Hallie, have long 'travelled' to the 'exotic' spaces we call home, come back with their experiences and trinkets, and then with their Western, Orientalist gaze attempted to write their experiences as facts about who 'we' are, without context, without history, without an acknowledgment of the complex political, socio economic and centuries old civilizations in which they embark. We have long seen this narrative of the 'backwards', 'uncivilized' other (ie. not white) needing saving from the western (white), civilized cultures of Europe, such as those which Hallie acknowledged through her retelling of the 'route to Tibet'. She has even written explicitly, that our languages have distorted the truth of her beloved goddesses with their patriarchy. Reminds me of these comments from Buddhists in the US who hightlight that "Indeed, Asian and Asian-American Buddhist practices have often been dismissed as superstitious, inauthentic (yet authentically exotic!) forms of Buddhism. In mainstream white American Buddhist conversations, white Buddhists are often heralded as the erudite saviors and purifiers of Buddhism. This perspective exemplifies the subtle enactments and overwhelming hubris of white supremacy. In positioning a certain type of Buddhism (white) as better than other kinds of Buddhism (Asian, “folk,” “baggage Buddhism”), the white ownership of Buddhism is claimed through delegitimizing the validity and long history of our traditions, then appropriating the practices on the pretext of performing them more correctly.” I hope you can see that this isn’t because she is precisely writing about Buddhism, but about the use of these spiritual concepts through her lens, which has empowered them and giving them the ‘right’ type of usage.

The problem that I would like to highlight here is one of many that I could bring up, but I will focus to just give insight into why this was particularly problematic and needs addressing. She began her talk discussing the route she, and others in England, used to take to Tibet, during which, she had to stop in 'Muslim fundamentalist countries', where women, including herself were treated 'very badly'. She then proceeded to tell us a jumbled-up story of her great admiration for Buddhism generally, and for the great Buddhist monk and activist, Thich Nhat Hanh. She then told us that she even considered becoming a Buddhist nun, BUT she stopped when she realized that even her beloved Buddhism was too hierarchical for her. Let us pause for one moment here. Hallie, a white Western women coming only a decade or less after the decolonization of spaces around the world that were colonized and destroyed by Europe, and with the rise of US imperialism around the globe in its place, to come appropriate the concepts that suited her and take the sacred knowledge of centuries old traditions and teach it back to us 'natives' by liberating us from our inherent inability to challenge hierarchical relations. Also then we must pause to take in the extremely orientalist, racist, Islamophobic generalization of the 'Muslim Fundamentalist' nations of Afghanistan and Iran. I would have appreciated context, nuance, some historical references, but instead we got nothing, and when she told her story further, she even mentioned that her colleagues asked her for more 'context', to which she replied, "I never wanted to write that part". I think it’s very evident how problematic this is. I tried to share with the class the rich histories of Iran and Afghanistan where women have played prominent roles in the all levels of society and have undergone significant political shifts in large part because of outside political intervention (The fact that I have to share such a basic insight, is also such so disheartening). But I won’t go further here now. If you would like more insight, I am happy to share with the class how Islam is not inherently oppressive to women, since it seems we are a group of intelligent people that seem to have no problem with the statements she made.

Orientalism, as Edward Said taught us decades ago, highlights how power and knowledge operate together. In the work of Foucault, we see that “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relation.” In Foucault’s opinion, power emerges in the mechanism of discourse, operates in the functioning of discourse, and reflects in all kinds of relationship, even power itself is a kind of relationship. Discourse regulates in the inner and is endowed the inner with order and meaning, that is to say, it is endowed with meaningful power in essence, which could enter into the specified order. Power governs discourse and is governed by discourse at the same time. So Said says “knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world”. The Orient in Orientalism is fabricated by the Westerns, is the distortion of the true Orient, which shows that Orientalism is the product of power. So, what determines Orientalism is a kind of powerful knowledge, something of pure academic, it becomes something ideological" (Zhoa, 2013). Furthermore, aside from the obvious problematic nature of her comments, understanding Orientalism also means acknowledging the ways in which this power is used to generate understandings of the 'other', the 'orient'. And this is precisely why knowledge generated about the 'other' needs to be contextualized with history. "Said ultimately decides that Orientalism overrides the true Orient and negates its truth. As far as Orientalism is concerned, the Orient cannot speak and it needs to be represented.

Hallie operates in a tradition of white feminists who have appropriated sacred knowledge and concepts from their roots, and ‘white washed’ them to suit the needs of the West. Even great figures such as Thich Nhat Hanh are not off limits. After all he was an activist, living in exile, who was a great ally to Martin Luther King, the champion of civil rights and equality, who was also a preacher and began his activism from the church. The idea that Hallie has a better perspective on the history and possibility of 'religion' than the actual HISTORY of these spaces is just beyond problematic. These men were leaders in religious communities fighting for equality, challenging hierarchical notions of power in society. So generalizations that all religions are hierarchical is just absurd. Furthermore, the idea that religion and culture is also not differentiated is also such a basic concept and idea that it was painful to sit through and have to listen. I come from a tradition of radical, third world feminist scholars, critical race theorists and others working to challenge power and inequality from a historically grounded, critical and feminist lens. To allow Hallie to participate in a class about spiritual writing, means that I must not understand some kind of common assumption on what type of discursive violence is allowable in this space. I realize that this space is not the right fit for me.

My writing, poetry and reflection has always been about taking the pain and trauma of our communities and ancestors and understanding the deeper spiritual pains and connections we continue to inherit and persevere through. I realize that there is a big gap in my knowledge about this concept of 'divine feminine', and so I apologize for what I do not fully know, but these insights are about the talk she gave.

I wanted to add a few articles that help to articulate this type of discursive violence and appropriation. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-erasure-of-islam-from-the-poetry-of-rumi https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/young-asian-american-buddhists-are-reclaiming-narrative-decades-white-rcna1236 https://www.lionsroar.com/weve-been-here-all-along/ https://www.lionsroar.com/the-many-faces-of-cultural-appropriation/

I hope this has provided you with a better understanding of where I was coming from with my comments. You may feel free to share this with the class if they are interested in why I am no longer able to continue in the class. Thank you for taking the time and energy to read this reflection on the experiences of the guest speaker you brought. I hope you can accept that this is not an attack on you, but from a place of deep love for creating spaces of learning that are about challenging violence and creating opportunities of healing that are revolutionary in nature and not those which reinscribe power relations which continue to diminish our possibilities for real freedom.

With love, Dr. Alisha Ticku

the defence.

"It is written". It has been almost two months since I have written anything. February 15 of this year I defended my PhD in the most beautiful, affirming and inspiring fashion. With so much love, positivity and commitment. My committee, and my supervisor in particular always made me feel confident but my external examiner truly set the tone for what came of that day. I passed with the best possible outcome, it truly was a dream. And it came on the heels of some of the most confusing and blurred days of my life. In the weeks leading up to the defence, I was making calls and promises for my Dad. Every. Single. Day. And I got so consumed, so quickly and so impossibly. I couldn't see a way out, and I couldn't stop falling deeper. But I had no choice but to show up. To keep my promises. To myself. To my supervisors. To my friends. To my family. To my subjects. To my study. And so I did. And I was elated when it was done. Dr Ticku. It happened. Finally. After all these years, after all the tears and setbacks and obstacles. I did not just exist, I was made to persist and finally to triumph. I have too many people to thank. When people asked me "how does it feel?" I didn't know what to say in the days right after. I was happy I think, but it hadn't hit me yet... but it has started now and that explains my absence. I didn't have much to say because I've been busy living... and loving... reflecting... taking stock... this time last year I was paralyzed in fear and panic, suffering through a painful set of realizations... I never imagined a year later this is where I would be... so back to now, I found this print last week as I busied myself rearranging and refreshing my home. My obsession with colour and light and ordaining my family space with beautiful affirmations of life, both the painful and the beautiful... something I very much needed. The feeling of being 'done' is absolutely like a huge weight being lifted off my shoulders, I feel proud and humbled, I feel motivated and peaceful in a way I haven't felt in a long time... or ever.

“Mama, wake up. Wake up, Mama”

I begin in the most transformative moment in my life. Not the moment when I promised to share my life. Not the moment when I became a mother. Not in a moment of accolade or condolence. Not one of anything, to anyone, for anything. Except for me.

“Loss”

“Loss?” (Recounting the only word I heard).

The doctor repeated, very matter of fact. “Yes. Loss”.

“As I said. It is very clear that you are afraid to experience the same Loss that you have experienced throughout your life…”

In that one simple word, loss, my whole life was changed. I instantly became a child whose world was chosen for them. I felt afraid, helpless and innocent. I felt it. In both times. In the past and in the present simultaneously. I saw my mother lying on the floor, on her side, pressing her tears into the floor,  hoping they would drown him. She was very much broken and defeated, yet, as always, ingenious. It is he who haunts me the most.  The greatest tragedy of my life. And it truly is as it is said, “One of the hardest things you will have to do, is to grieve the loss of someone who is still alive”. For me it is this, for others it is preparation for the inevitable, or for the unimagined. We are connected in more ways than we know.

“Mama, Wake up. Wake up, Mama. Please”.

I saw a child kneeling next to the face of a mother, curled up, playing dead, playing done, you won.

My whole life has been conceptualized as a series of survivals.

As a series of non-choices.

Of necessities.

You did what you had to do, to survive.

To literally stay alive.

I learned this from the ultimate of survivor in my world, my mother. From a lineage of women before her. From journeys past, haunting the living. Immigrant geographies are not simply dreams from point A to B, they are historically embedded in the violence that engenders dreams of survival. In the genealogies that accompany geographies of migration. In mapping these journeys, we can simultaneously ‘unmap’ the histories, legacies, and lived experiences that make dreams possible. Those of battered women and drunken men, of imprisoned and impoverished masses, of broken promises and failed dreams, of colonial dislocations and systemic inequalities, of poverty and labour, of patriarchy and racism, of realms of possibility, and the nightmarish pain that awakens.

Loss

It happened sometime around February, maybe March. It doesn’t matter exactly when. What matters is that it took so long. It matters that I did not know what I was missing. I pressed my lips into the softest squish of a cheek with the sweetest scent. Into a being of which I am a part. As I pulled my lips back, I realized it. It was my first time. It the first time I kissed my baby. It was too many months into his life.  We shared a proximity that cannot possibly be any closer, and yet, here I was having never laid my lips on his delicate face. When I think back now to that moment of realization I cry for the pain I felt but did not know until then. In the moment however, I smiled from my stomach. From deep inside. From the gut. I did not feel bad. I felt relieved. I felt so full. I felt thankful.

Without the pain, I would never have realized the weight of his generosity. My son, Kareem (الکریم‎‎ [1]), you have given me so much more than you will ever know. You triggered in me the pain I felt, but did not know was there. Deep. Hidden. Unconscious.

Your gift was my pain realized.

Loss

My Dad (not to be mistaken with ‘real d.a.d.’, ‘real’ to denote biological from the limits of a child’s vocabulary, and d.a.d. to save new phone numbers from someone who I know is my father, but I am not sure about). A different man. A different ‘father’. Gentle. Kind. Eccentric. Genius. Living in his beautifully unstable world. How much pain he must have felt. Diagnosed and medicated, sometimes sedated. Delicate and beautiful collections of dead butterflies, du Maurier special mild cigarette hanging from one side of his lip, Grolsch on his office desk, rips in his Fido Dido pyjama pants, soldiering iron in one hand, acoustic guitar in the other. As a child I felt wonder, beauty and kindness. And then, simultaneously, I was afraid, angry and resentful. I did not know what I know now. I could not have known. But I wish I did that day.

I looked into the backyard through the glass and saw his figure sitting upright in a chair, ciggy in hand, talking. Talking and talking and talking. I stayed. I starred. I searched. No one appeared to me. I went upstairs angry. In the evening I was forced to take a ride from him to my soccer practice. On the way I interrupted abruptly in the midst of his conversation about finding God or realizing something monumental and asked,

“Who were you talking to today?”

“No one”, he said. He hesitated.

“Sometimes I get lonely”.

I wasn’t supposed to know. But I wish I did. The things I would talk to you about today. The things that we would share. The tears we would cry together. I could never have known the weight of all of that pain, but I always wished I did. And now I do.

Loss

She said I experienced tremendous loss as a child. That was loss she said. Not my choice. Not my fault. Something was taken from me. I never saw him again. That was 2002. It’s 2016. I am 32. That is a little less than half of my life and it still hurts like a fresh wound.

Transformation of Lime Butterfly ( papilio demoleus )

My daughter loves caterpillars and butterflies just like he did. She is mesmerized by their movement, shape, colour and ability. Children know the true captivating beauty of nature, as with each new encounter their world is entirely transformed. They have so much to teach us.

I understand now why he was so delicate with their beauty, as caterpillars embody something so powerful. They do not know what is coming, or perhaps the knowledge is in them all along, either way they must remain faithful.

Trusting, believing, living, evolving.

 ‘And just when the caterpillar thought the world was over,

it became a beautiful butterfly’

And the butterfly is so beautiful because it carries with it the unknown possibilities of things it cannot know then but feels now. It carries with it a genealogy that is embedded in its being.

Loss

Anxiety. What a painful, miserable state of being. Not only a state of mind but an all encompassing feeling of overwhelming proportions. A set of possibilities, of impending fears, of what ifs, of unknowns, and endless imaginings, leading to the intoxicating dreams of sedation. The months that followed the birth of Kareem were some of the most painful moments in my life. I was drowning and I was looking for anything to stay afloat.

 “God. If you take this away from me,

I promise I will never take not feeling this for granted.

Please. Help me”.

It is not necessarily being a mother that made me feel this way. It is being a mother who carries a genealogy of loss. Who carries pain that has not be realized.

“Loss”, she said.

I have never conceptualized my life in this way. I have never thought back on anything that has happened in my life and thought that this happened to a child. As a child I always felt it my responsibility to protect us, to hold doors closed with one hand while they are being broken down, and press the security button with the other. I never knew how inconsequential my efforts were, I always imagined myself to be a factor. So back to the word loss. It hurts and heals simultaneously. It hurts for that child and for the mother. And it heals, as it allows the child to be consoled by the grief they are entitled to feel, the pain they felt but never understood. And it heals the mother, the women, the daughter, for the pain she feels now, from the hurt she felt then but did not have space to feel, from a place she did not know she would be, into a future she can not yet imagine.

Loss

“You are afraid to experience the same loss that you have experienced throughout your life with the thing you love the most right now, your children.”

 I literally love something so much that it hurts.

And I love them so much.

And sometimes it hurts so so much.

I have said it before. And I will say it again…

I am overflowing with tears and fears.

I am so grateful and so scared.

I am so happy and I am so terrified.

I am so thankful yet sometimes, I feel so trapped.

I am so in love, and so tired, frustrated and sometimes sad.

“Mama, Wake up. Wake up, Mama,” and so I have. Living a dream, awoken by a nightmare.

Thank you my sweet Kareem, you truly are generous in ways that you do not yet even know.

As I mourn these ‘new’ losses, I am brought to the most beautiful words I have ever felt.

I hope that the memory of this pain remains, so that the weight of these words never fades.

 It is a burden and a blessing that I wish to bear

again and again and again.

IWD you say…

Reflections on International Women’s Day.

I think it’s an opportunity to reflect on how far we still have to go. 

For me, motherhood has been the most incredible and suffocating experience of my life. How can something you love so much, both give so much and take so much. Giving you life in reason and purpose, love and joy & simultaneously suck every last ounce of energy and attention, involving so many sacrifices with the power to stifle you and rewire your entire brain. But a huge part of this is about the intersections of motherhood, patriarchy and colonialism. 

I will never forget when the secretary in my PhD program was helping me prep the room for my defense, and I was saying I don’t think we will have enough chairs for the guests, she turned, with no malice, just genuinely problematic and unconscious bias, “Are you the first person in your family to get a PhD?”. I heard, “For you ‘people’, that must be a really big deal”. Yes. Yes ma’am. It is a big deal. A huge deal. The biggest deal ever. You see I come from a fractured home, riddled with immense violence, precarity and sacrifice. Where the lineages of colonial dislocation and impoverishment pushed my family into situations of immense precarity. Where the best chance was to come to the metropole, to escape the ruins of what your ancestors stole, disfigured or destroyed. Still, I was raised by the fiercest, most incredibly determined women this earth has seen. Resourceful, confident, full of fire and passion to succeed, never allowing the patriarchy to silence her voice or tame her spirit, building a life, not just ‘on her own’, but amidst immense violence. You ever had to fake labour to save your baby and yourself? Ever have to pack up your kids in the middle of a cold winter night to escape? Ever have to drop your babies off 11,625 kms away to come back and try and rebuild your life, only to have one of them not come to you when you came back for them, or never go back to take care of your own mother because you were hustling to strive. The ‘problem’ is, she did not only survive, she sought to thrive, but this journey involved many sacrifices, too many to ever fully comprehend. Suffice to say. Yes, indeed, a PhD is a big deal. And not because we are incapable. But because your opportunities were afforded to you, your parents, and your parent’s parents directly because of the immiseration your lineage wrought on our communities. And still today, you continue to profit off of our misery in your ivory towers. 

But then, here I am. Lucky to have been guided by incredible women of colour who mentored me and supported me and believed in me. And to have made friends who loved me, laughed and cried with me. But then, I as many women do, finished school at the same time that I was ready to have children. No one warned me about how hard it would be. No one advised me to wait or to plan ahead. Except for one encounter with a male would be committee member, who asked me my plans for after I finished, to which I remarked, “I think I would like to focus on my family for a bit”. He scoffed with a look of utter disgust and said, “Oh… Well… Too bad. The first few years after you finish are critical to your career”. Suffice to say, he never invited me to any other special department events.

I was PISSED. But he wasn’t lying. He was actually telling me the truth. Maybe he was warning me. But I was too pissed at the patriarchy seeping through this remarks that I couldn’t see anything beyond red. Years later I find it almost impossible to mother and accomplish any academic work. I am capable but the work demands of me things that I can not offer right now, and that I often question if I will ever be able to give. And because this equal playing field is fair and doesn’t offer any exceptions to the rules…HA! JUST KIDDING. Exceptions are feeling entitled to opportunities and jobs, to walking into rooms and never having your knowledge or experience questioned, never having to take extended breaks or sacrifice your body to create and nurture life, never having to come face to face with haunting traumas with the power to destroy further generations, never having your mind fall beyond your grasp directly because of the pressures and triggers that emerge in the post-partum period, or never having to miss a deadline or opportunity because of the demands of mothering. But that aside, there is no acceptance or understanding of these ‘extended’ breaks. There is no support for those of us who, for various historically implicated reasons, cannot or are unwilling to sacrifice our mothering, our time or our energies in favour of our would be academic work.

I remember once my mama said to me, “I want you to work because you want to, not because you have no choice”. So, do you understand how it feels to have grown up with the sacrifices of a single mother who had no choice but to NOT be there? And why one might favour this as a privilege not found in the survival strategies from where we emerged. Something we fiercely protect and are committed to. There is often no space for us to have both. We have to choose one or the other, but never both. And God help us if we choose both. We will continue to be penalized and asked why we have fewer publications, fewer conferences, fewer awards and accolades. But never will we be seen for what we were able to accomplish amidst the impossible work of mothering and healing intergenerational trauma. Never will the sacred work of healing this pain in hopes that it will not be inherited by the next generation in the same way be seen or appreciated for its impossible level of sacrifice and hardship. Never will mothering amidst considerable hardship and ongoing violence and trauma be understood for its level of courage and commitment. But why wait for a system built on our exclusion to accept us, I suppose. Except that, for many of us, that piece of us is missing and without doing the work, we will always feel the weight of what needs to be done. Because it is important and necessary work. I have had to also shift my perspective in the last few years, to see my mothering as apart of my activism, and to accept our survival as revolutionary in an of itself. 

For me, genealogies of colonialism are imbedded in the intergenerational traumas which we inherit. More specifically, motherhood for me, has come with immense challenges. It has pushed my mental health to new and terrifying places, and the colonial genealogies haunting my family have surfaced in dramatic twists. Not to mention, I graduated in the middle of all of this survival work that I needed to do and heal from, to hopefully avoid passing on these traumas. Although sadly some of this I already know has seeped through to them. So, finishing the PhD with two toddlers by the side, caring for my aging alcoholic father, experiencing a traumatic childbirth followed by immensely painful post partum anxiety, having to heal to survive amidst this difficulty, only to graduate with immense honours, only to almost simultaneously grieve the sudden, inevitable death of said father, whose care I neglected in favour of my own graduation and survival. 

All of this to say, I am deserving and capable but that the institutions surrounding us do not support these realities which we may face. They are patriarchal in their operations and gendered in their exclusions. Being the first one to graduate with a PhD is a great accomplishment for the entire family, and a testament to that mother, before me, who sacrificed so many of her own dreams to pave the way for mine. But it also reminds us of the problematic nature of these exclusions, the histories of why we may find ourselves in these positions, and how the colonial inheritances we face shape the possibilities for us to succeed without substantial changes to address these imbalances, and in particular, the gendered nature of these exclusions and how they may disproportionately impact women, and mothers more specifically. 

I see you. 

MORE LIFE mamas.

Mothering in Precarious Times

How do mothers navigate ‘colonial inheritances’? How does the ‘burden of persistent colonialisms’ shape our work as mothers, our dreams for our children, families and communities? What genealogies accompany our journeys into motherhood? How do these histories shape our work as mothers? What does it feel like to mother in precarious times?  Under conditions of immense instability, social, cultural, economic, physical, mental… spiritually. How do we entrust the world with our babies? How are we forced to believe in imagined good, hope and justice? How does it feel to be forced to believe in the possibility of life over the catalogue of injustices that are killing our babies (both young and old)?

A week ago, I was getting ready to drop off one of my babies to school, and I came face to face with both my immense privilege and the dangers my babies will continue to face for being who they are. It was “Punish a Muslim day” as proclaimed by white supremacists in the UK, a day to get their revenge. It was vague and infuriating. Anxiety inducing and terrifying. Confusing. One of those many moments as a mother where you question yourself, what are my instincts saying? Am I being overly dramatic? But.
I was connecting this call for violence to one of the most dangerous crisis we face today, the fragility of white masculinity. And then to the groups of people targeting Islamic institutions in my city. Those who tear pieces of the Quran and spit and scream on its sacred knowledge to show us just how much they hate. It. Us. Fears. Anger. Insecurities. Frustrations muddled into emotional rants on the dangerous ideologies it  ‘promotes’ they say.

What does mothering look like in this context? We woke to an email from our school’s administration alerting us to the additional safety measures they were taking that day. We messaged each other, sharing our fears, comforting each other, encouraging each other to be brave, to trust in that ‘imagined good’ we are forced to believe every time we let our babies out of our grip. The school told us of their plans to monitor the situation closely. They would audit the security system and maintain rigid entry policies, and they had alerted the local police, who would increase their patrol in the area. Okay, I thought. They are taking it seriously. I pushed myself. I questioned myself, are you overreacting? I was thinking of how many mothers in the America have lost their babies to military grade assault weapons ripping through their children’s schools. I watched as male teachers and administrators paced the premises, on the look out for suspicious people or vehicles in the area. I had to consider the possibility. This fear is not unfounded I told myself. I could not deny the very real possibility. Is today the day a coward comes to an Islamic school to hurt our babies, to show us how much he has been taught to hate? How will I teach my babies about these people? They want you to know how much you are not welcome here, that you don’t belong here.  Hmmm. Peculiar premise. Remember when your ancestors rounded up Indigenous children, and ripped babies from their mothers and forced them into a system where they are stripped of their identities, and violently sexually, physically, mentally and spiritually abused, all under the sanction of the state, and will full support of the law? But you’ve reconciled that you say. The government apologized for God’s sake, and they don’t even have to pay taxes. Do you know how much free stuff they get? (lies.).

I was afraid to leave my baby. But I had to do that thing that all mothers have to do. I had to remind myself that even though I am apart of their story, I do not write it. I can not control everything that happens in their lives. Even though I will never stop worrying about them. Even though I will fight with every ounce of my being to protect them. As painful and fruitless as that may be, I cannot stop.  As I dropped of my baby, I thought of the police presence they promised. Where are the cruisers? Privilege. It woke me up.
How do Black mothers fare in these times? How have they survived generations of exclusions, in a system based on denying them their humanity, through institutions set up to segregate and police their bodies? How have they raised proud, outspoken, compassionate babies in the face of such immense historically embedded violence? How can they raise their children to respect these institutions, and to feel protected and safe in the presence of those same institutions who continue to senselessly murder their babies without any consequence? As I hugged my baby extra tight, but not too nervously, making sure she heard my “I love you”, I thought, what if every single time you sent your baby out into the world, wait, I take that back. It doesn’t matter where they are. It doesn’t matter what they are wearing. It doesn’t matter how educated they are. It doesn’t matter how much you warned them. They can not escape the ‘fact of blackness’ that leaves their bodies riddled with as many bullets as they have lived years on this earth for playing on their smartphone in grandma’s yard.

As I leave the parking lot, I scan for suspicious cars. My friend told me she drove by her daughter’s school four times that day. Don’t be so dramatic creeps into my mind. I admire the bravery of my Hijabi sisters. But at least it’s not America. But wait. No. What does that even mean? Isn’t this the country, the same place where a shooter open fired in a Mosque murdering people while they prayed? Quebec is five hours away, not an imagined, “this type of stuff doesn’t happen in Canada” distance away. Wait. Isn’t my city the place where a group of people stood outside a high school screaming at children for their worship of a God they claim instructs them to … wait, what is that again thing we are doing? Oh. It’s those dangerous ideologies they are being taught. Mamas, we are on the frontlines of raising our babies into those warriors they fear. Those beautiful Muslim babies whom we hope to raise into powerful, outspoken, humble, compassionate, dignified, just and kind heroes. I will do everything in my power to equip them with the relentless determination to exist, persist and triumph. And I will do everything in my power to love them with all of that ferocious and  frightening determination you imagine I am aiming at your ‘freedom’. And everyday I will send them out into the world, terrified for them, but never allowing them to be scared, only bravely holding their heads high as the bold warriors they are in my eyes. How are those Palestinian mothers raising those babies under occupation? Under  those not only stealing land, but rewriting history in their favour, and those mothers who must continue to endure, not only physically through the pain and force of occupation, but the psychological and spiritual struggle of those who face attempts at being erased, attempting to destroy their very will to exist. How do they raise those Ahed’s of our day, proud, firm, afraid but brave? How are they forced to raise these babies into fighters, in order to survive, from their very first breaths?

I think of my son. My sweet brown boy who will be raised in a world that is afraid of him, who believes him to be a threat. Because I can only hope with everything in my being that he will humble himself to prayer, he will give charity, and show compassion and free himself from the destruction power of ego and the forces of vanity and consumerism that will try to kill his spirit. What is that dangerous to? Who is that a threat towards? What kind of ‘freedom’ does that challenge? Today I stopped at a grocery store to grab some coffee pods. I passed by a locked case of medicine in the middle of an aisle. Behind the plastic shields and cold locks I saw Children’s Tylenol for cold and fever, Advil, and  Motrin. What about those mothers who have been forced into a situation to take Tylenol or formula for their sick or hungry babies. We have some very real problems we need to collectively face if this is our reality.

In the hours before I picked up my baby I thought of all those mothers who have to make the choice of filthy water, or none at all, sending their children to school under bombs, letting their babies play in the street where they could be killed by police for being the wrong colour, in the right or wrong place, for having something or nothing in their hands, for covering their heads or not, for speaking back or not being able to speak, or God forbid having a mental health issue. Where mothers must persevere when their children are committing suicide at crisis levels because of generational trauma that they can not escape, or where our babies can be killed by military weapons in their elementary schools, or families who live in fear of being ripped apart because of their ‘status’, or for our turban wearing brown bodies who can be beaten for reminding them of our otherness, or all of our babies who are judged, dismissed, bullied, erased in their everyday lives. Oh Mothers. I pray for you. “May every tear that has every fallen from your tired eyes become a river for you in Paradise”. That generational trauma, those inheritances we have to choice but to face. I feel it. I am anxious for all of these realities for our children, but I also feel the painful loss of our fathers, brothers, husbands, friends, our men. I mourn the generational trauma that forced my father, a child of internally displaced peoples on the move courtesy of colonial division, to drop out of school and find ways to survive. To migrant for that ‘better live’ that he suffered and drank through, everyday except Sunday, my mother’s favourite day of the week, she tells me. And who beat the mother of the children he loved more than anything, relentlessly. And who died rotting and decaying surrounded by the vile filth and vermin we allow to trample the people most vulnerable and desperate amongst us. But wait. Those newest government funded research projects that have created innovative programs to help. We can help! They cry. They fund. They study. They fail so many of us. Maybe we need to ask why so many of us are ‘falling through the cracks’… How can we rely on those same institutions that were created through our exclusions? To be more direct.  I am fed up with waiting to be saved by the very same institutions set up to kill us. I don’t know what comes next. But I know that we need to start showing up for each other. As mothers we know the struggle of feeling each ache and pain alongside our babies, and we cry in pain over having to entrust the world with our children. Knowing they were never meant to thrive under these conditions, and hoping and fighting for them to survive. But. We can teach our babies to stand up for what is just. To take responsibility over leaving the world in a better state than we received it. To live righteously, honestly, compassionately, especially towards that which they do not understand. If this is radical then so be it. I have no other choice. I am a mother, I can not stop believing.

“Whosoever of you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then [let him change it] with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart — and that is the weakest of faith.” (Sahih Muslim)

surviving in the year 2017.

BEST REALIZED THROUGH A JUVENILE RHYME. NOT ONLY TO KEEP IN LINE WITH THE MENTAL POSSIBILITIES OF THE TIMES (OUCH.). BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY, AS A REMINDER OF POSSIBILITY, FROM THE BEAUTY AND CAPACITY OF CHILDHOOD. FROM WHENCE WE CAME.

feel. deal. heal.

heal. feel. deal.

deal. heal. feel.

“There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt” (Lorde, 1984)… and so my wish for us all is that beyond the lie of coincidence, we may see how it is both written, and simultenously, waiting to be realized.

I am finishing this from a place I have not been before…

I can not stop counting my breathes.

I can not stop thinking of each one I exhale.

It feels as though I have let it out so far that each new breathe comes in a panic.

a little too late, but just in time.

Each breathe I exhale feels as if it will be my last.

and so with that, I remind us, “do not mock a pain you haven’t endured”.

IT IS WRITTEN.

One afternoon two years ago, on the way to drop off food and money for my D.A.D., a friend called asking for the title of my blog which he was helping to create a website for. I did not yet know the audience for which I intended to write. I hadn’t much imagined it. How to come up with a title, for a purpose I consciously knew little about? Still, I spoke it out loud,

“What about ‘drowning in dreams’?” I nervously joked, “ I know it seems dark, but does it make sense?”

He replied, “It’s perfect actually. It is the right kind of weird”.

Neither of us knew what exactly it meant, or what this project would be about. We hadn’t discussed its subject matter. The intent. The purpose. But we both knew it made sense. Somehow, in some way, we knew it was right. And so, in a sense, it was conceived before I had ever typed a single word. 

FEEL.

I hadn’t given much thought to what drowning in dreams might actually mean. I knew I felt uneasy referencing drowning in a time of tremendous suffering for those being swallowed up or washing up on the shores in their last attempts to flee ongoing violence and displacements, but as I see it, none of us are outside of these realities. We are embedded in the making and unmaking of violent ongoing realities, which shape diverse experiences. We are complicit in upholding systems that continue to support and make possible the senseless violence which continues to bleed our planet. Perhaps, this is best considered through the ideas of ‘genealogy’. Those genealogies, histories, legacies, processes, that accompany geographies of migration, through which we may all be merely trying to survive. So many of us are drowning from the legacies, and ongoing violence of colonial and imperial conquest. So many of us are just trying to stay afloat.

DEAL.

The first few posts I wrote were also from a place of tremendous pain. They were extremely difficult to write and experience together simultaneously  But it had to happen. I felt as though I was drowning from the weight of so much loss, at a time when I was so terribly needed. This is the unaccounted, intangible work of caring that so many mothers feel. The fact of being needed so incredibly much, and the inability to escape it. Your heart beating outside of your body, forever. Vulnerable and attune to each ache and possibility. The overwhelming love of it all is also an unbearable pain and immense weight to carry. In the midst of all of the pain, it began happening.

HEAL. 

‘Drowning in dreams’ is dominated by ideas of overwhelming sensations. Dream interpretations center around the fear of being overwhelmed, whether by difficult feelings, emotions, anxieties… possibilities. Additionally, it has been conceptualized in relation to struggling to survive as a person. In this sense, it is simultaneously about the anticipated ‘fear’ of/or the potential of a feeling, set of emotions or anxieties, and also about trying to exist alongside these ‘fears’. Some have suggested that dreams about drowning can also be productive in offering the dreamer hints to search their waking life for what can be seen as threatening or burdening. It is beyond ironic that I chose this as the title of this project. Actually irony seems to imply happenstance. Which this is not.

IT IS WRITTEN.

For as long as I can remember, the most frightening nightmare I have had, on numerous occasions, is related to drowning.

It is the image of a building on the shore of a vast ocean where the waves are growing and growing at such frightening depths to engulf all that is in their wake. The infinite height, depth and weight of the water is terrifying, and the fear is two fold.

It is first centered on the sheer magnitude and potential of the waves/water themselves, and secondly, about the fear of being completely engulfed, immersed, powerless. I have had this reoccurring nightmare for many years of my life, never able to grasp the meaning. Until now. The signs were there all along, but it is only now that I am able to start piecing it together. I couldn’t have known what I know now, then. 

HEAL.

In January my daughter, four years old, starting piano lessons. It is absolutely fascinating to put this in conversation with my academic work. I find myself reflecting on the power of the mind to balance and oscillate between, amidst and through multiple levels, layers, mediums, aspects. Learning music involves so many layers and levels of understanding, so much simultaneity and multiplicity. Students first begin by numbering each finger, matching these to notes, developing this through repetition and reimaging them through notes and connecting that to their fingers. Reading music while engaging their bodies to physically play. Balancing tempo. Counting beats. Playing in unison. Learning notes. Reading notes. Writing them. Composing them. Linking the body to the mind with conscious intent, all with children who cannot yet read a complete word. It is unbelievably beautiful to see them engage in such complexity at such a young age and it begs the question as to why as adults we seem to have such limited cognitive or imaginative abilities most of the time. It is as though the more we know, the less we can envision. It is as though it may only be one or the other, not both, not all, not a lot, at once for conflicting reasons, embedded in genealogies, histories, geographies, simultaneously in the past, present and future. Not to say, everything and nothing. But to encourage us to think in multiplicity, complexity, nuance.

Concentrate. We sung.

People are dying.

Children are crying.

Concentrate.

FEEL.

“IF WE FEEL THAT THINGS ARE CALM, WHAT MUST WE FORGET IN ORDER TO INHABIT SUCH A RESTFUL FEELING?” (PUAR, 2007).

Are we living a dangerous dream, which we might only hope to be awoken from?

I remember a time about four years ago after I had my daughter where I exhausted to a breaking point dealing with my dad after having become a mother for the first time. I sought the help of a professional… we weren’t vibing enough to build a relationship, but within fifteen minutes of speaking she said,

“Why do you feel so guilty for loving him? It’s okay you know. You are allowed to feel that way. The first thing you need to do is stop feeling guilty, or bad about this feeling you have”.

Just as the all encompassing wave cries. Show compassion. For your pain. For yourself. For Others. It’s okay to feel. There are so many of us, trying to survive our lives while suffering greatly, in largely unconscious ways. But giving ourselves space to feel might be that first step, necessary in order to deal. To dream of a time where you may in fact, heal. Allowing compassion to guide you to a knowledge, made possible through pain, into a world which you are connected to profoundly. And so they say, the end is simultaneously the beginning. But healing does not erase. It is not something emerging out of nothing, of complete newness. You retain roots, connections, linkages, depths, and… maybe these are the threads that allow us to know the true beauty that anyone who has been brave enough to feel their suffering, knows.

Mogahed writes about the ocean as “breaktakingly beautiful” (45), but notes, it may be just as beautiful as it is deadly. “Water, the same substance necessary to sustain life, can end life, in drowning” (45). She connects worldly life as the ocean, and our hearts as the ships. She explains that we can use the ocean to lead us to our final destination, but the ocean is only a means, it is a means of seeking a higher purpose, “Imagine what would happen if the ocean became our end – rather than just a means” (45). Thus,  she explains, as long as water stays outside of the ship it will continue to float, but if water starts to enter into the ship, it begins to sink.

In my reflection on my recurrent nightmare, the waves can be apart of that ocean which reflects this worldly life. It is those very real painful realities that torment the swimmer. Perhaps it was a message all along to fight the very urge to be consumed by worldly matters to which you lose control to and are ruthlessly at the mercy of.

DEAL. 

So what are these dreams in which we may find ourselves drowning? Dreams represent in many ways an experience beyond our waking consciousness, ‘imaginary’, or ‘imagined’, beyond our reality, without boundaries. We are ‘free’? While this idea of freedom is largely located in spaces of the subconscious mind who is able to unless in the safety of a dream state, a la Freud and Jung. In popular culture, dreams have been considered aspirational or motivational and as part of imagining more, better or different worlds.

Traditionally conceptualized (in Eurocentric accounts) as related to the ‘subconscious’. Beginning in the psychoanalysis, dreams have been dominated by thinking that views them as part of unconscious desires (Freud, 1913). In another way, neuroscientifically, dreams are considered as mere responses to changes in brain activity (Hobson and McCarley 1977), while in popular culture, dreams are understood as imaginative experiences of waking life that feel like a dream, a state of mind that represents a release from reality, a vision resembling a dream life state, something notable for its beauty, excellence or enjoyable quality, a strongly desired goal or purpose, something tied to the fulfillment of a wish. And before this, for centuries before, dreaming has been linked to spiritual, supernatural, Godly forces. Often seen as divine messages, as spaces for the divine to communicate. And interestingly, today, in the most contemporary work on dreaming, scientists argue that ‘dreaming’ which is linked to sleep, is productive and necessary at many levels, and has implications for conscious, waking life.

Despite the many interesting ways that dreams can be conceptualized, the power of dreams in general cannot be denied. As many have argued, dreams have no boundaries and this makes them significant worlds of influence, allowing us to imagine things beyond our current realities, and inducing desires towards future attainment. Sounds important to retain, but also significant is the possibility of what ‘productive’ work dreams may provide. To consider this we can ask a basic, yet profound question as to why we dream. Some scholars note that there is no one reason but rather a number of theories that span many disciplines such as psychiatry, psychology and neurobiology. For some, the idea that dreaming is linked to memory processes, and can be seen as an extension of waking consciousness such that we may reflect on experiences of waking life as constituting a space where we can work through difficult, complicated or unsettling thoughts, emotions or experiences. Even more interesting is dreaming as linked to sleep. This is conceptualized as a cycle, culminating in Rapid Eye Movement (REM), the space where the most vivid, ‘real’ dreaming occurs, and as it happens, where modern science has erased the divine, we find connections in current work on dreaming. In which many cultures understood dreams in profoundly different and more significant ways for living. They have been considered as spaces for healing and for understanding the future (Patton, 2004). As Patton explains, ancient cultures saw dreams as part of “enigmatic parable”, highly valued, and often see as potentially divinely sent “fraught with meaning about the future, and having the potential to heal or offer solutions to life’s biggest problems” (Leddy, 2013). Thus, dreams were understood as spaces of healing and had the potential to impact waking life. From these early conceptualizations, explanations for dream content formed the basis of most, early theoretical insights on dreaming. For the most part, psychoanalysis dominated this thinking (which occurred well before the discovery of REM linked to modern brain science), explaining dreams as part of repressed desires (Freud), and complex reasoning in relation to mythic narratives (Jung). This thinking is seen in opposition to contemporary brain science which largely challenges the idea that dreaming is “meaningful, privileged, and interpretable psychologically”, and rather argues that dreams are the “simple reflection of the sleep-related changes in brain state” (Hobson, 2002, 1-2). BUT. since the discovery of REM sleep, researchers such as Winson (1990) have explored the neuroscientific aspects of REM sleep and memory processes together. For Winson, dreaming was very meaningful and significant and related to memory processes, a process through which we form survival strategies and evaluate current experience in relation to these strategies (Winson, 1990). Thus, dreaming here is a reflection of an individual’s strategy of survival, where the “subjects of dreams are broad ranging and complex, incorporating self-image, fears, insecurities, strengths, grandiose ideas, sexual orientation, desire, jealousy and love” (Winson, 64). Winson therefore argues that the characteristics of the unconscious and associated processes of brain functioning however are very different from what Freud thought. Rather than being solely about untamed passions and destructive wishes, he argues that the unconscious is a “cohesive continually active mental structure that takes note of life’s experiences and reacts according to its own scheme of interpretation” (Winson, 1990, 67). Thus, rather than disguised consequences of repression, their unusual character is a result of the “complex associations that are culled from memory (Winson, 1990, 67). Dreaming can therefore be understood as a form of consciousness that unites past, present and future by processing information from the past and present as part of preparations for the future.

Interestingly, during REM sleep, the state in which the most vivid dreams are experienced, the inhibition of spinal motor neurons by brainstem mechanisms that limit motor abilities is also simultaneously experienced, and thus REM sleep is also defined as “an activated brain in a paralyzed body” (Carskadon and Dement 2011, 19). While in REM sleep “motor neurons are inhibited, preventing the body from moving freely” (Winson, 1990, 59), “eyes move rapidly in unison under closed lids, breathing becomes irregular and heart rate increases” (Winson, 1990, 59). Thus, when we dream, we feel our freest, when in fact we are paralyzed. Building here, some scholars argue that REM sleep in fact constitutes a may constitute a proto-conscious state, “providing a virtual reality model of the world that is of functional use to the development and maintenance of waking consciousness” (Hobson, 803). As he explains, waking consciousness is defined by awareness of the external world, our bodies and our selves and the awareness of our awareness, however, “When dreaming we are also consciously aware; we have perception and emotion, which are organized in a scenario-like structure, but we erroneously consider ourselves to be awake despite abundant cognitive evidence that this cannot be true” (Hobson, 2009, 803). Thus, when we dream, we wrongly think that it is real (lived), as they are abstractions from fully lived conscious reality. Dreams are thus, both lived and imagined simultaneously, but we all face the problem that all dreamers and dreams face, which is the “failure to recognize its own true condition, its incoherence (or bizarreness), its severe limitation of thought” (803). Thus, dreams conceal and potentially ‘hide’ aspects of their reality. However, as Hobson highlights, dreams also can reveal and have implications for full consciousness. He explains that some argue that the connection between sleep and psychology is tied not only to the mere deprivation of sleep, but the denial of dreaming (occurring in REM sleep). Specifically, he argues that this is the most detrimental force in triggering cognitive deterioration (Hobson, 2009, 803). Dreams, are therefore understood as a necessary counterpoint to our conscious state, whereby as Hobson argues, the “integrity of waking consciousness depends on the integrity of dream consciousness” (Hobson, 2009, 803). Thus, “what we may need to navigate our waking world is an infinite set of charts from which we may draw the one best suited to an equally infinite set of real-life possibilities” (803). Hobson asks, if REM sleep precedes dreaming, what happens before dreaming appears? He argues that the brain is preparing itself for consciousness, “a lifelong process, an innate virtual reality generator, the properties of which are defined for us in our dreams” (Hobson, 2009, 803). Thus, dreams are both a necessary component for our conscious state and are implicated in our lived realities, and are simultaneously, inherently limited in their inability to recognize their state for what it is. Significantly though, dreams are as much preparations for waking consciousness as a reaction to it. “We are as much getting ready to behave as we are getting over the effects of our behaviour” (Hobson, 2009, 803). 

Interestingly, just like sleep, dreams are also vulnerable to disruption from mental and physical health related problems, seen at times, in the form of nightmares. At once, that which seems outside, the nightmare which can not possibly be the dream, is in fact both outside and within at once, embedded into our everyday, expressed in our anxieties, manifest in our relationships to each other and to spaces.

In addition, as we can see in popular culture, for individuals dreams have been tied to values and conditions of possibility, as escapes, as aspirational, as powerful motivations, as goals, and as ambitions, but they may be simultaneously nightmarish, stressful, disturbing, frightening, recurring, haunting.

Understanding our connections to ongoing pain in the world and violence in our everyday realities, fear and suffering in our lives, we need a deep, nuanced, historically grounded genealogical approach that allows us to uncover the dependencies and relationships that shape the everyday realities of a diverse people. Dreaming therefore is significant as it is the most “universal, enduring aspect of being human” (Breus, 2015), and thus we might ask about the influence of dreaming in our waking lives, and whether there is any way that dreams might help us live better. There are views that support the idea that dreaming is a creative portal and new studies argue that dreams may assist in daytime functioning, whereby “… dreams may be fertile territory for influencing and enhancing our waking frame of mind” (Breus, 2015). Therefore, dreams are not only abstractions but have real, lived consequences in our daily lives (Hobson, 2010). “dreams provide us with insight about what’s preoccupying us, troubling us, engaging our thoughts and emotions. Often healing, often mysterious, always fascinating, dreams can both shape us and show us who we are” (Breus, 2015). Dreams can show us who we are. They can expose us to our most vulnerable. The dream of drowning was a necessary nightmare for me that was waiting to be realized. And in another way, it is important for us to consider how to survive in the year 2017 with compassion and dignity, to expose the many ways in which the dreams of some are built on the nightmarish realities of others.

Collectively, we are witness to atrocious levels of violence on a daily basis, in its balanity, as a permanent feature of our lives, and sadly, in order to survive, many of us believe that we must distance ourselves. But dreams have something important to teach us. As dreams connect the past and present for futures, so to do we hold in our existence, genealogies. Dreams, both imagined and lived, in their multiplicity and diversity, implicate historical genealogies that undergird contemporary, present, lived realities, and these shape the possibilities for futures. Perhaps, we must accept the painful anxieties, which torment us as part of a process of both implicating ourselves in the atrocities of today, and simultaneously understanding our pain as part of our journeys, as part of the genealogies, which accompany us, and as apart of the journeys that may heal us.

And to those breathes…whose count I can not stopping keeping. the weight of which feels impossible to escape. thank you. for the reminder of the burden and blessing. Of the dreams which we must be held to account and for the breathes without which we can could not exist.

And so, as the innocent rhyme shows us,

ALLOW YOURSELF TO FEEL.

PUSH YOURSELF TO DEAL. 

WORK TOWARDS BEING ABLE TO HEAL. 

But don’t forget that sometimes you must also,

CELEBRATE MOMENTS WHERE YOU HEAL.

EMBRACE WHAT IT MEANS AND JUST FEEL.

AND WITH THAT STRENGTH, MOVE TO DEAL.

And one day,

ONCE WE DEAL.AND COLLECTIVELY HEAL.

WE JUST MIGHT FINALLY FEEL OUR DREAMS COMING TRUE.

But, we will be written into history one way or another, so in order to survive the year 2017, we must remember…

“The truthfulness of dreams is related to the dreamer”.

 Coming next… “A significant thing: it is not the head of a civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart” (Cesaire, 1955).