Rupture wears out our selfhood, our identities and relationships, only the well loved fray at the edges and yet, fray edges call for repair.

I think of Japanese kintsugi and I think of patchwork as processes of repair that reinvent objects rather than try to force their original form on them. In most of my daily encounters with other adults, mostly my parents and siblings, I’m the othered one. I keep trying to think of this as their way of loving me, a preference to force some shape on me that I resist, because I am no longer what my original form was.

Rupture and Repair

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about repair and relating. In the past two years, I have been invited into spaces where rupture has happened and was calling for review and renewal. This is after my own personal rupture of divorce, my own failure to relate after so much harm has been done, too much for my system to compost without support, at least.

And yet, I’ve entered these spaces with sleeves rolled up and a readiness to undam the very murky waters of relating. Restoring the natural flow of water will very likely initially cause damage, so we need to bank our rivers.

I acknowledge that my inclusion in these spaces comes with an effort to do better and I know that to do this part, I need to be very careful to not recreate the othering I come from.

There are no teams here, there are just people who chose to stay and others who chose to leave and no one choice is more noble than the other. Both choices are honoring and honored. Steps for successful repair post rupture are very simple and for now, it’s a trifecta of refraining.

1. Refrain from othering

2. Refrain from division

3. Refrain from suturing

On Neutrality

I don’t come to any of this from a place of neutrality. I have opinions. I have preferences. I’m not available for woke speeches and inauthentic expression. My current definition of inauthentic expression is all expression that borrows language from pop psychologists and new age spirituality to create “boundaries” that put it on other people to meet - in doing so, we’re expecting other people to do the work of not triggering us or overstepping our boundaries. It becomes the other person’s responsibility and I think our activation is our own responsibility to handle.

I use archetypes and themes from cards, astrology and myth to contextualize, I like to identify and recognize patterns to create my own cartography of things. And again, this is just a framework - useful but has been invented and can be discarded or dismissed.

Tension leaves me feeling queasy. Disagreement is not something we’ve learnt how to be with. In groups that have learnt the “correct” ways of communicating, the “civilized” words to use or the “right” structures of conflict resolution, people tend to resort to statements in response to conflict.

Statements are static, words create a barrier between the person, the group and the incident itself and to rush towards repair in that case creates even more harm.

To express discomfort is valid, and to express that without offering a pathway towards how you want to deal with it or to storm out of the the (metaphorical) room wouldn’t really be adding much, in fact, it would be removing your (potentially much needed) opinion, feelings and experiences from the room.

There’s a caveat here, too. Dialogue can drag. Dialogue can continue to pick at the scab and it can actually be the antithesis of repair. It ends up being a recollection of all the things that didn’t work - I don’t know what I would want to do instead, but definitely not that.

Resourcing and Support

As a social being, by virtue of being human, I need council to survive. The council I choose to engage with is a council of imaginal beings, ones that have access to outrageously unrealistic scenarios and realities, because I would otherwise lose my mind.

taught me to use pieces of paper or cards to represent the different beings that want to be present, I invent them at times.

What I am learning right now is to not seek answers but rather stay with the question while remaining curious about what emerges. It’s testing my patience and my need for certainty. And this is especially testing because my whole life is one big mystery at this point.

I’m about to turn 39 and I still don’t have the slightest clue - this is far from what I had imagined for myself as a young adult picturing what my almost 40s would be like. And perhaps the answer to my questions would come through imagining what they could look like because I’m not there yet.

Imagining always holds (some) information.

Relating is hard work. Bonds require work to build and even more work to maintain. While I would have preferred for it to be easy, maintaining relationships and relatability through the ever changing kaleidoscope of being alive is not as effortless as mass media wants us to think it is.

It’s much easier to cancel someone, to cut ties, to declare that you’re no longer in alignment with how they choose to live their lives. Which, too, is very valid - but should never come as the knee jerk response, you know?

I wrote this thinking about the role of a “man” in my own context. I’m Arab African and there is a lot to be done to fill that role: a lot of responsibility, a lot of expectation and a lot of power that is given if you are a man. Most men I know never really received any training to handle this much unchecked power. They assume the macho without the man. Giving us a flimsy cartoon character of a man who won’t even shave his armpits. 1

The same could be argued for the role of “adult” and the same could apply to the roles of “priestess,” “teacher,” “coach,” “guide” and “facilitator” which we see a lot of online and much of it is sold to us.

We’re placing most of our attention and effort into claiming the role rather than defining the role for ourselves. We have hundreds of examples of people we think/ judge/observe as successful in a role we desire for ourselves and we mimic their behavior, hence the use of “cartoonishly defined” we end up mimicking sketches of a role instead of studying and defining it for ourselves.

Getting a tad bit personal with this

I come to this thought with a lot of resentment as a parent where my co-parent isn’t filling the role I expect him to fill. So when I enter this relational space of engaging with my co-parent, I’m met with a vacuum.

And to fill that void, to me, is emotionally and physically taxing - simply, because I’m holding other roles. This is how women end up carrying most of the emotional and mental load of care work. There’s often a need/space to be filled existing in relational vacuum: women are not being met where the need is.

We’re not being met when the person we’re engaging with isn’t filling the role they’re assuming. So it’s a cardboard version of a role and not the role itself. It’s fragile and far from sturdy, it can’t hold much, let alone meet the other where they are or offer a space to lean on when an exhale is (so very much) in order.

The Ritual of Meeting

We have no template for that ritual of meeting. Yes. Meeting is a ritual.

It requires reverence and part of any ritual is the preparing for it. This is where I’m guessing the research comes in.

It’s the backend work of defining the role for ourselves, as opposed to spending too much time defining and setting our boundaries. We need to think of the very substance of the role and what it entails first before deciding on the container or where the boundary is set.

When I engage with a person who assumes the role of a man, who’s engaging with their masculine, I’m expecting them to hold some container for my feminine chaos to fill, I have defined that for myself as: the soft serving and tending at the altar of relating.

But instead, I have to offer the do, do, do which I use to serve at the altar of capitalism. but at the altar of relating, I give it up, I sacrifice the do, do, do and ask for the altar of relating to take and transform it for me, and in the process, I am changed and transformed.

What unfolds after this is a new and evolved role.

So when we don’t fill our roles, we’re recreating the cartoon versions of role and that’s why I think as a generation (aging millennial here, hi!) we’re stuck. We’re navigating life as Peter Pans in adult suits and we wonder why life is so hard and why we feel so lost.

Scripted Relating

One of my teachers would always say:

To me, what’s been made up has been imagined, and what has been imagined can be imagined differently or otherwise.

And so when we come to relating with the scripts of somatic experiencing, nervous system regulation, boundary holding or nonviolent communication, it’s important to remember that these frameworks, while useful sometimes, have been invented and might not even be relevant or contextually appropriate in most cases.

If we rely on frameworks to script the human out of the conversation, then we’re not relating, we’re simply performing and have a serious case of shallow interaction that would, at best, leave us wanting of depth and care.

I had an ex who would always police and judge my tone (and mood) oscillation as “disregulated” which sounds eerily similar to how the colonizer has judged colonized expression as savage. Having experienced years of this, I ended up being a shell of a person, regulated, yes, but empty.

And this is where I make my case for feral spaces - but that’s story for another time.

Weaving my work into the story

I’m a facilitator of the expanded spiral of the Work that Reconnects. Among the main themes in my work are care, repair, relating and imagining a world where many worlds fit as inspired by The Zapatistas. And not just a world that works for some and not for most others.

To me, imagination is the greatest ally towards liberation and liberation could look a hundred thousand different ways. And in how I imagine this work, I imagine the very intimate act of braiding someone’s hair. My daughter’s, my son’s, mine and my sisters’ of blood and spirit…

it can never look anything but intimate. You’re holding someone’s hair, trying to not get it tangled in your fingers, sectioning, bringing together - and this is how we work with the three timelines of who we are to bring forth (back?) a reality that works.

There’s the thread of who and where we are, what we’re going through and what grievances we hold. There’s the thread of where we come from, our different lineages of land, spirit, vocation, craft and our lore - what these bring with them, the shoulders we stand on, the shoulders that have turned away and the ones that collapsed under the weight of the world - they are all important. they all add to the story of what’s to come.

From here, we add in the third layer that makes the braid and that is what we want to witness and be surrounded by. To me, this is the hardest part. To come to terms with what we really, really want, this is where most work is required.

WORD STUDY IS GRIEF STUDY

In this season of life, the words I’m studying are love, reverence and alight and how they can come together to rebirth me as a human in service. That is my personal work in this season, with the last birthday of my thirties fast approaching. As I sit with what reverence is and what alight could feel like, how can a heart love so deeply that it’s set on fire?

There’s grief there. A lot of it, a grief of the shedding, a grief of loving and giving up the wanting. (which reminds me, I am actually studying to become a grief facilitator!)

To love so much it brings you forehead to floor and what this means, how the tears taste different when the heart is alight and not broken, is a journey I’m about to embark on. I’m asking for it to be soft. May it be soft. May it be a softening.

OFFERINGS

Facets of Being focuses on the social location and self awareness stages of the expanded spiral of the work that reconnects and it is very relevant to what I am thinking about in terms of cardboard roles and cartoonish identities. Yulia and I explore the global disparities in power and privilege and that journey reveals a lot to people - including ourselves - as we journey through the spiral of the work that reconnects.

This is the second iteration of the workshop and the first time we held it, I was left with the question of: what if liberation didn’t have to mean a loss of privilege? People with power and privilege fear collapse and the liberation of those with less power and privilege because it implies a loss of privilege. And what if it can look otherwise?

Spiral Journey Facilitator Development Program

I’m a graduate of this program and it continues to change my life. This is my second year facilitating this program with a wonderful team of facilitators and applications are open until August 15. I would love if you apply! Most of what I know about facilitation I’ve learnt from this program.

LATER THIS YEAR

For the sake of accountability and focus, I wanted to share what I am currently working on for later this year and early into 2027.

• Thawing the Freeze of capitalism as a multi-month course

• A 6 week workshop on cultivating currents of care with a full day in-person event in Cairo

• A year long course with a membership payment structure to explore imagination for liberation because I’m realizing that there’s just so much to fit in there and to try and cover that in 6 weeks is doing it a disservice.

If you’ve made it this far with this piece, I just want to thank you.

I have no capacity or desire to hold the guilt or fragility of people in the North of the North. I have no time to hold space for the explosive and entitled behavior of radicalized people (of color in Western contexts, or westernized by liberal ideology) who, yes, have been subjected to many -isms, and still fail to notice how the colonizer has infiltrated their behavior. 

If you’re going to name how you find something harmful, I expect you to stay with that and explore alternative paths forward, backward or sideways. 

I don’t identify with being underprivileged. The definition of harm/privilege we’re using is one based on the metrics and meters of capitalism and extractive modernity. It took me years of being in love with development economics before I realized it was built to extract even further from economies it’s trying to “develop.”

A woman in a niqab, the second wife in a farmer household was the one who showed me that without even realizing it. I don’t know her name but she changed my life. 

I am cushioned by never having lived away from my home country and have no ongoing experience of discrimination - that’s if we’re going to leave sexism aside. I’m aware some people who have experienced a bouquet of discrimination might feel dismissed by my blanket statement, and this is what intersectionality is for.

People who have been uprooted, people of color who get to live the whole experience of being people of color, making homes of new lands where they are the minority will disagree with me.

And there’s room for disagreement, being of a different opinion doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve reached a relational dead-end, there’s an Arabic saying for that: 

الاختلاف في الرأي لا يفسد للود قضية 

The lack of privilege I experience is more of a global nature given my natural curiosity. I reach for things that are of interest to me, online courses, for example, and I am automatically disadvantaged because of the larger systems at play: 

• Exchange rates (a currency so weak, it’s embarrassing) 

• My nationality (a passport that can virtually get me nowhere without a visa) 

• inconsistent income by virtue of being a single mother, where the formal labor market is built to have us outsource our parenting. I can’t seem to shake off the guilt of having to write this. The heaviness of being privileged enough to be given a house to live in without having to pay rent. 

• Being poorer than my family of origin and my past peers had me withdraw by virtue of not being able to afford the same things, or having different priorities. I've missed weddings because of this. 

• Living under an authoritarian regime all my life

I know this will ruffle some feathers and it’s a bit scary, so for the sake of offering myself some comfort, let me list all the ways I think I’m right anyway.

I’m right anyway because I’ve lived far from material security for long enough. I have survived abuse of many flavors. I have had the golden spoon snatched out of my mouth. I come from relative privilege but I’m pretty much upper middle class and have gotten used to a few comforts and have had them taken away one after the other. I’ve actually experienced downward socioeconomic mobility.

For context, let me tell you about my defiant bus ride.

On the overnight bus back from Dahab, pregnant with my second child, a bus I very defiantly booked after I missed my flight and frantically tried to book another with my (then) husband in the car. Our five year old watches as the tension escalates, our rotting dynamic unfolds, the finale being my pregnant breakdown with my father on the phone in the car as I report on all the things that hurt me that week.

Back to the bus — I was listening to a podcast where adrienne maree brown spoke of the imagination and systems of oppression. They were saying that even the most oppressive of systems were originally fashioned by someone’s imagination.

Imagine what that person was like and how genius they thought their plan was, to come up with something like capitalism…?

I put my hand on my second trimester belly, this wasn’t the life I had planned for, it wasn’t what I had dreamt for myself as a child. This definitely isn’t the life I want for myself and my children.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped dreaming. The heaviness was all I could experience and hearing those words, with a human growing inside of me, I could feel a rekindling of sorts, a spark of hope tugging at my heart. Something whispered:

We’re at rock bottom, but do you know where we could go from here?

Anywhere. 

It was the hardest thing for me to believe. Hope was the furthest away from where I was at the time.

I’m right anyway because this is a choice I continue to make, I choose to not make my relative poverty be a source of bitterness or holier than thou-ness. I choose to make it a nourishing, fortifying place for my imagination to thrive.

I choose this place at the periphery that I inhabit to be a place of warmth and welcome, to experiment and explore where our edges are and where we remain stuck and rigid. 

I choose to live in this house on the crumbling cliff of modernity and build a slide for safe landing into what comes after, I imagine it first, complete with cotton candy clouds and butterflies and all the rainbows. 

And from there, I begin to build. 

The little child in me is excited, the very same child who pretended to mix potions behind pretty floral curtains, looking out my grandmother’s big windows, with a silhouette of the pyramids watching over me. 

I’m right anyway because I stand on the shoulders of giants, benevolent, they teach me, maleficent, I offer them healing. 

Their advice to me, an Arab, was to read the pieces so I can understand the nuance of what’s happening in the region (where I‘m from and where I have lived all my life).

My impulse was to leave the space, slam the door shut and leave the room or start yelling at that person. But this was on WhatsApp so my dramatic exit wouldn’t have been so dramatic.

Arabs are loud and we love to yell, especially if you grew up in my house. Our debates are hilarious in that sense, we’re also famous for throwing shoes are people.

I was not willing to educate that person in any way. Their high horse, their ivory tower, their complete ignorance just made me really angry. And in that moment, I just wanted to poke them. Like a child, that’s how angry I was.

The Empire would send soldiers. Agents of Empire send a link to a badly-written article that assumes it knows your lived experience better than you do, via a passive-aggressive white woman. (swimming in oblivion)

In that moment, I had a decision to make.

I was beginning to notice that being part of international or global online spaces had me revert to dynamics that I wasn’t proud of, a dynamic of assimilation. I was forgetting who I am and what the lands I’m on represent, what stories they held and what the layers of history meant for me and my body.

I wasn’t going to outsource my authority anymore. There was no more waiting for someone to hand me some of their authority so I can become relevant.

I’m not one to wait around for someone to save me, but that wasn’t always the case. On a macro-level, I know that governments are not here to serve the people, governments are here to serve the empire, so I never rely on them to offer any support in that sense, if you come from a country where systems never worked, then you know what I mean.

When people started talking more about collapse, I began to tap into the possibility of imagining that those of us who’ve lived through collapse their entire life were actually coming from the future. This is how the Not Yet Lab came into being, now called Imagination for Liberation.

And still, I hold the question: whose collapse? and when did it start?

On a more personal level, I was always waiting for someone to save me. It wasn’t until I was going through a very distressful event, with a 6 year old and another child under 1, and I called my mother with no response, I called one of my two sisters, again, no response. I called my brother, no answer. I texted my other sister to tell her what was going on and she sent our sister to come pick me and the kids up. I was shaky. I was in a not so functional freeze.

I later found out that the people who didn’t pick up were out of the country together without telling me and it was then that I realized that no one was going to save me. This sounds like it works against my belief that we can only do it together – but we can only do it together in functional communities. Dysfunctional communities crumble, they’re toxic, so that’s why my work rests on the foundations of togetherness, it’s not always explicitly expressed, but it’s built in, in a way.

Because in a functional, healthy community, I wouldn’t have to hold my phone, scared for myself and my children and try to call several people several times before someone comes to take us to a place where we felt safe.

I wove that in what I imagine the communities I desire to be part of look like. I imagine that I would have 2-3 people who would know that if I call more than one time in a row, then there’s something up and that I’m not okay. Or maybe a code word. Because things like this happen. It’s easier to imagine a world with no conflict whatsoever, or one where everyone feels safe all the time and we all live in blissful harmony. But that’s not realistic. That doesn’t even qualify as wishful thinking, that’s just detached and irritatingly utopian.

I come from a background, value system and set of beliefs that ask of me to move beyond the hurt and into possibility for repair. 

What comes after this section names abuse but not in specific or explicit ways. Yet I needed to mention it here so you know what you’re about to read.

I collapsed into my broken couch, dumbstruck. I’m sure I looked like I was about to pass out. What I had just said played over and over and over in my mind and it sounded too familiar for my liking. What just happened came from my mother’s parenting book. The words I said were not mine. They did come out of my mouth, but echoed the chambers of my memory. My own body could taste the old fear.

I felt so disappointed in myself. I felt the doom descending upon me. 

I am a bad mother.

I’m traumatizing my children.

My children will not forgive me for decades to come.

My mother’s guide on how to raise children is very different from mine. It broke me and whenever I would try and discuss this with her as a grown up, she would blame it on my being an annoying child. On being unsupported. On being sick. Or, worst of all, on her being a failure and that this is the way she is and there’s no point trying to change things now.

Moments after the roar of a threat came through my mouth: if you don’t do this, you’ll get that. I felt a mix of shame and dread yes, but I also felt an inkling of compassion for my mother.

(Reader please gasp.)

My mother raised 4 children with an absent husband, a young medical doctor trying to provide for his family. And I am raising two very active children with an absent ex husband always off somewhere following his whims and no one to say “hey leave the kids with me, you can go enjoy your day”

The compassion creeping in on me left me even more disoriented, adding to the disappointment I had in myself as a mother, I now didn’t even know how to identify.

A big part of my identity is built around the tension I have with my mother, the strain that comes with being around her, the strenuous effort it takes to not snap the moment she says something.

My mother hurt me. My mother abused me. How can I even feel any semblance of compassion towards her? Who would I even be if I didn’t have that kind of relationship with and to my mother? 

(The answer is I have no idea)

I think it’s obvious that I’m a wounded person. As a writer, I engage in a lot of navel gazing because it helps me understand what I’m going through and digest what I’m experiencing. 

I exist in the mirrors that others offer me, I don’t know who I am outside of those mirrors of relating. 

So everything I have to write offers that: my perspective, a perspective.

And as a wounded person, it’s hard to be aware of other people’s wounding and how that affects their behavior. It also makes it hard for me to see the ways I can bite, or have bitten or snapped at people out of fear of being hurt (when it was not defense) 

What I’m trying to say is: I, too, have hurt people and one of those people is my ex husband.

I can’t see or admit that unless I distance myself enough from my story.

I noticed how he experienced that very same dissonance at a family gathering when someone was trying to take a picture of us and our kids.

He kept trying to ruin the picture. Move out of the frame, speak, disrupt the moment being captured in any way he could without making it seem obvious.

And it was because I was married to that person for 7 years. I could tell.

I imagine what was going on in his mind at that moment: we can’t be happy, I’m trying to be happy somewhere else and if I’m happy with her in a picture this would ruin an entire story I’ve been trying to build in my mind since the divorce.

I could be wrong, but I’m most probably right. 

I guess when we leave ourselves at the periphery and center other things, the story changes. And when we’ve built our whole existence around one story, something shifts.

We unravel.

And I don’t know what comes next

It wasn’t easy. It was sometimes even embarrassing — with my kids storming into the room as we debriefed, sometimes it was funny — like when I found out my daughter stole popsicles from the kitchen freezer and sat on the stairs savoring them.

It was scary at times as well. Like when someone knocked on my door because I hadn’t been returning their calls. That person, I had no relationship with and I had to lock the door to feel safe. I had to enlist the help of people I barely know and ask for advice, for help.

But because I did, I also made a new friend. Or two, or many.

Friends who challenged my go, go, go tendency. I can do this, I can carry this alone, I can do without receiving because there’s not much to be received anyway.

What assumptions.

I made friends with an island on the Nile, too.

What if I could allow solar, masculine force to not be harmful, to evolve beyond being penetrative and disruptive? What if I can attune tot he magic in photosynthesis? The sunlight transforming into carbon is all things magic and I think I have overlooked this for so long. Sunlight doesn’t refuse to shine on a person whose behavior is subpar and chlorophyl doesn’t refuse to transform sunlight that shines on countries ruled by tyrants.

But when sunlight and chlorophyl meet, nourishment is created for the entire Earth. Not just humans, not just me, everyone. All beings.

What if I am chlorophyl that has been trying to intellectualize the process of photosynthesis and hence robbing it, stripping it off of its magic, stealing the wonder from the entire process?

January has ended and here we are, almost a week into February already. You can miss home when you’re away from home but how do you remedy missing a home when you’re supposedly home?

I think I’m ready to finally admit that I don’t know how to make a home, my children don’t like spending time in our house, well, unless they’re coloring or making crafts. Our furniture is falling apart, pillow covers fraying, we have two towels, two bed frames with no mattresses, and I think I’m finally ready to admit my failures in that front.

You see, the same sun shines on us all and yet it is not the same cloud that floats above us. The waters change and so do we, maybe we truly are changed by the waters we drink from, maybe it is true that the Nile brings you back to it. The Nile chooses who gets to come back and I am not sure what it feels like to be chosen by such a great being. Yes, water has memory.

I just apologized to a friend for feeling overwhelmed by my yearning. I feel thankful to have friends who I can tell that to — who would see my yearning for the weight and shape of it, as a valid reason to withdraw because I cannot go on in that way. I cannot lift it alone and it’s hard. It’s heavy and I am sure we are meant to hold it together.

But these friends are far and wide, yes, but mostly far. Too far, in fact. Dispersed like dandelions and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing but on days when I want to be seen, heard and witnessed in my yearning, it is very, very lonely.

I thought my yearning was for newness and hence the title of this piece but I guess my yearning is for familiarity — to be known by someone, by a few, perhaps, in all my unfolding and becoming. To be known through the unfolding and becoming.

To be able to say that you need someone, to feel safe enough in the vulnerability to actually need someone, to accept and acknowledge it.

We start on January 31st and you can join us here.

register here

To me, there’s a reason why you (like me) feel like your life belongs to someone else.

Could it be that you’re trying to fit in a mass produced life?

A one size fits all?

If yes, then it’s only natural that you feel uninterested, disengaged, stuck, cynical and just bleh.

We weren’t built for pretending like you’re after the same ctrl + c dream of (capitalist) success that someone else dreamt up 🥲

You could be a facilitator, a healer, and regardless of the hats you wear, you’re a dreamer who’s just tired of having to convince everyone that there’s room for hope in this world…

So you just unplugged and stopped the dreaming altogether.What we need aren’t utopian dreams of the future but rather thrutopian ones, because we’ll need a means to get there.

want to join?

When we imagine and rehearse it, troubleshooting whatever problems might arise, we sail there more smoothly.

We have permission to dream and not be bogged down by capitalism, by our hyper-awareness of the faultlines, cracks and faults in the system. In fact this is our driving force, it’s where change begins!

Imagination for Liberation follows the journey along the Work that Reconnects Spiral, as developed by Joanna Macy and expanded by Mutima Imani, to help us find our way beyond despair in what are otherwise desperate times.

Yearning.

I’m sitting with a lot of heavy yearning that’s weighing me down with such immense longing for something I don’t even know.

There’s an emptiness that I cannot bear to sit with. It rained today in Cairo.

And the stuffiness that it has left me with is unbearable. I couldn’t bear the smell of rain, I couldn’t perceive the freshness that comes after rain.

What I was left with was the melancholy of rain. And no, I’m not speaking of rain as would an emo person, where they’re the tears of the skies. They’re not.

I can’t find my tears either.

Yearning comes to visit late at night and it keeps me up, I want to sleep, I say and it has complete disregard for my wish.

Can devotion and desire share space, I ask, it just looks at me, blank.

How long can I last like this? Again, that blank look. Hollow, devoid of any message that I can sit with or interpret.

Do you even know what I’m talking about? Does anyone even speak the language? I can’t help but think of Avril Lavigne lyrics from my high school days.

It’s a damn cold night, trying to figure out this life.

won’t you take me by the hand, take me somewhere new,

I don’t know who you are but I, I’m with you.

My daughter hasn’t breastfed today and it’s about time. She turns three this month - there’s a lot of tenderness that I hold around this and I wonder if it’s related.

I’m writing this as I would a blog post in the early 2000s — ah to be young and free — but was I even free?

One of my teachers speaks of freedom as the freedom from the whims of the (small) self. And I think about this a lot. A lot of the trouble that I’ve gotten into was a result of following my reckless whim thinking this was my “intuition” and I have come to believe that intuition has the softest of all nudges.

Yes, sometimes if not most, it’s persistent and it nags until you finally do the thing, but it’s always soft. And I guess that’s the whole point: to soften. To soften and not have to grapple with life and modernity wants us to believe that we have to.

I’m not trying to say that it’s all smooth sailing for it is definitely not. I’m not trying to argue for abandon either. We do have to earn some things, spiritually at least. We have to put the work of remembrance so that we can actually remember.

There’s a lot of romanticizing that comes with spirituality and it gives it a bad rap. It leaves the essence of spiritual practice glossed over and commodified at times.

But what if the yearning is spiritual?

What if I can welcome this kind guest as my companion in this phase of life? A single mother of two children who is trying to learn, to be a better human, trying to share her thoughts with others. What if yearning and longing are by design and what if belonging is a vocation?

Can we belong together, my yearning and I? Can we belong together, my longing and I? Can we belong together, my desire, my devotion, the chaos and I?

Is the yearning just stillness in disguise and if it is, is there joy here?

Having a topography to certainty, almost certainly means that there is a topography to uncertainty. A village, and a garden, both have uncertain terrains. And the same applies to digital spaces where there is a lot of uncertainty (and perceived safety). When we interact with one another from the safety of wherever we choose to be from, behind a screen, there’s the actual aloneness to it.

We are, in fact, safe in our own room, alone or surrounded by people we feel safe around. The space we’re tuning in to being delivered through speakers sometimes even directly to our ears.

There’s a lot of safety here, a lot of personalization, so much so that we forget that there’s another person - or several - at the other end of it.

Joanna Macy and Molly Brown talk about the three stories of our time in Coming Back to Life, these stories are Business as Usual, The Great Unravelling and The Great Turning. These are spoken about and contemplated even further in the upcoming book Coming Together in the Great Turning.

As we live through collapse, or the Great Unravelling, what’s happening is that we’re trying to find all the ways we can cope with it. Collapse is not a one-time event, it’s a process. It’s happens simultaneously on the collective and personal levels and we all experience it differently.

In liberal and progressive space, there’s a lot of effort to try and make sense of it and cultivate safety for all as we go through times of great despair. And as someone from the Global South, I experience that as a lot of policing. A policing of expression that feels like yet another form of colonization and oppression that has the current of disparity run even deeper.

I’m not sure if this manifests differently if you’re someone outside of the US, I have a feeling that this is a US centric thing, but I can’t tell.

This has me thinking a lot because there’s this very specific way of being, talking, acting that will deem you cultured and offer you an entry ticket into liberal spaces which, to be honest, are full of really cool people that I like hanging out with. But it reeks of QR codes to access beaches along the North Cost of Egypt, which require that you look a certain way, talk a certain way and act a certain way — and have access to a certain level of income...

This, too, is about class, but I’m not here to talk about class today. I do have a lot to say about this as someone who’s experiencing reverse socio-economic mobility due to both marital status and having children.

But back to my original point..

These ways of being and behaving are simply metrics and standards for people to abide by in order to appear civil. Similar to what my grandparents and great grandparents needed to do in order to gain the colonizer’s approval and have a decent life.

But what I’m arguing for is the exact opposite of this, I’m willing to come across as uncivilized. And that doesn’t mean I will attack and snarl at you, I might, yes. But that’s another story for another time.

I continue writing this piece weeks later and I lost my train of thought, so I’m trying to remember what it is that I wanted to say.

So what comes next might appear tangental and it could be but it isn’t. There’s a difference between being civilized — which to me is a foreign notion with foreign metrics — and having adab. I don’t know how to explain what adab is, and I can try. Adab is a way of being. It’s to show reverence and awe, to be aware of the hierarchies of being by virtue of, let’s say, age, role or context. I may never correct an elder in public, for example, even if I completely disagree with them or even if they have misquoted something. Unless they ask.

That’s adab. At least one layer of it.

And that might seem in conflict with freedom and freedoms in general. I know a lot of people wouldn’t agree with me, even my own siblings, raised by the same parents. When we experience different things and different lives, we change…

In fact, I’m not even sure I believe in absolute freedom (of expression?) because freedom has limits simply because we exist together — because we belong together and the natural order of things is for us to be in pockets of belonging.

I’ve been trying to do is fill my life with online classes and spaces and because I’m on the other side of the world from most of them, my evenings are often too full.

But the truth is, I’ve been desiring more in-person interaction, more in-person togetherness.

Online spaces have offered me a lot, but they haven’t remedied the yearning. Online spaces offer a proxy for intimacy, a hologram. And that’s not to reduce their value or the togetherness they’ve given me, it’s just to say, they haven’t filled the depths of the well of my yearning.

Meet me in Aswan?

Almost two years into being the sole adult in the house, being a single parent - or in simpler terms moving out of my ex-husband’s and my parents’ house - I’ve been trying to invite people over for lunch or breakfast or brunch…

I’m faced with the primitiveness of my kitchen tools and utensils, I don’t have porcelain dishes, only melamine. No glasses, only plastic cups - these were the emergency things my mother gave me when I moved into my parents’ old flat.

All my surfaces are lined with toys. The rooms are lit with white neon hospital lights that are too bright for any time of day which my mother seems to love so much and has installed years ago. The cabinet doors are always falling, the randomness and falling-apart of it all speaks of a (my) stunted initiation into adulthood.

I don’t think I was ever initiated into adulthood, let alone womanhood. Or my feminine nature altogether.

A woman keeps the hearth, ancestrally, this is nothing to do with gender roles. I’ve noticed that when I am in conversation with the house, it warms up to me and it feels like home.

I left my parents’ house to move in with my ex, I never lived alone. I also was never given any instructions or opportunities to learn how to take care of the space around me because what mattered was that I get good grades.

Meet me in Siwa?

I’m writing a collection of essays on postcolonial mothering. This is my way of admitting to myself that I’m writing a book - a memoir, a collection of essays - on all the ways that I’m unbinding myself from colonialism which lives on in my DNA and is very alive in my own mothering and the mothering I received. Capitalism works really well to keep colonialism alive and they both rest on the pillars of patriarchy. Patriarchy has harmed us all. I write as an act of resistance, of defiance.

My desire to gather is, too, an act of protest, of resistance and defiance. When we’ve been offered all these promises of comfort and not having to leave the house, ever, we isolate. And when we’re isolated, we consume more, and we yearn for something, for our humanity, basically. So to gather, we return to our humanness.

The yearning is there, it’s always there for me and I followed where it was leading me and here I am, with two opportunities to gather with people to talk about and do things that bring me joy. With children being present because children are in my constellation, basically. This is my life and there need to be more spaces like this, where we don’t outsource care so we can tend to a fragment of who we are.

But I want to come into wholeness, to experience even if just a glimpse of this. I know that we don’t always get to experience life from wholeness but we can at least get a taste of it.

The Sufis quote Imam Ali who said that if I am absent, (He) reveals himself and if (He) reveals himself, I become absent. This is not the best translation but it’s how I want to close this. I include a few more lines of this because it also speaks of the yearning.

I’m hosting two different workshops soon. The Not Yet Lab Intensive on two dates in September (one starts in a few days!) to accommodate different timezones and Casting the Spiral, a Work that Reconnects workshop in October. Please join me! We’ll have a lot of fun.

I don’t know how to start writing this.

I’ve been hiding from my own writing ever since I declared to an audience that I’m writing a memoir on postcolonial mothering. In fact, I have no idea what postcolonial mothering is. I do know, however, that there is a lot of grief involved. The grief comes from all the cracks in my being that tell me that the colonizer still occupies my body in some ways. So I thought, maybe I should map the stages of grief against the stages of decolonizing and that would be a good skeleton for my book.

But my book remains boneless. It refuses to have a spine, or bones for that matter, because the bones have been colonized. My bones are still occupied by the memory of the pain my grandfather has experienced in a classroom as a ruler met the palm of his hand.

Or the memory of his teenage sister being shipped to a new country with her foreign husband who she continues to have three children with. My grandfather’s sister passed away less than ten days ago and all the grief hit me again. Wave after wave after wave. Like the Mediterranean Sea I couldn’t afford to access this summer, and the pangs of guilt and shame that hit my stomach making tight fists of my intestines.

That, too, is the colonizer. But this time, the colonizer is my own people. The ones that have been infiltrated by the capitalist project and live to serve at the altar of eternal growth. Unchecked growth is going to be our demise.

***

During lockdown, I went to Alexandria, where my grandfather spent a lot of time. The city my grandfather loved and the sea he swam in was brighter. Clearer. The sea was blue again and not a murky blue-green. We are our own worst enemy. Unchecked growth is going to be our demise.

My ex was a big teenage boy whose mother and sister feared. Unchecked growth.

What happens when no one stops the oppressor? What happens when no one can stand up for an abuser?

My mother used to hit me harder when I cried so I learnt to hold the tears back and to cry inwardly. The capillaries around my eyes would burst from all the emotion that went unexpressed. When I grew older, my skin thicker, I would pretend that I wasn’t hurting at all and it drove her crazy.

***

An under-nourished mother is a dangerous mother. An under-resourced mother is a hungry mother. A mother cat that feels unsafe eats her own litter.

The intelligentsia thought they knew better in 2011. And maybe they did but when they stepped into the practice lab there were so many more variables than the ones they plotted against two dimensional axes or ran regression models for on SPSS - most of them had never even run a regression manually. (I have. I hated it)

When the educated ones decided to clean up the third spaces in an affluent neighborhood in Cairo, I sat in the car next to my then fiancé and started crying. “we took away the only outing they could afford and held an overpriced flea market on a weekend”

Privileged guild. Privileged guilt.

***

There are so many ways to define privilege, even more ways to experience it. On the nights I spent alone with a child and the ones I spent alone with two children while their father was off somewhere with his friends, I imagined life otherwise.

I imagined different versions of futures where I’d be happy. Some things I forgot to troubleshoot and I’m straightening out right now — like how will I make money, for example — but mostly, they’re all bits and fragments of futures I had imagined on these nights.

Some nights I would stay up with the feeling of a hole behind my uterus. An emptiness.

There was the future where I didn’t feel so lonely, there was the future where I wasn’t so alone.

There was a future where I was not married on paper and not in practice. There was another future where I was single by choice. A future where I’m supported, resourced, nurtured.

A future where all mothers are.

A future where children are included.

A future where care wouldn’t have to be outsourced or hired out because we’re stuck on a hamster-wheel of making some random weirdo’s dream of capitalism become even truer and more monstrous.

A future where modernity and progress aren’t our end all and be all. A future where modernity doesn’t have to be so cold and sterile. Steel cut and straight edges that it cuts right through your humanity and there would be no one to tend to the wound because everyone is running after their (piece of) bread like we say in Egyptian Arabic.

And it makes me think if I’m the only one with a past so lonely, a present where I still yearn for belonging because I have all those dreams and ideals of belonging and togetherness and intergenerational spaces.

But it also makes me think that if I’m not there yet then I need to dream smaller.

***

A dream too far out into the future is a dream set up to flop. We need bridges, we need webs of support, vines to swing on if we choose to. We need ladders and stairways. We need the scenic route and the rough one equally. In fact, the scenic route tends to always be longer, steeper and well, by definition, more beautiful. It’s only when you arrive that you realize how taxing it was.

And when I arrive, I choose to be welcomed by kin and kith, chosen, yes, but mutually. Community isn’t just about chosen family, it’s family who chooses you back and that’s a scarce thing to come by for people like me. Wallflowers, black sheep, whatever you call us. We’re at the margins, and the center just makes me nervous.

I don’t want to be centered, I want to experience togetherness. To be in it, which then also asks of me to do the work of intimacy. Intimacy as a verb is more than just proximity, it’s a tough and tender exercise in softening the heart.

And I’m all for it.

***

Thank you for reading. This piece was brought to you by a sleepless night. Raw and unedited. Maybe I’ll come back to it later for edits. But for now, enjoy!

I am writing this on the same day I woke up to the news of Joanna Macy’s passing. As a student of the Work that Reconnects, I’ve been closely following the news of Joanna Macy’s health and hospice since her last hospitalization. This comes at the beginning of my journey as part of the Spiral Journey Facilitator Development Program facilitator team and as always, the spiral is working (on) me.

As I prepare to facilitate the spiral, the spiral is teaching me. Joanna has just crossed the threshold from root teacher and elder to ancestor. In my lineage, teachers like Joanna also have work to do after they pass. So, while impermanence is a fact of life, Joanna’s work work is just beginning. In that sense, we’re just getting to know the permeability of Joanna, Joanna’s work and impact in general.

Her life keeps on fractal-ing and will be fractal-ing even wider, deeper and further.

I’m not shocked at Joanna Macy’s death, she very lovingly prepared us for her life’s end. She made sure that we all know that this is not the end of the work. In one final act of compassion and awe for the world and her fellow humans, Joanna showed us how to die.

I feel the most daring we can be at any point in time, and especially in this time, is to be in awe of this moment.

This moment of loss, this moment of grief, this moment of potential desperation. I can’t write this word without thinking of Joanna and the Work that Reconnects1.

How many times have we felt that the world is about to end? That the world is ending? I can’t even remember the amount of times I exclaimed to myself or someone I love “I can’t even do this anymore”

But what if this very statement is an invitation? A veil beyond which we can peek into a field of possibility?

This is what Joanna taught me, even without me ever meeting her. I feel for those whose lives she has more directly touched. And I honor and value this invitation she has delivered me across time and space.

What if despair is a veil and our heaviness or sense of loss is a curiosity, an invitation to sneak a peak, to question, to invite in possibility.

My friend M and I were talking about this the other day: that we do have a choice, that every single option and choice is written in the records and the path we take is for us to decide. I called it probability, like the chart and the tree we were taught in pure maths. We were in his living room and he said, no, it’s possibility not probability. Probability is about percentage and this is beyond percentage, we’re not more likely to take one path than we are to take another. It’s all possible.

It is all possible.

It is all possible.

All is possible.

Two weeks ago, I shared this post on micro-dreaming to help me with imagination overwhelm. Having so much about the world needing to change while also dealing with the isolation of, well, so many things…

…the isolation of not feeling like I belong is one way I can put it to assume some responsibility and not having to blame it all on capitalism and modernity. Even though I truly thing these systems are to blame.

The process was as follows:

1. brain dump: think of all the things we want to change about our lives

2. create a list of 12 things that might be achievable in a week (realistically, given all the demands of life and your actual schedules and so on) I learn a lot about this from Lexi at Pretty Decent Internet Cafe

3. create another list of feelings you want to feel

4. a fourth list (I’m a Virgo, I like lists) of ways you can stop yourself. This some sort of pre-trouble shooting

5. make it fun, make it random maybe.

Here are my lists…

Things I want to change about my life: how my trauma gets in the way, how my family treats me, eating in more often, spending more quality time with my kids, be more dedicated to ritual and practice, write more (prolific is a word that brings so much up for me and I won’t use it), celebrate more in community, make space for myself to create, attune to what I want and how I want to spend my time, more ease around money.

Things that can be achievable in a week: eat in more, spend more quality time with kids, more dedicated to my ritual and practice, celebrate more.

How I want to feel: ease, love, joy, gratitude, honored, appreciated, held, received, listen to, have someone run their hands through my hair

How I might stop myself: borderline personality traits all/nothing, withdrawing to avoid conflict, thinking it’s not worth it, who will want to even read this, “I’m just an Egyptian woman with kids and that’s all I have to be” - I need to be grateful for what I have, there’s no point.

Experimenting with this, I did the following:

For the first week of June, I spent more time cooking at home and got a bit creative with it due to some financial constraints. I also spent more time writing.

June micro-dream 1: DONE

Feel more ease as I spend more time cooking for my kids and eating in

June micro-dream 2: DONE but part of a longer, bigger dream

Feel honored as I offer myself what my family of origin cannot offer me. This is more than a micro-dream but I did engage with it a bit more this week. During the first week of June, my siblings and mother weren’t kind to me and that’s a nice way of putting it. So I spent the second week of June away from them. To honor my eldest child’s wants, I let him go see my family and I pick him up when it’s time for him to leave.

Bonus dream: celebrate more! Share good news I received with community!

1. I’m part of the Spiral Journey Facilitator Development Program team! And it’s such an honor to join such wonderful humans on this journey doing, learning and living the Work that Reconnects

2. I received a fellowship to attend the Unexpected Shape Writing Academy (it’s been a dream of mine for a while now!)

3. I never shared this here but I’m also part of the Post Growth Institute Fellowship this year!

June micro-dream 3: in progress

Feel more held by my ritual and practice (and write about it) . We’ll see how that unfolds.

What are your micro-dreams for the next two weeks? Please share with me.

Finally, I would like to remind you that I’m holding a live cohort of the Not Yet Lab that starts THIS WEDNESDAY! It’s donation based and proceeds go to a displaced family in Cairo after covering my costs. Trades are also welcomed!

more info here

register here

I’ve been reflecting on why dreaming gets overwhelming, why it has me in a state of freeze rather than a more generative or desirable state of being open to receive life, to receive my vision, to move towards it and act upon it.

And it hit me.

The lives I dream of living and the roles I dream of assuming are so far away from where I currently am in life.

I think I’ve fallen for the inspirational trap. I’m not meant to always inspire. I’m not to always repurpose my life into actionable steps or lessons. My life can be just that: my life. And right now, this is not the best place to be. But you know what happens when we realize this?

At least for me, I realize that I’m equipped for just that. For this life, for going through these things and living this way until I decide it’s too much and I have and it is.

I want to change the world. Yes. I have world changing visions living beyond the confines of my life and in the liminal/imaginal space in my genome and epigenetics.

But…

I have to build my capacity for these. I have to reach a state where it’s believable for me to be part of these visions, to live these lives, to create these realities. And so, going against my own judgement, I created a protocol for micro-dreaming.

Doable. Believable. Approachable. Real.

For the four weeks of June, I’m going to decide on 4 little dreams to work towards. Dreams can be goals, plans or desires - they all get a whole week to be “realized”

Micro Dreaming: A Protocol

Step 1: Brain Dump

This is a two part process because thinking of our grievances is a draining process so we need to remedy it with gratitude. It’s similar to counter poses in yoga.

First, we think of all the things we want to change about our lives. Everything. The mess. The loneliness. The dread. Inflation. Borders. The old injury and the story behind how it compounded. The things you weren’t supposed to hear your mother say about you. The things you wished your sister said when your mother said these things about you. How you feel like such an outcast. The old furniture you can’t afford to replace. The honks of Cairo.

Now the things we’re grateful for. Like how you actually like being an outcast because it gives such a beautiful observational spot and vantage point. How there’s very little pressure at the periphery. The ways you share with your similarly broke friends and somehow you have more than enough. Friends you make on the internet. Friends from the internet who come to visit and become kindred. The randomness of Cairo and how you can’t help but smile.

Step 2: List Making

Create a list of 12 things that can be achievable to finish/do/create during a week. This will be your bank of ideas. You can also choose to involve or include others. I write this thinking of my kids and how I can include them in my small dreams. We can paint together, actually, we probably will.

Step 3: A Bank of Feelings

This is where we’ll list how we want to feel. What do we want to experience more of and we’ll pair these with the list above to create feelings you desire more of in your life. I write this thinking of desiring more creativity and connection with my kids (following the example from above). So I’m thinking of making a zine with them. I’ve never made a zine, so this makes beginners of all us. I’m thinking we could have twice as many feelings because these can combine well. So make a list of 24 feelings.

Step 4: Rehearse Obstacles

How might we step ourselves? Can we already troubleshoot for this? This might involve some writing. Rehearsing a future also requires that we rehearse the obstacles that we might face. More often than not, our future selves are more experienced and better versed than our present selves and we come up with even better solutions when/if faced with the projected obstacle.

I have a tendency of feeling very precious about what I create and have noticed how careful I am with paint and how less careful my 8 year old is and even less careful my 2 year old is. So here I am telling Virgo self to be more daring because this is all an experiment.

Step 5: Make it Fun

I’m sure we’ve all experienced losing momentum and “steam” half way through a project and I suspect this is because of one of two reasons. Either the project is greatly influenced by outside factors (and not really your dream) or is something you think you should embark on but don’t really want to (you feel you should but don’t really want to)

For the risk of seeming too woo, let me talk a bit about the ego’s favorite trick: to make itself seem like intuition and have your best interest in mind. This is often the case when you feel like you need to listen to your body and eat all the sugar you can come across or going on this impromptu adventure because we were all created free (Without really putting into consideration that you’ll be broke for the next 12 months because of said adventure)

So how do we make this fun?

1. Treat it like an experiment: if something isn’t working, revisit and revise.

2. Make it random! You can cut up your lists into small slips of paper and pair them. 1 dream with 1-2 feelings and get creative with that.

Will you join me? Let me know some micro-dreams that you want to be experimenting with, I’d love to know. Also, I can’t really promise to (yet) but I might keep you updated with mine!

A realization descended upon me as the veil lifted. All the time, I’ve had both belonging and acceptance mixed up — and their threads, despite being very different in texture, were all tangled up in my being.

The short version:

Acceptance is conditional.
Belonging is intrinsic.

One thread feels like it’s been spun using an ancient spindle, cotton, wool or linen tended to with so much care: you spin, spin, spin as stories travel through the fabric of time and imprint their memory onto the emerging thread. That is belonging.

Acceptance, on the other hand, feels like a clinic, or an office with florescent light. A synthetic thread that’s been so efficiently spun by a machine. No stories. No words. Just the hum of the machine and the whisper of forbidden words spoken by workers too scared they’d get caught. Acceptance is sturdy and shiny. It’s like skyscrapers erect where small houses yellowed with age stood, no gardens, no big balconies.

Acceptance is the wide roads with speeding cars. Small streets that get quiet at night are belonging.

Acceptance is humans forcing their will on nature - or at least thinking that they are. Because you simply can’t and I learnt that in the desert the Spring I got pregnant with my daughter.

In 2022, I was in Siwa with my then husband and a few other people preparing to host 100+ people on a piece of land with a small number of buildings and limited amenities. We weren’t really prepared and the forecast wasn’t looking food. We tried to will the storm away, we tried to be cocky in the face of wind when we were in the middle of the desert. Needless to say, nature still had her way.

Now back to the original thread of this story.

Synthetic threads of acceptance involve fracking, extracting, mining and taking away from. They always make me feel like there’s more to do, more to be, like I’m not enough. Like this is never enough…

And sometimes, when there’s not enough humanity, when there’s not enough love…sometimes in the face of being dehumanized, neglected or harmed, we need to refuse. We need to not accept. But what we’re not accepting, I feel, is a behavior, we’re clarifying a standard, a boundary and a preferred way of being treated: honored, cherished, revered. This is where the conditionality comes — where it actually becomes a requirement.

Acceptance is always mining for your best behavior.

Within my family of origin, it feels like I’ve always stretch myself to belong (maybe even shrunk, too). I yearned for it, I desired it like a cat in heat. But it turns out, what I’ve been seeking was actually their acceptance.

My mother (who’s by now a celebrity around here) used to outcast me whenever I misbehaved. She would intentionally treat my sister better and with more care when she submitted to my mother’s constant demands of her. And I was discarded, it felt, I was kept outside that embrace, alone.

When I refused to apologize, my exile extended. I remember watching them from a distance. I remember watching other daughters being cared for by their mothers. I felt small. I felt alone.

If I didn’t behave, I didn’t belong.

But can you really take away belonging?

What I couldn’t understand was that I didn’t have acceptance. It’s not that my belonging was taken away from me, it was acceptance. And what my mother didn’t get was that they’re not one and the same.

Acceptance is temporary. It’s flat.
Belonging is a tapestry that’s woven relationally.

And because I couldn’t get that, I don’t have a relationship with my mother. I don’t belong.

Choice

Belonging requires reciprocal choice. And reciprocity isn’t a word I typically like. It’s not something I believe in across the board but, here, it becomes so fitting. I can choose a family but they’re not mine until they choose me back.

Rachael spoke about thinking you have belonging with someone — which, I believe, evolves relationally — when if fact you only have their acceptance — which evolves conditionally..

When you only have acceptance, it’s withdrawn as you evolve and circumstances change. It varies because it’s a one way street and often involves both hierarchy and power dynamics.

It’s been my experience that I could most easily identity whether what I had with someone was belonging or acceptance was whenever I needed support.

When what connects me to another is their acceptance, I’m often perceived as less than: weaker, poorer, slower…lower. And, depending on their education, people would either perceive helping me as:

• Enabling: and that’s if they are children of the white, modern, seemingly progressive, individualist institution. Here it’s frowned upon and completely ignored. Others who might offer help are often told off or advised not to. Simply because to each their own and I need to fend for myself.

• Problematic: and that’s if they are children of a seemingly backwards capitalistic or patriarchal institution that’s often “traditional” — here, they’d view the problem as theirs and as something that they need to find a solution for. They’d often delegate or ignore it until it goes away. But more often, it’s the subject of long phone calls with friends or family.

I’m not sure if there’s more I have to say about this. My guess is that there’s a lot more but right now my kids are requiring my attention. My son missed his school bus because I missed my alarm and my two year old is climbing up shelves trying to get something to play with. So I kind of need to end this abruptly and get them out of the house before I lose my mind.

But before I do (and I write this after having made sure my younger child is safe) I wanted to share that I’m offering a Holding Jar making class Saturday 14th of May at 6pm Cairo.

More about it here

We’ll be making jars to hold the weight of what we carry with us. And on the week after, we’ll be making Jars of Delight.

Next month, I’m finally offering the Not Yet Lab Live 6-week workshop because I realized I’m never going to be ready enough and I had to fully accept this. We’re starting on June 18th.

I typically oscillate between wandering around the house picking up stuff from the floor, throwing things in the trash, cleaning the litter, doing the laundry…all in an improv contemporary dance sort of manner…you know, the kind that only hyper-philosophical and overly intellectual kids get.

(I feel bad for these kids and how far removed they are from “real” life.)

The kind that reflects where my mind is at. At best, I get snippets of sentences in my mind and sometimes, I do write them. At worst, I'm Mutley, muttering under my breath. Complaining. Or shrieking like a hurt dog.

Maybe I'm a hurt dog.

On the other end of my oscillation is the doting mother who makes jokes with her son as they walk back from practice. Who takes him with her so they can have fun. And he says “today was a fun day.” And the world seems to work for a minute there. She's holding the son's hand and “wearing” the daughter.

It won't be long before my daughter outgrows the baby-carrier. I guess crossing the street would no longer be an easy feat. And I also guess that I will have to renew my driver's license which expired in 2017. Maybe I could even start driving again and not have to rely on the school bus.

But for now, I'm the hurt dog.

Or the adolescent cat in heat.

At my worst, I'm a banshee.

2.

During the liminal space extending between night and day – it's too late to be yesterday and too early to be tomorrow – my most forbidden thoughts dance their way up to the surface.

The kids are asleep and I have space for yearning. So I yearn and yearn and yearn. Some days, I yearn for love, some nights, a lover. Other days, a big permaculture garden, other days, a sunny reading nook in an air conditioned room because Cairo summers are notorious for how brutally hot and long they are.

Some days I just want to be the weird witchy white haired woman that you'd rather not come near and yet the few people she allows close love her to pieces and know she'd do anything for them.

Some days my phone doesn't ring.

Once upon a time, I woke up and was preparing my coffee like I normally would. In a percolator, it allows me a few moments of slowness before the whirlwind of the day when you have young kids.

My then husband, back from months long travels, laid on the couch, silent, like a big cat waiting for its prey. That was the last morning we shared living in a house together.

Because when he asked if I wasn't going to say good morning, I said where would the “good” come from and suddenly, a pang of pain landed on my jaw.

And because my phone could go for days without ringing, even with three siblings and two parents, I didn't know two of my siblings were traveling with my mother. I didn't want to disturb my father either.

So the aggression kind of escalated in the presence of our offspring until my sister picked us up.

We live in my parents’ old house because when a woman asks for a divorce she gets nothing. But also, because I valued safety over fairness. I valued peace and co-parenting over getting my “rights.”

And these days, my yearning is for a world that's yet to exist.

3.

Almost 8 years into my motherhood journey, my rebirth as a mother, I am only now realizing that I'm born again as I birth children.

I thought it stopped there.

The truth is, every time I mess up and every time my kids are happy with my mothering, I'm born anew.

I'm not trying to romanticize it. I have locked myself up in the bathroom, I let my kids watch screen for far too long for my liking to get some peace and quiet..

I stayed up way way past my bedtime to get some work done, agonizing over when and where my breakthrough is coming from…

I cried to my kids.

I cried because of them.

I cried for them. For the kind of mother I've become and the (maybe not completely) lost dreams of the mother I'd hoped to become…

And still, I think, there's hope, right?

I'm the imagination person, after all, right?

This year, it's offering me possibility. And a whole lot of magic.

It began with a very simple realization.

I realized we needed to envision different futures if we really want the present to change. And the present has to change. And if we want it to be different, the way we approach it has to also be different: there's a future beyond this threshold -- dreams and the imagination will carry us through and I'm certain.

Earlier in December, I announced a three part workshop that will guide people through the Imaginarium, it was supposed to cost $33 for the 3 workshops.

I adopted the “launch before your ready” justifying it by “I'll never be ready” -- especially as someone with the privilege and honor of parenting two young kids alone. My life has very little structure and it's all centered around my kids.

As the day approached, my life got busier and busier. My system began to fray at the edges. I wasn't feeling okay.

What I hadn't realized is this:

Before I offer this work, I need to tend and attend to my needs for resourcing and receptivity. I don't call it regulation because I feel it's the opposite of stimulation and I have nothing against stimulation per se.

I felt pulled in a different direction.

I wanted to tend to my immediate surroundings and people. I needed to give time and attention to what's around me first, and then, from that space, extend further and out.

So I canceled the class and refunded people. I now have a wait-list for the class, if you'd like to join it. Here's the link

The whole point and the first step of the framework is to ground in our surroundings and present. The whole point is to remember a future where we belong.

So, to me, it didn't feel congruent to step away from my children and friends who, to me, required my presence, so I can teach this work.

The framework rests upon a few things which include:

1. Ursula K Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction

2. Speculative fiction in general

3. The role of imagination for liberation as inspired by adrienne maree brown

4. Change work which I learned from Melissa Tiers and Simone Seol

5. The Work that Reconnects as taught to me by Molly Brown, Constance Washburn and Mutima Amani

6. Offers and Needs Markets which I'm a facilitator of and is offered by the Post Growth Institute

7. Transformative Energy Facilitation which I was taught by Kenneth Jover

8. My own devotional practice and path where I am learning what it means to be a disciple.

Solstices carry us through with a reminder to slow down and embrace stillness.

So on the longest night, the threshold/portal/night where the light returns, I offer myself, and you, this:

Permission.

We can take our time. We need to acknowledge that sometimes, that stalling is a freeze response and that we need to have our hand held to cross that line, the threshold.

Because, while pace may differ, the one thing I'm sure of is that we were not meant to do any of this alone.

I offer myself empathy (and a hug) for tending to my own needs. I hold the tension between that and the weight I give to honoring our words, keeping our promises. It's the discipline/devotion spectrum and both can be held together. It's a both/and situation.

Can you do me a favor and share what you're giving yourself permission to hold this season?

Maybe with the return of the light, this seed, given permission, would sprout into something else, something generative, nourishing and life affirming.

Speaking of the seasons, of shifts and holding, I can't help but mention my friend Jen's work. Jen is holding a beautiful for holding 13 wishes through Epiphany and we'll be opening our wishes together in Cairo at this beautiful place downtown. You can join us if your’e in Cairo.

A moheb lives for the yearning. They know that connections happens in glimpses, in sparks. Connection is elusive, yearning, however, it's how we live our lives. Desiruous.

It's been a season of hibernation. Of yearning, if you haven't guessed yet. Sometimes the yearning comes with a flood of words, and at other times, it's just a dry season. The words are scarce, the flow, clogged with emotion that's bigger than any word or language to express. For a billingual, it's even worse because my knowledge of both languages has failed me.

I've been chasing poetry, so to speak. But here's something I wrote.

“Look, Sara, the moon.”

I looked up at the moon on our drive towards the Mediterranean. In retrospect, I realize my parents were young, stressed, overworked.

In that moment, very little me took this crumb of affection from my mother and held on for dear life.

My mother made me fall in love with the moon. Or maybe, I love the moon the way I wished I could love my mother.

The way I had wished she'd shown up for me. Predictable, consistent, cyclical.

My mother was abrupt, disruptive, erupting, like a volcano, and anything but predictable.

But she would always, always, always point at the moon on full moon nights and stars when the moon was new on our road trips.

And I would look up and sink into a dream state of being so in love with what the sky was playing for me at the time.

I'm Sara and I come from Egypt and we share a border with a genocide on one side, and war on the other. I don't know what to call what's happening in Sudan but I know that when I walk the streets of Cairo, there are a lot of displaced people from both Sudan and Palestine. The Palestinians can't cross the border anymore. A lot of Sudanese have died trying to cross the other border. But you can watch some trustworthy news source for this. I don't have a full report I just have a head full of thoughts.

I order my cappuccino and have it served by a Gazan man, fierce in his eyes like his fellow Gazans. I sit here under that big tree, listening to the birds and I find myself missing the beauty of Gaza. I've never been to Gaza, I wouldn't even be allowed in if I tried. It even takes special permits to get to the Egyptian side of Rafah.

But I get flashbacks of the olive trees and the sea, it reminds me of something or I'm taken there. I don't know. I've been to Arish as a child once with my grandparents. I remember the palm trees on the beach – I haven't seen them anywhere else by the Mediterranean, only Arish and perhaps Gaza.

I don't know where that nostalgia is coming from, that yearning.

Yearning is one of my favorite feelings, I resort to it to keep my heart alive. So I sit with it.

I sit with it and imagine a Gaza that I can visit. A Gaza where people can freely enter and leave. You know, a Gaza that's not a warzone, an exile or a prison.

This is hope.

This is what hope does.

It's the reason why I feel imagination, speculative, hopeful imagination is the thin thread tethering me (us?) to faith in humanity.

To find gratitude in this moment is hard, because it comes with guilt. It comes with the guilt of sleeping in a bed at night, enjoying my small pleasures during the day. It comes with the guilt of being here. Alive. Well.

I remember last year, a few weeks into what people were still calling an act of defence because the situation is “complicated” and my friend Esam shared his writing with me and a few other friends.

He wanted us to help translate his work and we did and it was hard. It was hard because with bombs and screams and death in the background, he wrote of Gaza in the winter, when his friends would go to the beach at night, when lovers would try and get some time alone by the sea. He still wrote about love.

As someone who's native to the Mediterranean, I have to admit it has this effect on you. It makes everything and everyone seem more loveable. It makes everything equal parts harsh and romantic with those big roaring waves and exaggeratingly colorful sunsets. By the Mediterranean, your hands want to reach for someone else's skin.

So how dare I not write of hope and gratitude? Yes, I'm grateful. I'm grateful to be alive in this moment in time because I know I'm on the right side of history. I know that history won't matter because the world is ending anyway and we still get to dream.

Yes, we get to dream. In fact, it's our assignment, our duty as dreamers to keep dreaming alive.

I'm grateful that I can write about it.

I'm grateful that the veil has dropped, the masks have melted and if you choose to, you can see the truth emerging from underneath the rubble.

And while I'm not Palestinian, where I come from, before the performance of Arab Nationalism, the people traveled and met across borders. Before the colonizers arrived, I don't even know how people dealt with borders.

I'm grateful I get to imagine a world with no borders.

I'm grateful I get to imagine new economies (or remember ancient ones) maybe those ancient trade routes have something to tell me. And you, they might have something to tell you, too.

And perhaps it's this: yes guilt is there and privilege, too, and still (always) there's room for gratitude.

A prompt/invitation:

Speak your guilt and your privilege into saltwater (sea, ocean, tears, water mixed with some salt) and ask it to be transmuted, ask it to show you where gratitude is. Ask it to show you the world that could be, the world that was, and how you can bridge them both.

We get to be bridges, we get to call in realities where no one is dehumanized.

It's been a year.

Dear Money,

I’m breaking up with you. I've gone through so much because of you and I don't know how we can continue being in relationship any longer.

I feel confined by you, imprisoned even, you've used people as tools to hold me captive; my mother, my ex-husband, all the bosses I've had.

Why do you want to keep me small? so my ideas won't grow because I spend most of my time worrying about surviving rather than creating?

Sometimes I just hate you..

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Did that hurt? Good. I'm going to be as petty as I can be.

You know why? Because you've isolated me. The moment I ran out of my own money, things started to get ugly. And by the way I spent that money on buying things to get married and therapy to break the cycle of trauma and not pass it to my kids.

You see, this whole dynamic would have been okay if I wasn't a grown up – let alone a parent, a single parent. I don’t want to do that anymore.

I have had to ask my little sisters for money, that's after I tried to reach my mom and couldn’t. That's also after my father sent me money. I know in a different time/place/dimension, this wouldn’t be the case, I actually don’t think it’s you you, it’s capitalism. But you’re part of it too – there shouldn’t be shame attached to asking, there shouldn’t be any mothers who do it alone. We should be doing this together.

I’m tired of their faces looking at me like that, and their muttered whispers – loud enough for me to hear, hurtful enough for me to never want to go back. The other day, my sister asked me to send her back the money I had asked for because I had none. My mother asked how could I even have used that much electricity, because I asked for more money.

It's almost as if I shouldn't breathe out because someone else is cleaning up the carbon dioxide I exhale. T o g e t h e r. Remember? We do this together – air is air because there's us and trees.

If I were to live without you, do I deserve to exist at all? Or does deservingness only flow to where you are?

Remember when my ex asked me to go back to my father’s house when I was pregnant?

I remember it to this day, our daughter is almost 2 and I hesitate everytime I add something to my supermarket cart. If it's for me, knowing that he pays for groceries, I put it back.

His money feeds his children – but who will feed me?

I’m trying so hard for you to come to me in exchange for my own work and words and not through my family or ex-husband. When you come through them, you hurt me. Always and a lot. You hurt me deeply.

Why do I have to depend on someone else for you to arrive? It comes with so much shame, so much resentment. It comes with an expectation for me to comply with (implicit) desires or ways of being that don't align with my current season in life.

I have to feed myself and the kids, take my son to practice, pay for utilities and maybe even have some fun (!!!) so I can be human and somehow still feel alive on 10,000 Egyptian pounds a month which I receive in weekly increments. I mean, really?

Do you want to make peace or not?

This is an ultimatum. Because it’s either we make up or break up. I’m lonely anyway. So your presence – or lack thereof – wouldn’t make much of a difference. I can be a hermit, I can be the crazy mother who never leaves the house.

When I'm receiving you for someone else, you come easy. But now it's hard to keep that boundary between my money and someone else's money because I don't have any of my own. That's not the integrity I was raised to have. This needs to stop.

I'm tired.

I'm tired of having to watch myself make judgements about how people who have plenty of you choose to spend you (recklessly, if you ask me) and feel resentful because I need you and you're not there.. I need you..

For myself.

For my kids.

For Hala.

For the students.

For clothes and shoes that fit. To get a new phone if I need it. For prescription glasses. To renew my driver's license.

I want to be able to give gifts, cook for friends and restock the fridge without having to worry about how I'm going to make it through the rest of the week. It's stressful, you know? It sucks that I go to sleep some days worried about whether we’ll have electricity through the night. (we have a prepaid meter)

It was fine to run out of money when I lived with other adults, now I'm the only adult and I have dependents.

I am anti-capitalist at heart, that's true. But there are little luxuries of technology and modernity that I like to indulge in.

Things like Substack subscriptions, cloud storage, scheduling links and zoom pro. Fun little luxuries that I like to give myself that don't require the pain of negotiating time for myself with a pseudo-community1.

Capitalism and I aren't working either. I want to parent first and grind later (or never, really) - so how about we find a way for us to meet online?

Let me list the “skills” for you to decide where we could meet:

• Transformative Energy Facilitation as trained by Kenneth Jover (one of the reasons I want us to meet is to send some of you his way)

• Integrative Change Work as trained by Melissa Tiers and Simone Seol, this is incredible work and it works.

• The Work that Reconnects Facilitation. I want us to meet there so I can contribute to the scholarship fund and offer the workshops more freely.

• Offers and Needs Markets Facilitation can you guess all the things we can do if we meet there?

• Writing - yum!

• My brain babies: the Not Yet Lab and Feral Sessions

• Designing delightful courses and workshops and writing scripts for visualizations and meditations

Can we?

I mean, I'm not used to being rejected like that… But I've also spent years in toxic dynamics…

Can we heal together?

Do you think if we do this, life would work out? And maybe, just maybe, I can find a love that feels safe?

Until next time,

Sara