Editorial note: This piece is a hundred different dots connected through one individual – the Healing One. I eventually mention them, near the end. I am writing to navigate and understand my own gratitude for them.

Dirt under our fingernails improves gut health; the smell of soil increases serotonin. I have a small ecosystem mushroom which I’ve named Luna (the Arabic word for moon). In my steel, cement and glass home suspended in the sky, when I water her soil and bring her close, my stress melts instantly. I believe the word is petrichor.

This may well be one of my favourite photos ever taken. I’m in my mother’s backyard because I decided to garden. I’m not a fan of gardening, but I love the rain and doing all of the things in it. All manifestations of water are healing – rain, sea, tears, sweat, the quiet of a bath. All of it.

In Islam, exalted are du3aas made while it rains.

23 degrees of heat, and humidity at 100%. I didn’t just come from the shower; I am soaked through and through and I have mud beneath my nails and in my hair. For me, growing up has always meant returning to who I was as a child. I’ve watched so many people over the years lose that lightness of being, that it’s an intentional effort on my part every day. Playfulness is the first rule for all of my relationships, romantic and otherwise.

Last week, out of nothing at all, a friend asked me if I was sad. The day after, a colleague messaged during a meeting to ask me if I was ever angry or upset because they’d only ever seen a smile on my face.

Smiling is my natural resting place. So is laughing. I laugh at the most inappropriate things and times, and this has increased since October because of the absurdity that it is to be human. We are such a small teeny tiny little drop, while equally being the Universe. I will never wrap my mind around it, and until He lifts the veil, I don’t need to.

I just need to make it through.

On the 19th of October, we learned that my matrilineal grandparent’s home was destroyed by the illegal settler colony. No reason, like all genocide and destruction to date. Blessedly, my last 13 family members remaining inside and alive were displaced months ago and so no one was murdered.

The home outlined in green is my uncle’s home; the empty space to its right is where my mother was raised and where I spent four months a year also growing up. That land was once covered in everything my grandfather planted – figs, pomegranates, lemons, limes, peaches, watermelons, grape vines, and palm trees. Where there was neither fruit nor vegetable, there were flowers.

Along the fence of the demolished home at the forefront of the image used to be a jasmine vine. Every night on his way home from his bookstore, my grandfather would pick all of the jasmine buds, come home and string them together for me on a necklace. They would bloom after sunset and I was a walking perfume come to form.

Every night. My time here is blessing after blessing after blessing.

On October 31st, we received more news and photographs. This time of my father’s sister’s home. It too has been destroyed; no one we know inside the rubble, though likely there were people displaced seeking shelter. Here is her home, the floors above built one by one over the years for her children and their own families –

There are only two homes left, both abandoned – my matrilineal aunt’s, and her daughter’s.

I am absolutely terrified of this world.

But. I have to still believe that all that matters is being soft with one another. Alchemy from the horror can only come through such softness. Clearly, a big fan of love, and of making people feel loved; even when I have been harmed at the hands of someone, I always eventually land at praying for their forgiveness and for their healing and for the necessary distance between us (so that they can do no more harm), rather than the reaping of the seeds they’d sewn. Always.

In only one instance have I asked that someone not be removed from my world, because their harm – though it splattered all over me – it was more to their own life, rooted in their own story and narrative not mine. It was their loss of sleep, not my own. I just happened to float in at a time when they were ripe for their own new chapter. This was new to me, a woman who uses machetes to cut the cancer from her world – a new set of glasses that it isn’t always cancer, but rather it is sometimes an infection which can be healed if we tend to it well.

Ijeoma Umebinyuo wrote “Last night, I asked my grandmother what to do with all the pain, ‘wash it clean with love’ she said.”

We believe that a hardened and unhealthy heart is hard to touch. That a mountain is oftentimes softer than the hearts of humans. Sufi Muslims that is; this is what we believe. So what is left but love to alchemize and transmute the hardened hearts? Nothing. There really is nothing else.

The root of every bad choice and harmful decision is a lack of love – for self first, others second. We can change this world one interaction and one extended hand in care daily. We can absolutely change this world.

Beneath the serrated edges of Malcolm which were born from the disease of the heart that is arrogance masquerading as white supremacy, he was all and only love: “I pray that God will bless you in everything that you do. I pray that you will grow intellectually, so that you can understand the problems of the world and where you fit into it. And I pray that all of the fear that has ever been in your heart will be taken out.”

Some might call me naïve in these hopes; maybe I wouldn’t make it through this world without this. But I know that every person who surface-sees this as naïveté, respects it, is grateful for it, and wishes to remain a part of the ecosystem in which they find themselves with me.

I will always take my ecosystem of hope and care over bitterness and hopelessness. I will always believe in abundance and love triumphing over scarcity and harm. It’s not just a wish; love transforms each one of us. In my welcome delusion, I also believe that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but rather that it is in the heart. When we see beauty and abundance, love, kindness, care, these are projections of our heart. Really, there are so many hills on which I will die, and I seem to be pulling them together in this one article.

I am, according to Human Design, a Manifesting Generator. I don’t need much from others to pick myself up and move forward, or to clean up a situation in my head and do the same. I am inclined to rumination; it’s how I take responsibility and it’s how I understand myself, others, and this awful place, so full of violence and equally, beauty and gentleness.

Don’t wait for it,
I said.

Create a world,
your world. Alone.
Stand alone. Create.
-Anäis Nin-

I once said that I chase conversations when in fact I chase understanding. I’m writing from a million different sides in my head to chase understanding of things incomprehensible. Our homes are gone. I haven’t cried about these losses, though I wanted to. I keep reminding myself that concrete can be rebuilt. Today, my cousin sent me photos of what our home used to look like, and my heart aches, though I should not be attached to dunya things.

There is no love big enough to forgive what has been done to my People. Though I believe that individually, through love and softness, we can mend the hearts of every single one of them devastated and in the worst possible kind of grief. They are forever changed, but not necessarily hardened. InshAllah.

Nearly two weeks and my heart has been on fire, incapable of crying in the face of all of this violence. But then I saw the most gentle face – overflowing with care and their own hesitation, and fear, rooted in possibly one of the softest hearts I’ve ever come across, and I began to sob. They don’t know this is what happened; that I hold their face in my memory to heal my breaking heart. It’s new even to me. This human is so gentle and they are all and only healing, but I’m not sure even they’re aware. I don’t think anyone has ever told them or shown them just how deeply their gentleness resonates.

Maybe they haven’t healed anyone but me? Which is the beauty of connection – some people bring out the best in us; together we heal, where with others we might destroy. I don’t know what to do with this information. This piece is riddled with my confused heart.

Allah will show me, inshaAllah.

This Healer, this Healing One, they made me realize that my heart aches for kindness; that I have never cried in the face of violence, but I will always break against the kindness which people extend, whether they are aware of it or not.

Open wide for the sun, and the moon, love. Nothing is out of reach. Remember Rumi, who counselled that “For every event that could occur in the world, countless possibilities sleep in the realm of similitudes. You awaken those possibilities with the words you utter. Speak beautiful words so that beautiful possibilities may awaken. The intervention in one’s destiny lies here.”

Ya  Rab.

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