Saturday, 3 May 2025
THE GREAT AND LITTLE WISTERIA
Saturday, 19 April 2025
SUMUD صمود
April now… we are in the middle of Passover. Chag Sameach. For some, this is the second Seder without their family members, who were taken hostage during the autumn of 2023. I think about how part of the world is praying everyday for the removal of some people from Gaza for their safety, while others are praying for the continued resistance of Palestinians, to be able to stay in their land, on their land. This particular resistance is known as
صمود
To quote Rabbi Brant Bosen, ‘Those who participate in the Passover Seder are required not only to read the story of the Exodus, but to examine its relevance as the Haggadah instructs us, in every generation.’ Adam from Adama… human from humus… from the soil we arise with soul, and then we are returned to ash and dust, soul returning to… where? I see the atheist’s point of view. If this is all a game, a playful experiment, with God the creator and destroyer, equally, then why engage in a game rigged from the very beginning?
This year finds me drifting in a conscious, thoughtful way, between the Hebrew (new to me) and Arabic letters. Shin, Alif, Lam/Lamed and Meem/Mem…next time, some more letters from Dad’s name… known lovingly as Chotu, he is also of course Mujtaba Tayabali. Tayyib, meaning good… around the Middle East, it’s almost slang for ‘What’s good? All good? All well? Bien? Bené?’ Or more politely, ‘Keef halak, ya tayyib? How are you, O good one?’
Well, it’s not at all tayyib. It’s so far from tayyib. We are all holding on to the scraps of our minds. Scattered Minds is the title of one of Gabor Maté’s earliest books, on ADD - Attention Deficit Disorder - I feel very ADD with the amount of literature I feel I ought to be ‘on top of’, the podcast episodes I have not yet caught up on, even, for the sake of entertainment, the TV dramas and movies I have yet to watch, the music that is passing me by.
Chat GPT helpfully sorts out a version of my life: this is how your life could look, appear the magically typed out words. I pay attention to the orderly structure for a moment, and then I scatter. Meanwhile, in between reading the cricket commentary to Dad, feeding my parents dishes I cook from Hello Fresh recipes, and trying to remember to do at least two surya namaskars a day, I am painting by numbers. Each month, I manage one completed work. Here is April slowly unfolding, one tiny shape at a time…
Friday, 21 March 2025
HAFTSEEN
I mentioned in a previous post that I had been attending poetry workshops once a week… in January, I began attending a God Fellowship course in tandem with studying the Hebrew Bible with Hadar Cohen, a mystic Arab Jewish scholar, who possesses that rare ability to invite deep spiritual and spirited thought by the quality of her listening. In Hadar’s case, the peace she creates is secondary to the justice and universal liberation she works for.
Listening is an art we aren’t encouraged to practise. It’s the talkies we like to engage in. Chatters by nature, our opinions have become currency. The radio has been replaced by podcasts and Instagram can be dipped into all day long. I love podcasts. I think I’m subscribed to over one hundred and sixty! I have uncounted tabs open on my various devices, an enormous list of movies/ documentaries to be watched and partially read books glower at me, reproaching their once loyal, now absentee friend.
I like to think I will make a longed for return to reading. I like to think I will attend to my patiently waiting novel. My yoga mats stretch out, hopeful in purple and pink… but… early this morning, a song rang out loud and conspicuous - ‘Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue!’ - and I knew Dad had not slept, was desperate for a cup of tea and company. The sun caught him out the other day, as he soaked up rays in the doorway. He fainted and Mum had a tricky time trying to manage him back to bed, and then, when he still hadn't fully regained consciousness, down to the floor - I was at the hospital having an infusion. The paramedics arrived and were brilliant, but Mum had already wrenched her back by then. Dad’s ok, Mum’s ok … Nat King Cole sets the tone… and I, trying not to cry most of the time, keep quilting the patchwork of my days, a haft seen of its own.
(Images of the Haftseen above are by Pauline Eleazar for Savoir Flair)
(Hadar Cohen can be found at her own website and at Malchut, her Jewish Mystical School)
Friday, 31 January 2025
EVEN MALEFICENT
and the rest of me falls apart.
Friday, 17 January 2025
ICARUS IN REVERSE
Friday, 10 January 2025
PALINODE TO FLIGHT
Tuesday, 31 December 2024
TONGLEN AND YUTORI
Have you heard of the Buddhist practise called Tonglen? It's a bodhicitta meditation of taking in dark energy, difficulty or despair and breathing out light, radiating beauty. No simple task! The likes of Zen master Pema Chodron are surely better able to know the size and depth of the darkness your own particular heart can hold before attempting alchemy. But I also think this is a practise most of us do every day in some small way.
It has been a tiring year. It is now three months since Dad went into hospital with sepsis and ear infections that made his life just that bit more challenging. I mean terrifying and confusing. And, in his typical fashion, though terror and confusion, still gracious, grateful, kind and wise. Home now, and a small channel of hearing has returned to one ear. New hearing aids with high tech capabilities must be adapted to. We, I mean us three, and it seems the world beyond, live on an edge much of the time, not fully understanding why. Taking small steps, oh so infinitesimal, to hold on to that tenuous and very human thing we call faith. What is faith? What is the sacred and good in us when the big evidence of who we are points so much to the contrary?
Have you heard of the Japanese practise of Yutori? It is the art of spaciousness, of the unhurried walk through life (rather than the harried clambering up the ladder, or across the treadmill). Do you have a spaciousness in your life? I have spent my life in houses with many rooms which I fashion into complex worlds, but also am daunted by the gathering of 'stuff'. 'Stuff' can be a treasure trove, and that can be a dangerous slippy sliding ground into a nostalgic hoarding of possessions.
It’s a weird thing to ‘still’ be living with my parents, ‘still’ be stuck in illness, ‘still’ be ‘at home’ rather than… where? Sometimes very famous and influential people say, ‘If I can help one person…’ or ‘If I have made one life better…’ but isn’t this the truth of who we really are? That each of us in our small and vital ways have made one life better, have held faith, kindness and joy, for one other life than our own? At least once a day for a parent, a child. Even, once a week, for a little curly coated dog? Even that seems beyond us sometimes, stretched as we are by historical and present day personal suffering. And still we return, represent, remember, recover. And occasionally, rejoice. So I go on, so you probably do too. I hope we’ll be alright. Times is moving us on regardless, the calendar turns to 2025. Happy New Year? From our Moominvalley to yours, may we remember what is good in each other.
Saturday, 21 December 2024
MAKING TEA (A SURVIVAL GUIDE TO WAITING)
TEA
Five times a day, I make tea. I do this
because I like the warmth in my hands, like the feeling
of self-directed kindness. I’m not used to it—
warmth and kindness, both—so I create my own
when I can. It’s easy. You just pour
water into a kettle and turn the knob and listen
for the scream. I do this
five times a day. Sometimes, when I’m pleased,
I let out a little sound. A poet noticed this
and it made me feel I might one day
properly be loved. Because no one is here
to love me, I make tea for myself
and leave the radio playing. I must
remind myself I am here, and do so
by noticing myself: my feet are cold
inside my socks, they touch the ground, my stomach
churns, my heart stutters, in my hands I hold
a warmth I make. I come from
a people who pray five times a day
and make tea. I admire the way they do
both. How they drop to the ground
wherever they are. Drop
pine nuts and mint sprigs in a glass.
I think to care for the self
is a kind of prayer. It is a gesture
of devotion toward what is not always beloved
or believed. I do not always believe
in myself, or love myself, I am sure
there are times I am bad or gone
or lying. In another’s mouth, tea often means gossip,
but sometimes means truth. Despite
the trope, in my experience my people do not lie
for pleasure, or when they should,
even when it might be a gesture
of kindness. But they are kind. If you were
to visit, a woman would bring you
a tray of tea. At any time of day.
My people love tea so much
it was once considered a sickness. Their colonizers
tried, as with any joy, to snuff it out. They feared a love
so strong one might sell or kill their other
loves for leaves and sugar. Teaism
sounds like a kind of faith
I’d buy into, a god I wouldn’t fear. I think now I truly believe
I wouldn’t kill anyone for love,
not even myself—most days
I can barely get out of bed. So I make tea.
I stand at the window while I wait.
My feet are cold and the radio plays its little sounds.
I do the small thing I know how to do
to care for myself. I am trying to notice joy,
which means survive. I do this all day, and then the next.
Author’s Note
This poem was the first I wrote in a long period of drought. I was, as the poem alludes to, suffering from a depressive episode, one that dislodged my language and made the simple tasks of living significantly difficult. There was one act of self-care, however, that I could bring myself to do with regularity: make tea. All day, each day, I did it; it’s true. I made the connection one day between my love of—dependency on, even—tea and the cultural role and history of tea in my Tunisian ancestry. Tea is so beloved in Tunisia that when it was under French rule, colonial administrators believed Tunisians’ tea consumption was a psychological condition, teaism, similar to alcoholism, and that the amount of tea my people drank had poisoned both their bodies and minds. I was interested in examining my own experience with my body and mind, harm and care, pleasure and survival, as it relates to tea, and this poem tumbled out of that. As a note to this note, my pantry continues to be stuffed to the brim with tea—enough to last me over a year, at least.
Monday, 18 November 2024
MESSY BOOTS AND POCKETS OF JOY
Do you recall two movies starring Kate Winslet titled 'Hideous Kinky' and 'Kinky Boots'? The first was based on a memoir by a woman whose mother cobbled together an interesting and beautiful life, off the beaten track. The second... well, it's just an intriguing sounding phrase, isn't it? Less of the hideous or kinky here, but if I were to title my cobbled together story, it would probably be Messy Boots. I mean that literally - I do sometimes forget that this is England and we have cream carpets (well, trying to stay cream) and I walk in after a good hack around the village with Samwise Gamjee, the cockapoo, and track mud here and there.
But mostly I mean that I live like a messy snail, leaving a trail of stuff in this room and that, where I start projects of creativity or purpose, and then tumble into illness and forget. Later, I return, the good elf to my messy troll, and pick up and tidy and sort. For thirty years, I have shaped a kind of happiness and peace from this little exercise, not so much of control, as of collage, collaboration with my two selves, my several selves.
There's another book I think of now... 'How To Make An American Quilt' by Whitney Otto. The movie starring Winona Ryder and Dr. Maya Angelou, is sweet. It's all very genteel and yet emotionally true to women of any time. Ever since the pandemic made realities virtual, made the impossible possible, we the various disparately located peoples of the world, are now able to come together in a thing called Zoom Rooms... we workshop in the same space and time across geography. So house bound elves like myself, even on troll-like days, can zoom with the likes of Fatima Bhutto, Fatima Farheen Mirza, Trivarna Hariharan and Suleika Jaouad to name a few of the writers and poets I have 'hung out' with. There are writing prompts, and we write together in silence, later sharing what we wrote if we have the courage, or even, for a while, being in silence during an entire reading hour cultivated by Naomi Alderman.
How do you hand make your life? Do you potter like I do? Are you tidy or messy? Is it childish to be messy and grown up to be tidy, or is it agelessly creative to be messy and openly vulnerable to display that you are not 'together' yet? Do you find, like I do, that there is so much to read and do, and never enough time, but that pockets of joy are in fact found in this mess of everything, everywhere, all at once? I am trying, as always, to cultivate an hour here and there to 'do something', and not be overwhelmed by how very small my doing is.
Saturday, 9 November 2024
GAZA IS A DOOR
Gaza is a door
into two worlds -
one that keeps us alive,
and one that kills us.
We die, either way,
at the door.
Death is a door
we knock on. And then run
far away from.
Life is a door
we can’t remember if we chose
to walk through.
Meanwhile, the river moves,
a running thing,
away and towards.
Meanwhile, I,
the other living thing
standing on this bridge,
autumn leaves in my pocket,
rain on my skin -
the tiniest of windows letting light in.
Artwork : @bypeoni Peonica Fernando
Poem featuring at dverse poets