Allow me to introduce you to my living room..
Sometimes, in my living room, which is a collection of old furniture from the different stages of my life, a couch from the days my father worked in Jeddah, another from the days that came after, I can’t really remember when my mother bought that one but it reclines. And a recliner from my parents’ room.
A carpet from when my parents and I used to live here, my grandmother too – now that I write this, it feels sweet to know my grandmother walked here. One of these couches I sat against with my second cousins and we listened to John Legend together as young (reckless) adults. He turns 40 this year.
Back to what happens in my living room now that I live here as a single parent with two children. I like to have my friends over because I can stay up late without horribly disrupting the kids’ sleep. We’ve hosted birthdays, dinners, iftars, the house hosts a lot of memories, not just for me, but for my people.
And it’s lived in. It’s very lived in and you can see it in the stains and the toys that are everywhere. I have to admit that the furniture is falling apart. I will eventually have to repair or replace it.
Today, we all wake up with one less cat in the house, we lost Junior, our fluffy white kitten with one blue eye and one green yesterday and we're all missing him. My friend who took him to the vet, my friend who offered his prayer beads for him to play with, my son who gave him his name because he looked so much like our late cat Sifa. And the other two cats are looking for him all over the house.
There's a sense of loss around here and I don't know what to do with it.
In other news,
The Portals Imaginarium is coming to a zoom room near you end of May and I would love for you to join me. The imaginarium is like a dream seed nursery where we'll prep the field for the dream seeds to sprout. I can't promise that your dreams will come true, but I can promise that you'll feel more equipped to do the work for tending them to do come true. Join me!
Yulia and I are holding a six week workshop called Facets of Being where we'll be exploring the global disparities in power and privilege as we follow the nodes of the expanded spiral of the Work that Reconnects: gratitude, self awareness and social location, systems of oppression, honoring our pain for the world, seeing with new/ancient eyes, liberation and finally going forth. The framework offers so much richness and I can guarantee we'll be having hard but necessary conversations
