Writing...
and Not Writing
I haven’t been writing much lately. A little here and there on two separate projects, but not like I used to. Not like my life depends on it. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s because I’ve finally, fully accepted that my life depends on something else entirely. Maybe it’s because I’m tired of writing things that should be obvious--and are to most of the world, just not most Americans.
To be completely honest, part of my silence is no longer wanting to broadcast my thoughts when I still might have important reasons to cross the US border. I would like to preserve the ability to fly under the radar for the next few years, at least. But just as truthfully, that ship may already have sailed, and I won’t know until I try.
All of this: aging parents, a rapidly changing world order, a sense of my own mortality (read: menopause), and a clear view that my children may one day set off on their own accord make me want to hold very still. This is odd because I’ve spent my life trying to set right whatever I possibly can, do whatever bit of good I can possibly get away with doing even if I may have been misguided sometimes. But now, here it is: frog on a log stillness when I’d least expected it.
You know what it might be, after all? It’s that at the very bottom of everything I think and feel, at the very bottom of everything I wrote in A Good Country (named ironically for how much of my family has thought and talked about America and other mostly white places) is the belief that you can’t have a good society without moral clarity. Moral clarity does not need to have a name, or a brand, or a catechism, but it needs to be unbuyable, unafraid of violence or death, certain of a truth that is bigger than this life.
That might be hard to digest for Westerners--we’re so used to hearing absolutely anything religious as if it came out of the mouth of a smarmy evangelist who wants to our money, our vote, or our hearts and minds. But we all know it to be true. Whether we love it or hate it, we all know moral clarity when we see it. It silences us and humbles us and sometimes even shames us. But we respect it anyway because it has the distinct scent of something eternal and good, like a newborn baby.
That’s what I’ve been focused on. Returning to something eternal and relentlessly good: Service to the dispossessed and the heartbroken. The regular prayers and detailed dreams that fed me when I was at rock bottom. Service to my own babies. Now, those babies are older, and I am inviting them along on this return wherever I can. (More on that later.)
I’ve been asking questions, some new to me, some I’ve been asking since I was a kid:
Who might we be if we danced and prayed into the consciousness of non-human creation? Into divine will? Into the unseen?
And who might we be if we grew the food we eat, and had to put our hands in soil and understand how it’s different from dirt?
And what if we recognized that almost all of what is, is unseeable and unknowable to each of us, and though we do a little better collectively, especially when we sing, we still aren’t anywhere close to any great knowing. Especially now. When there’s so much information and so little time.
What if that’s why the Qur’an says to believe in the unseen: because that means we have to also recognize the limits of our perceptions.
Why do I keep ending up in the lap of the Inayatiyya (order of sufis), without even realizing I’m in their company?
Why am I suddenly obsessed with Morocco, a country to which I’ve never been?
Why have I felt so mute these last months?
Will I ever have a job that pays a living wage again? Or am I doomed to downward mobility, even as I rack up degrees and experience?
How did I get blessed with these cheeky, wise, grouchy, hilarious children and what am I supposed to do with them?
If the world is meant to fall apart: magnanimous nations rising, becoming corrupt empires and falling, over and over again, more violently every time, why do I still want to fix things, make beautiful things where I can, keep company with those who are doing the same?
Is that what faith is?
And is it okay if I love to nap also, maybe more than anything else?
Maybe here is where I get restarted, or maybe just reoriented. In the meantime, here are the beautiful things that have been keeping my hands busy lately:
