Ramadan Day 6: I have the Fast and the Fast has me

strange in the morning light to cry and to feel the world cry with you.

are these tears of joy or tears of suffering?

these times are filled with a fear so intense that when the world breathes, i want my heart to open.

my lungs straining.

it will be our exhale, when the time comes.

 

when the time comes.

 

In responding to the opening question about her talk “The Pandemic is a Portal,” Arundahti Roy said:

 

“When we were locked down, I was thinking: Do we have a present? Because somehow it feels as if we don’t have a present. As if there’s a past, and there’s a future, and the present is a transit lounge, you know. With sort of echoes of the past and a premonition of the future that we’re trying to stitch our past to our future and we can’t, because the present is rapture.”

 

The word rapture confused me, so I looked it up on Miriam-Webster.

1. state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion
2. mystical experience in which the spirit is exalted to a knowledge of divine things

 

I like both of those definitions.

Is what I’m missing now, the present and by extension, the rapture?

In the fast, there becomes an absence.

 

Because my body is without its usual food and water, it has made room for something else. What is this something else?

 

What the absence gives.

 

The fast is a container for my feelings.

I have put my feelings into the fast so that I can sit here and be present.

I’m not “carried away by overwhelming emotion.”

 

Honestly, the hard feelings are safer in the fast than they are with me.

The fast is gentle with them, turns them into curiosity and kittens.

I brought bear claws to the surgery.

When the hard feelings are with me, they do hard things.

They’re close talkers.

Uncomfortable and loud and hot. Sometimes they cut me or beat me. When they are with me, I still feel alone. I feel wronged. I lust for justice or vengeance.

I give the fast my desire too.

Even my desire that I no longer suffer.

 

The difficult news is met with a deprivation of urgency.

The flash of rage is muted into irritation, a growl from the stomach.

The partially undone task remains undone. It can wait. It can wait.

 

A Matador once told me that in truth absolutely nothing is personal about the way another person treats you. They are always acting out of their own issues, their own perceptions, their own needs. I know this to be true, intellectually. That how I treat people says more about me than it says about them.

 

When I’m unwilling to forgive people, does it mean that I’m afraid?

Do I have reason to be afraid?

Is the fear protecting me, the way it does you – keeps us from running to the grocery store? Keeps us from breathing in the droplets of the unseen enemy? Keeps us from getting too close?

 

 

Where is their fear?

 

I have listened as we complain about having to parent our elders, who we have to teach simple cleaning processes, for whom disinfection is not second nature although, by and large, they were always more hygienic than us, whose soft hands need to be re-gloved, who we have to beg not to go to senior hours at Costco or ShopRite or any other grocery or bodega, who go to parties and as they pass by, roll down their windshields and exchange words with the other guests, when everybody is over 60, when everybody is over 70, who need to stop answering their doors, who wear masks that dangle underneath their noses so they can breathe more fully, who don’t know where to get a mask so we have to challenge our ethics to get them all manner of masks, or things that pass as masks at any rate, their groceries, who don’t know that the best time to open the mail is when it’s ripened for 5-7 days, who insist on visiting their sisters even their daughters have to stand in the driveway, blocking off their cars, arms crossed, stern. We have become their keepers. The heavy tippers on their behalf. We are the lucky ones. The ones who still have our elders. The ones who have the privilege to protect them.

 

“I don’t get it,” we say.

 

They aren’t living for the future, are they? That most uncertain and troubled of things that departs like a slick ghost when you’re sick, when you’re walking a little slower, when you’ve gone around the bend, when you can’t wait for your life to start, or for it to be over, when you have now, and you know how precious now finally is.

 

Perhaps the fast isn’t about an absence of my feelings.

I might be wrong, or more likely, I am right both times, every time.

The same way all my decisions are likely to be right during the fast.

Perhaps another way to speak about the fast is that there is an absence of me.

Because I am experiencing divinity.

 

What is Allah if not the container for everything and nothing?

 

In my conversation with Lucy today, we returned to the conversation about my ability to hold pain, which maybe needs some expansion. “Perhaps you haven’t been keeping everything in the same basket,” she speaks cautiously, as if this was an afterthought though it’s clearly important. “There are degrees of feelings. You have a basket for very strong negative feelings, for being upset. You have a different basket for sweetness, love, and joy. You have to learn how to hold them in the same basket, together so you have more capacity for the pain you feel.”

 

Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing, sitting here, writing to you and to myself, expanding my capacity.

I have absented myself from myself.

in the fast, do i have a new ability to contain multitudes? to hold complexity? to have one heart full of suffering and of joy?

 

That is what Courtru reminds me to do – to not release the joy, or at least all hope of it, because suffering is here too.

 

Adonis texted just now, as I was writing, that his partner Manuel was rushed to the emergency room with complications of his pneumonia – he’s been sick for the past week plus and had already been diagnosed with pneumonia. Their COVID-19 tests came back negative just the other day. Weren’t we cheering? Now Adonis fears that Manuel might have a recurrence of cancer, or it could just be pneumonia.

 

I ask Adonis if I can sit with him on the phone, but he tells me there is no need.

 

“There’s no updates.”

“Do not go there, right now, because we don’t know. This is what my friends try to tell me when I try to tell them about all the bad things that have happened. How the bad things will continue to happen.”

 

“Good things can happen too,” Courtru said a long, long time ago. Or was it yesterday. The first symptom of Coronavirus was to take away our days, or to fuse them together, into that one endless day.

One day for every day.

 

Adonis is wiser than me. He changes the subject. “We just ordered a box from the New Parkway, with steaks, cheesecake, a whole pizza. It looks amazing.”

Then later, “I wanted Manuel to try. :(”

“Don’t despair,” I text. “We can get him the steaks later. We don’t know what’s gonna’ happen.”

 

I’m scared for Adonis. Adonis is scared too. I’m sure Manuel is scared. Reading this, perhaps you are scared.

 

Adonis tries his best to live his life in the present. He is always, always helping people. I’m pretty sure that’s also the bane of his existence, but you couldn’t ask for a more ethical and more compassionate human being.

 

 

“The ocean of suffering is immense, but if you turn around, you can see the land. The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy. When one tree in the garden is sick, you have to care for it. But don’t overlook all the healthy trees. Even while you have pain in your heart, you can enjoy the many wonders of life – the beautiful sunset, the smile of a child, the many flowers and trees. To suffer is not enough. Please don’t be imprisoned by your suffering.” – Thich Nhat Hanh, from “The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching”

 

Adonis has told me before that every time he has ever lived with a romantic partner, it has gone terribly. In every way, a precipitous disaster befell them. He has a lot of baggage about partner co-habitation, and he’s been working through this for a long time. He told me shortly before the pandemic that he planned to move in with Manuel. I will never forget what Adonis told me after Manuel’s cancer went into remission earlier this year. “After the cancer, I realized after that if we never tried to make it work, never tried to live together, I would always regret it. We’re going to move in.”

Then the pandemic.

When things became untenable in the Tenderloin where Manuel was living, Adonis drove over and moved Manuel to his apartment that he shares with his brother who is a frontline pharmacist, and he did it knowing that despite the risks, the other risks were also great, too great for him to ignore: that Manuel wouldn’t be safe in the Tenderloin, that he wouldn’t be able to be there for Manuel, and also there was another thing, the thing he wanted: that finally, truly Adonis wanted to live with someone who wanted to live with him.

 

We didn’t talk too much in the first few weeks of the pandemic, but Adonis told me about the joy of living together with his partner. That Manuel did crossword puzzles, and they ate and cooked fun meals together. His brother made amazing this one oreo crumb-type cheesecake that nearly stopped my heart (in part because I’m dairy intolerant). I see that despite the fact that Manuel is way more conservative and different than somebody like me, toward Adonis, Manuel is loving and kind, patient and never possessive. He is a kind partner. They are kind to each other. This love is a beautiful thing to see.

---

The next sentence of the Thich Nhat Hanh quote from earlier: “If you have experienced hunger, you know that having food is a miracle. If you have suffered from the cold, you know the preciousness of warmth…”

---

 

I don’t know what to do right now.

There is so much fear and so much suffering in the world around me.

I’m glad for the fast because together, we’re holding it down, the fast and I.

I try so hard to remember that I’ve been not okay, and then became okay. I remind myself, as Lucy advised, to keep the happy memories close. I need them now more than ever.

I want to cry.

I go to a meditation instead at EBMC.

I have to keep it real.

I cannot know if something terrible is going to happen.

I don’t want terrible things to happen. Not to you. Or you.

There is a picture of my trip to Joshua Tree this January. I began the post with it.

 

I couldn’t bring myself to look at this picture before today. If I scrolled by it on accident, I ignored it.

I want to turn toward it now.

It was one of the best “enormous” moments of my life. I was on a writing adventure with a very dear friend who was the ground, richest of dirts, then transformed into La Paloma and flew into the sky and then into my heart. We had gummy bears on the drive down and belly-aching burgers on the way up and the way down. We wrote every morning, stories that we wanted to make better and that make us better because we were writing, and in the afternoons, we hiked into Joshua Tree and saw the most beautiful signs of life, the cacti, the sand, the rocks. We made meatball dinners together and watched really awful movies. We threw our eyeballs into a telescope and serenaded each other with an old guitar and our rusty memories. We had pizza and beer (she did – I had a cream soda). We walked around the rim of the desert until we arrived at the sunset.

It was a near-perfect moment, and I got to live it.

The day after I returned, I suffered one of the biggest losses of my life, a death, and I am still grieving. I feel the loss in my body. I’m haunted. I don’t know how to let go, and I don’t want to let go. Because the memory of my body is all I have left of her.

I was so terribly happy.

Today, I’m fasting for all of us.

I’m holding the pain and the sorrow, the hopelessness and despair, the endless strings of loss and grief.

I’m holding the joy and the sweetness, the delight at new connections and old connections, the ways I have loved and been loved, the food my mother is making us, the eating I will do, the first sip of water.

It’s me. Holding all these things.

And I’m not doing this alone.

I have the fast and the fast has me.

strange in the evening light to hear the world cry and to feel myself cry with it.

are these tears of joy or tears of suffering?

these times are filled with a fear so intense that this time when I breathe, I want the chest of the world to open.

its lungs straining.

it will be our exhale, when the time comes.

 

the time is now.

***

 

 

 

Ramadan Day 5 1/2 – Decisions, Decisions

La Paloma sent me a meme this morning.

 

I’ve been asking myself lately if I need to start writing by hand.

The screen hurts my eyes.

I wake up in the dark, unable to make decisions, but thinking about them.

 

It’s so funny about life: every time something goes wrong, I feel assaulted by the series of difficult decisions I  must then make.

Of course when life is a seal bobbing in the ocean, the decisions roll off of my back like water.

 

During the fast my decisions are lighter, like stones skipping on the waves.

 

Why do I feel I’m in the middle of the ocean? The hand that threw the stone is very far away. I make duaa without knowing whether I’m the hand, or just a finger. If a wave were to come, it would alter the stone’s course. I want to see where it will fall. I would like to throw the stone again.

 

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the importance of high self-esteem.

This is because I have what feel like a lot of big decisions to make, and I am concerned about mistakes no matter how many times my friends tell me that there is no factor I’ve left unexamined, that I will make the best decision I can with very little information, with so much unknown.

The decisions that face me now remind me of so-called happiness choice dilemma, where people become improbably paralyzed because they are choosing between more than one good thing.

Maybe what I have is an unhappiness choice dilemma, where the information I have leads to a probability of poor outcomes.

I think about what my sister once said in this situation, is there a possibility of a good outcome?

Why, yes, there is a possibility.

A woman I once dated, somebody who’d grown up in the foster system and whose ancestors were a displaced indigenous people said — it’s the little choices in between that really start to kill you. You are so worried about navigating the big storm in your tiny boat, that you don’t see you’re being thrown off by all the smaller waves. She also said that if you stare at the small waves too long, you get seasick.

I don’t know.

Is this why indecisive people get hung up on things? It’s fear along with an inability to commit to a path. Perhaps it’s also about being controlling? Privileged people when it comes to education, class, careers —  lawyers, scientists, doctors, a lot of people from white-collar backgrounds can be really dumb about what they do or do not have control over. That’s why they sweat the small stuff. Because they’re used to a world where their opinion and their decisions matter.

If you live in a world where you get beat down a ton no matter, you stop believing that your individual choices matter so much.

This is why it’s so important to have high self-esteem.

Maybe it’s never too late to believe in your value as a person, and to believe in not only your right, but your ability, to make choices, irrespective of outcome. That those choices are the best you can do at the time, and those choices don’t make you a “failure” or “stupid.”

 

If you think I just gave myself a darn good pep talk, well . . .

 

Many of you contacted me after my sad post a couple days ago. Thank you for holding me in your heart.

 

I really like what Mariposa wrote me, and I’m quoting it here because maybe you need to hear it too.

 

“ . . .i’m sorry you’re sad and struggling with surgery decisions and pains and disappointments. i had my version of that, it was painful and scary.

 

you’ll get through. keep going.

you’re very loved and you’re very loving. that’s all it takes.”

 

I want to believe that, I do. Sometimes I feel like a cynic though, because I believe that I have the strength to keep going. I’ve already kept going through stuff that I know could’ve stopped me cold. But, there are so many days and so many nights where I’ll be honest, I know that me continuing to try for what I want only means that I’ve found the courage to try. It doesn’t mean that I’ll get what I want.

That truth has broken my heart, and now I try really hard to remind myself that it’s enough to be grateful that I have the resources and werewithal to try.

And some, if not most, nights, that gratitude isn’t enough. And so I do break after all. I’ve been feeling on an edge this past few days.

 

So today, I decided, was going to be another deal with the surgery decisions in the morning by emailing doctors with questions and journaling and what not and then deal with work and the fact that I have a truly emotionally difficult fiction writing class I’m taking in the evening. (There are moments when I feel like the class is more of a book club where ypipo share their personal experiences rather than a workshop.)

 

I know this is all very mundane, but I started taking writing classes because of major loss that left me unable to focus on an everyday basis. It worked because as the great Elmaz Abinader said, “Sometimes when you can’t put anything out, that’s the best time to take things in.”

 

But then, as I had half-written this blog entry and was about to finish processing all these questions about my future decisions, out of nowhere, life handed me a weird-ball: a co-worker Klaus cussed at me, straight up, during a relatively frustrating (but insignificant to me) conversation about, of all things, how to formulate interest rates on an excel spreadsheet. I immediately contacted my boss to ask how to handle this particular outburst. She explained how to involve HR, the verbal v. written warning. Blah Blah Blah.

 

So I video’d Klaus and said we needed to sort this out. Our convo had so many challenges that I truly thought we would never come to terms. Except for two things saved it.

 

First, Klaus apologized. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was a shit apology. Like it was said in an angry tone and followed up with tons of rationalization about how our fight had caused him to swear at me. If you watch a lot of Grey’s Anatomy (like I do), then you really learn from Richard who’s in AA that an apology has to be one with no excuses, no asks, no requirements.

 

(Okay, I didn’t only learn that from Richard, but I do watch a lot of Grey’s Anatomy.)

 

That apology meant a ton to me, even though, quite honestly, I was still pissed as hell that anybody at work has the temerity to swear at me.

 

BTW, I’m used to being cussed out by former clients, and I have a potty mouth and have cursed myself at many people in many settings (though not at co-workers), so really there’s the question of hypocrisy here.

 

The thing that pleased me most is that I got an opportunity to practice my forgiveness chops. As some of you may know, I’ve had some violent stuff happen in my family. I have this one immediate family member who did this thing (I’m on the fence about disclosing the details) so I’ll save those deets for later. After he did it, he not only didn’t apologize about it (and never has), but he proceeded to spend his time endearing himself to other family members like he hadn’t endangered my life and fucked up tons of shit. (I know, I know, this is pretty common behavior when people do shitty things.) The worst part was how other family members reacted to it, which is that they went straight into denial and have never reconciled reality with their idea of him.

One of my friends put it this way, “What does your family need in order to change their dynamics, for him to kill you?”

 

Now here was Klaus who had done something far less offensive. Nevertheless, I was definitely feeling my own temper rise, but then I realized, you know what? It’s better if we talk to each other.

 

So even though it was painful and took over an hour, we went over some of the behaviors that we’d both displayed that helped things to escalate. Klaus and I kept talking, even when it was tough. We called each other out for various tones and facial expressions and for explanations that didn’t make sense. I got angry like 15 more times before I stopped being angry. I was exhausted by the conversation.

 

And, in the end, Klaus stuck to his apology. I realized Klaus was doing his best, and if I wanted a perfect apology or for his professionalism to suddenly rise, then I needed to go talk to Richard in Grey’s Anatomy. I realized all of this in a particularly crisp moment where Klaus gave me a long statement that ended with him saying that I had called him an idiot.

 

“Hold on! I didn’t call you an idiot. I never called you an idiot.”

“You all but called me an idiot. You were condescending to me. Just look at your face now.”

[30 seconds as the video lagged. We both tried to look at my face.]

“That’s the video lag, I’m straining to hear you, dude. I’m not making faces at you. I’m frowning because I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Oh. Oh. [Klaus gives me the hand instead of using his words because he wants to say stuff.] Okay, yeah, no what I’m trying to say is that you were talking to me like I’m an idiot.”

“[Outburst from me.] Hold on, Klaus. Just because I’m disagreeing with you about an interest rate and because you’re saying something that I don’t understand about how interest compounds doesn’t mean that I think you’re an idiot. I may be upset or think in that moment you’re not getting it, but you’re the one who thinks you’re an idiot. You’re the one who has low self esteem, clearly. . .”

 

Whooo, boy, did I have to stop myself or what? I was going bananas, and once again, I’d hit the nail on the peanut.

The truth of what I was saying and how this had all gone down finally got to me. I had made him feel stupid even though nothing in the conversation made me feel stupid. I felt fine arguing about stupid interest rate stuff that I know NOTHING about because I stopped feeling stupid around the year 1998 – I can say more about that later. But before that, I grew up thinking I was the biggest dumbfuck around. I mean, my dad would mention all the time that I probably should be held back a grade because of my intellectual shortcomings. There was a lot said to me about me being stupid when I was young. I grew up knowing I was stupid.

This shocks people who know me now.

Their shock shocks me.

 

One day, after a lot of stuff happened, I began to believe I might be rocket scientist smart (ok, minus the actual “rocket scientist” part because I can’t do normal math worth shit and have some other comprehension problems). But the biggest change wasn’t that I actually got smarter or stupider, for that matter. I started acting as if I was already smart enough. Not in that (too) arrogant way where you’re proving to people how brainy you are, but that I started letting my heart embrace that I was smart enough to do enough.

 

Not anything I wanted, but enough for this life, enough to do the things I wanted, and I wanted a lot.

Meaning that there are limits, but I wasn’t going to prejudge myself or curb my hopes because of my doubts about my intellect. The things I (eventually) wanted to do, be an attorney, be a writer, learn how to do more science stuff, were or weren’t going to happen because of my intelligence alone.

Like so many people, I have racism/sexism/homophobia/prejudice to set my limits for me.

 

So suddenly, Klaus was in front of me, and he was mad at me for talking down to him, but every time I had talked down to him in what I thought was a natural outcropping of frustration turns out — he didn’t understand what I was saying so I started asking him questions to clarify. He wasn’t being particularly clear in his explanations because he was getting frustrated and tongue-tied that I didn’t understand him. When I expressed that he wasn’t doing things right – he heard that I thought he was stupid.

 

He didn’t have the self-esteem to hang with me in the argument. That’s why in meetings when I brought things up, he’d start telling me all the things he knows about the subject instead of answering my question.

 

So after I stopped myself from going too far down the psychological path, I realized that he really was embarrassed and upset at his own behavior. That Klaus was also hurt as fuck. And truthfully, maybe a part of me hadn’t respected him when we were arguing about interest rates.

 

Maybe when people have clear limitations, I judge them for those limitations, and the truth is that I hold them to a standard by which I hold myself. And what about my shortcomings? And what about my high standards? Are they fair to others? To myself?

Isn’t it funny how when people are more mature, wise, sensitive, or more intelligent than me, how I simply take it for granted that they are going to take care of the gap between us? That I feel that they shouldn’t be frustrated at me that I’m not as capable as they are.

Is it egotistical to admit that I had a capacity to be more articulate than Klaus in this situation? Or was it just facts. Sometimes we need to see our strengths, otherwise we cannot see other people’s weaknesses.

I love to learn, but do I love to teach? Do I love to teach when it’s clear that a person “should” know better? Do I love to teach, especially when the person is a cis man? I’m so damn annoyed all the time at how they are left off the hook emotionally for no other reason than they got a pass at the start. I grew up with a brother, after all, in an immigrant family. The hypocrisy of that situation makes my eyeballs roll.

 

I don’t know the answers to these questions.

I do know that Klaus was being respectful now. Klaus was saying sorry now.

 

“Klaus, I need you to know that I never called you an idiot. I don’t think you’re an idiot. Yes, I was mad and frustrated, and I was impatient that you weren’t working at the speed I wanted. I probably did wonder to myself – why isn’t he getting me? But no more so than any miscommunication. But that’s no excuse, because I was rude. I was so rude to you, and you don’t deserve ever for anybody to be rude to you or to talk to you the way I was talking. I’m sorry.”

 

It shocked me when he teared up at what I thought was a so-so-apology.

 

I don’t think it was the fact that I apologized. I think it was the tiny little word that my heart told me to put in – the word that haunted and haunts me with every bad outcome in my life – deserve.

 

Don’t we believe we deserve it? All the bad things that happened. All the losses. The pain. The violence. The insults. The absences. That I did something to bring it on myself. That I didn’t deserve happiness, an apology, a kindness. That’s the voice.

 

The voice that self-esteem quiets.

---

From Fasting for Ramadan by Kazim Ali

 

Ramadan Day 4 : Ramadan Begins

For the past 6 weeks, Faith Adiele (professor at CCA and author of Meeting Faith) and I have been co-hosting this amazing Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) Writing Community on Mondays. Our slogan is 2 Prompts & A Whole Lotta Community! That’s because we do two prompts for 20 minutes each, and then we share and chit-chat. You don’t have to be a writer at all or be a member of any writer community to join. We have people who call in from Seattle, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, New Jersey, New York, Florida, Texas, Washington, D.C. Philly, Hawaii, and such a range of ages, color, geography. We only ask that you be a person of color who wants to write that day with us!

 

 

We started this get-together right after shelter-in-place was announced and over 100 folks have traipsed through and written with us. My favorite part is after the prompts are finished, when we get to hear writers from all over the country share a little snippet of what they wrote during the session. It becomes, as Faith puts it, a multi-voice lyric essay. It’s heartrendingly beautiful and LOL funny and overall, unbelievably splendid.

 

My second favorite part is that it’s probably the most fun social experience I’ve had since shelter in place. That’s because there’s always about 15 of the same people who show up consistently, even if they have to miss a week here or there. And then there’s 15-20 new people each week, and all of them are amazing and totally get into the prompts too. It’s fun. And I love it because the group is a like a salve to my loneliness.

 

Today, we met and gave two prompts. I’ll share both of them, and I’ll share my response to one of them. I invite you to write for 20 minutes to each prompt and then to send me like a paragraph or 2 of what you wrote (if it’s prose). If it’s a poem (that’s not like a page turner), send me the whole dang thing! ❤

 

I won’t give feedback since I’m as distractible as ever being gone fishing for a bear (see yesterday’s blog), but I know it’d be a gift to read what you wrote from the prompt. Especially because one of the lessons I’ve been struggling to learn as a writer is to read when I can’t write.

BTW if you love the layout of these prompts, Faith is responsible for all graphic design and for the primary content of some of the loveliest of our prompts.

 

Okay, so this is supposed to be a circle, but I’m fasting and therefore cannot format.

 

Also, I modified mine to be “Fasting Begins” at the Center instead of “Healing Begins”

 

4:25 Alarm goes off. You press snooze. Suhoor needs to be wrapped up by 5am today.

4:30 You get up and go downstairs to the kitchen. You eat protein in the form of oats, 1 fried egg, and ½ of last night’s leftovers which are takeout kebabs that should last me for a week, also a brownie that I found in the fridge (yay!).

4:50 You drink OJ in a glass and about a gallon of water. Not really a gallon, but like half a gallon? You’re afraid you’ll get a headache later in the day if you’re not hydrated enough.

4:55 You’re not hungry and not thirsty, but it’s not stopping time yet so I drink sip at some water.

5:00 READY to wash up, brush my teeth and pray Fajr

5:05 Mostly, you’re filled with anxiety about the fact that you don’t really know Arabic and aren’t getting any of the prayers right, but you do have a cool app on my phone that plays different prayer calls, and if you put them on repeat and say Alhamdulillah a bunch of times and then talk to God about all the people you love and what God might do for them and also say some “You am grateful for…” things, You feel like that might do the trick.

5:10 You gotta pee

5:15 You try to fall asleep instead

5:18 You grab your phone and scroll through Insta and like a bunch of pics.

5:20 You go pee

5:30 You go pee

5:40 You go pee

5:45 You’re very angry that you haven’t been able to fall asleep because you have to go pee.

5:50 You watch Netflix, the last episode of Altered Carbon which you’ve binged over the weekend. It makes you sleepy.

6:55 You go pee

7:00 You fall asleep even though the sun is being super annoying and saying hey.

7:15 You wake up really quickly to check your email to see when your first morning meeting is. It’s been moved until 11am. Yay!

9:00 Anxiety wakes you up in the form of strange dreams about cupcakes and the world coming to an end with only a collage person made up of your exes to chastise you and you realize you’ll never get what you want and actually there’s a pandemic that you didn’t make up that’s real.

9:30 You’ve been laying in bed drifting in and out for a minute. You’re pretty sure the sun is your enemy and you hold a grudge that is fueled pretty much every time you try to “get some sleep” after Suhoor.

10:40 You shower because you want to make sure to put on a day face and even if you can’t drink water, you want to be in it.

11:00 You go to work where you read several legal documents and help make a plan on how to make sure people who can’t work regular hours are still able to keep their jobs and review convoluted documents that you are pretty sure are written in gibberish and wonder why you write like that too sometimes.

2:00 You think about pumpkin pie which makes you think about the QT Pie you hypothetically started dating during the pandemic.

2:30 You start writing a blog post for your Ramadan blog but then your fingers immediately dial the QT Pie (TRAITORS!) and you somehow end up having a fun flirty conversation with her that makes you feel like you’re on Cloud 9 even though you swore that you would be sad today, or it could be that the fast is setting in? Why is this happening, this strange lack of intense feeling? You don’t even care to dig that deep. You simply are. And as an extra bonus, you don’t even feel like super-Haram for having this fun flirty conversation because it’s not like either of you made any overt references to doing each other. Or even thought about it? You actually have real conversations because the bonus side of a pandemic is that you feel lucky to talk instead of to bone.

3:00 You see a bag of chips that you stupidly left on the shelf and are probably two weeks old but will taste like EVERYTHING. But you resist your hunger by going into a work meeting to talk about budgets and accounting. You are so grateful for work, even work that numbs you a little, because you’d rather be numb than in pain. You can’t help yourself, though, sometimes in the quiet moments in between when somebody is fumbling around in the spread sheet, or in the document, trying to make something or the other work, you pull out Fasting for Ramadan by Kazim Ali, and you read.

4:50 You go to your awesome BIPOC Writing Community and find that somehow the fast and this group are combining in a golden hour to bring you joy and yes, community, even during these distant times, and you are radiantly happy and really relieved that you can at least sneak in part of your Ramadan writing in this way.

7:45 You call the QT Pie again to see if they will smile at you. They do.

7:48 You race downstairs and pour a glass of water and get a date out. You are like rocket-ready to feast and poised for take-off.

7:50 You inhale all the food so fast that you’re so lucky that you don’t get stomach sick that often. Your mother made all this delicious and she is in another room because you’re quarantining from her post-surgery and everything, the hot noodles, the stir fry chicken and broccoli, the salad, everything tastes like it was made with love by the best chef in the world. It makes you sad that she can’t share a meal with you which is surely the great pleasure of Iftar, whether or not another person is fasting. To make a meal for a person who fasts is such a blessing, and you hope Allah rewards her a ton, a ton.

8:40 You sit down to write your blog and plan the end of your night including a Netflix Party with your cousin and try to do everything you can not to think about all the soul crushing things that have happened the day before. You realize how happy you were while you were fasting. Even though you have enough energy to feed your sadness again, you hold onto the memory of a time when things felt okay, no matter how bad things actually became.

11:00pm You’re not there yet, but you hope you’ll be asleep by then.

Here’s Prompt #2. I won’t share what I wrote for that, but ENJOY!

My co-host Faith really can make a prompt sing. If you want to see our other prompts, you can go here.

 

 

Finally, I want you to know how much I appreciate you reading my blog. I’m exhausted because, like so many others, I’ve been trying to both grieve a personal loss and deal with the losses that come with #COVIDTIMES. It can be hard to focus, and to write.

And so awesome, today, I actually was able to link up the BIPOC Writing Community prompt with my blog, and that makes me so happy!!!

Today, and every Monday, I’m so grateful for the BIPOC Writing Community and for Faith’s loving support of both me and especially the way she tenderly gives her listening and her support to each and every person when they read. This joint has given me this feeling of a writing group / party / circle of love through the pandemic-fueled weeks. It has been here for me since the beginning, and I am all about it. And every single time I join, I feel that I’m both giving love by showing up for the rest of the people on the call and also that I am receiving love from all the folks who show up to write or even sometimes to sit there and pretend to write. We all give so many hearts and snaps to each other. It is the cutest, and the sweetest.

This idea of showing up in little ways, simply by being present, by reading the people we know, or even the people we don’t. By allowing ourselves a little bit of joy even as we collectively and individually wade through grief and yes, suffering. There is something of courage in all the people I’m encountering these difficult days. I see it in you and I see it in myself.

So thank you to everyone who has shared about the group, who has supported the group, who attends the group, of course Faith for being the most warm and brilliant of co-hosts, and a heartfelt burst of love for the ones who keep coming back. You all make my day brighter.

 

---

“The End of Poetry”

By Ada Limón

Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,
the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost
letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and
the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child
and enough of the pointing to the world, weary
and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.

 

You can hear Ada Limón read it out loud here.

---

 

And what is a fast without my old friend Kazim Ali, who has kept me company for nearly a decade with his fasting journal. . .who through it, continues to teach me how to fast.

 

---

From Fasting for Ramadan by Kazim Ali

Ramadan Day 3 – Gone Fishing for Bears with the Sun on my Sad Face

 

 

I had a post all planned out today. I’d spent the couple hours after Fajr meditating on mothers. There’s a lot to be said about that topic, and about the difference in writing creatively about mothers as opposed to fathers. How we imagine them, what a difference cultural tropes and expectations make.

 

I also wanted to discuss at length the issue of community conflict, to follow-up on a very difficult dynamic that arose in yesterday’s queer Muslim prison abolition reading group. I wanted to discuss what happens when one member of your community is harmed by another outside of the group context, and about why I jumped on that phone call out of love. I needed to be there for Brass. I’ve been where she is (in fact I’m in a similar situation but it’s my family member). Somebody in the room has done something truly awful to you, and everybody else in the room keeps on talking. Sometimes people know and they see that a terrible thing has happened, and they choose to look away. When they do that, you feel as if a part of you has been disappeared too.

 

Then I got a heart-wrenching phone call.

The surgery failed.

My problems. Still here.

I despaired.

Tears slid down my face.

When I swallowed them, I thought that it was important I not lose more water.

It’s so stupid that I’m crying.

I was calm, and I was sad.

 

I was close to breaking my fast, not because I had to, but because this bad news means that in a day or two, maybe a week, I might break my fast for health reasons. I love writing during Ramadan, while fasting. Otherwise, I go back to the work of the novel and the short(er) story. I started to fishtail, thinking about how becoming the definition of resilience is like nobody’s life plan ever. What’s the point? I asked myself. What’s the point of continuing a fast when a part of me believes that Allah is saying fuck you to me over and over again. It’s terrible to lose faith when you need it most.

 

I’ve only begun.

I’m beginning.

I hear that voice telling me to give up.

It’s over. It’s over. It’s over.

 

It’s been over already like maybe 4 or 5 times.

Yet this voice always hurts. The wound is always fresh.

 

It was early in the morning.

I called Courtru and left a message saying bad news.

Courtru has been struggling under the demands of her work, trying to raise money for a nonprofit. As usual, feeling a sense of responsibility as its primary fundraiser. She didn’t pick up. It’s a Sunday. She’s probably working.

 

I knew I needed to speak to somebody, but a part of me didn’t want to call La Paloma. Before COVID, she would come over sometimes and sit with me when the worst was happening. When life and death would merge into reality propositions. But now I’m ashamed of my life, the sum of it, how much pain and shadow creeps into its existence. I’ve become used to existence and the destructiveness of life.

 

I’m so frustrated and hurt at this life, how it takes casual dating and romance, and rips it apart piece by piece, roughly shaking its head side to side, and then pawing at the parts, nudging and sniffing like a baby tiger.

 

I only see the sleeve in the teeth.

 

I called La Paloma who sat in her sun-dappled room, strewn across a bed, trying to beat back the light with a shirt over her eyes.

 

“Can I speak to my friend?” I asked. “It’s not good stuff.”

“Of course. Our friendship comes first,” she said.

 

I felt extra terrible because today, for the first time, La Paloma is fasting for Ramadan. She’s doing it for herself, because she is a very spiritual person, and she is curious about the benefits especially now during shelter in place, when life is upside down. I know that. I also know she’s fasting with me.

 

I had nothing to offer. Still, she sat in silence for me for many minutes.

After a while, I asked her if she could just talk to me.

 

I feel nourished by the details of her life. How she’d spent a few hours in the kitchen last night, making the ingredients for a chicken soup, chopping, roasting, boiling. Then she realized she didn’t have chicken broth. She’d made mushrooms in miso butter for me as well. “Because you can’t cook easily when you’re fasting, and I’ll be fasting tomorrow so I wanted to pre-cook for you.” I’d been dreaming about recovering from the surgery and fasting and getting to eat those mushrooms.

 

I was so disappointed. I’d planned to drive back to Oakland today, and now I felt drained at the mere prospect of fasting and packing and driving. Socially quarantining from my mother has been so hard. Not being in the same room with her feels extra lonely. I want to see La Paloma even if it’s over 6 feet apart, with masks on. If I don’t leave today, it will be at least the middle of the week I think, before I can carve out the time to drive back.

“I can’t get to Oakland tonight. This may mean another surgery. That would be right when we were going to be able to touch each other again.” I tried to say stuff, but it mostly came out as gibberish and hurt, an ugly combo. I gave up on trying to talk through things.

 

We joked about dates that we could still plan with COVID-19. I said that we could watch a movie with masks on about the evils of the meat industry and see if either of us wanted to be vegan. That way we would figure out our compatibility. She suggested hiking at a secret beach near Bolinas where the high tide would come in and cover the trail so we had to time things precisely.

 

She let me do a breathing exercise with her where mostly both of us hoped to fall asleep but knew that we wouldn’t. Then, she let me read Kazim Ali to her.

 

“Would you like to start at the beginning because it’s your first day of fasting? Or have me flip until you say stop?”

“Stop,” she said as I flipped to the middle.

 

The poem we landed on seemed inexpressibly relevant. Something inside me felt shared.

 

I asked her a ton of questions about fasting and whether I could break my fast. “Do you think you could ask one of your friends who fast?” she asked. “Maybe Brass or somebody else who fasts?” she mentioned.

 

There are many reasons why La Paloma is a cool customer, but one reason is that she is very appreciative of my other friends.

 

We got off the phone, and she said, “Be gentle.”

 

I was so grateful for her. Courtru had called back. She was working. I choked up as I told her the news. “That’s terrible,” she said. And then she said, “But this is what you signed up for. You knew that the chances were against you, and you made a decision to keep going. You’re still in the game. You can keep trying.”

 

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You can,” she said. “You’ve done it before, and you’ll do it again.”

When she talks, I see the person I aspire to be.

She’s known me for twenty years now. I’ve been selfish, mean, neglectful, and yet she still returns to the courage, the wisdom, the strength.

 

Sometimes we are the person that we believe we are.

 

“I have to stop fasting,” I said.

“You don’t have to stop fasting,” she said. “The situation you’re in was built for the worst of hindsight. You can’t know anything. Nobody, not your doctor, not you, can tell you anything. And right now, you need to remember that with the information you actually have, everything you do is valid. There’s truly no right choice or wrong choice. What’s important is that you commit to the choice that you make. You’re doing that. The outcome is bad, but don’t forget what a victory it is that you are still trying. That’s the only thing you can control.”

 

I began to tell her everything else that was wrong. Some of the in’s and out’s of the decisions I have to make. How much pain I’ve been feeling with my brother’s violent meltdown last summer, the family dynamics that have been complicit in his lack of responsibility. Whether I should drive to Oakland or not. How scared I’ve been that I might infect my mother. How I didn’t know if surgery would be an option if I waited, because of both the pandemic and my body. How terribly confused I felt about fasting. How my body didn’t want to hurt again and again. How I was scared that it doesn’t matter if I try.

 

“You get so many benefits from fasting. You need to remember that you have other parts of your life. Parts that bring you joy. Right now, you need to focus on those parts. If you go ahead with the surgery, that will be a good decision too. Because you’re doing everything to try and get what you want. But everything is uncertain for everybody, so you also need to remember that you are more than one goal. You have so much in your life. Let go of productivity and sticking to a schedule and getting things done, and be really gentle with yourself. If you want to fast, then be glad for the fast and everything that it brings you.”

 

Courtru has been supporting my fasting and my writing from the start, even when I was still practicing law full time and not sure what to do with the writing thing.

 

“In fact, I just got reamed by Virgie for the same reason. I was telling her about how I needed to finish this grant deadline, and finish this deadline for my scifi awards programming, and also I needed to go online and this other thing, and Virgie said, ‘You don’t NEED to do any of those things.’ We went one by one through each thing, and when we were done, I was like oh yeah, I don’t need to do any of these things. I had a deadline for Friday and I pushed it off. That’s why I’m working on a Sunday. And I’m taking off Monday, and I’m going to bake a cake and read.”

 

Courtru has bona fide anxiety around work. She has lived through some of the worst racial discrimination and toxic workplaces that I’ve heard about in a while. She’s one of the smartest, most diligent, and generous workers I know. Hearing all this from her, I knew that we were in #COVIDTIMES for sure, and also I felt so proud of her. That she had learned to let go a bit of work stress, in order to take care of herself.

 

“It’s a pandemic. Stop with all the expectations. You don’t need to write your blog. You don’t need to DO anything. Go watch some tv or take a nap. Go take your mind off of things. Give yourself a break and remember all the positive things in your life. That needs to be the priority right now.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

I’m really sad. I have a lot to learn, but I also have a lot of gratitude in my heart that I get to keep trying.

 

Do I want to keep trying?

Nope, not really. But, I will if I can because the alternative is far, far worse.

 

During a crisis, we may release our expectations and allow ourselves to show up in whatever way we are able.

 

During Ramadan, that gentle grasp of the present, the ability to see, the way nature is blooming.

 

The humility and strength it takes to pause.

 

In the meantime, I’ve decided to go fishing for bears with the sun on my sad face, to not write a blog post today (though this came out easily right after I made the decision not to blog – HA), to not drive up to Oakland, to see if my mom and my sister and her kids would be up for a socially distant walk (which in my sister’s case means like 12 feet apart, even outside), to read a little, and maybe watch tv with my cousin BeeDoo. To see if La Paloma will let me read more poems to her. Or read some to me.

 

To sit here and take it easy on myself.

To grieve.

To give up a little.

To appreciate the little things that give me joy.

Like fast.

 

---

 

What we read today from Kazim Ali’s Fasting for Ramadan

Ramadan Day 2 – Imagine Abolition

My eyes hurt from trying to crawl through the camera so I can be close to you.

I’m not that spirit from Ringu so I can’t get through.

 

I’m just a regular schmuck, a character from Pandemic Times™, a hapless victim of circumstance. I listen to the song Aren’t We All and when I dance, it’s usually on Zoom with seventeen strangers. We all wear headphones and listen to separate playlists.

 

I have an announcement: I got into this hype speculative fiction workshop called Clarion West for 2020. This is like a brass ring for spec fiction writers. It’s in Seattle. There’s something about being in a rented out sorority house with 17 other sci fi/fantasy/horror writers during #COVIDTIMES that feels like either filming a reality show, or possibly, doing primary research for our books. A lot of spec fiction writers are stumbling in this New World with masks on, mumbling “Oh yeah, I’m a realist writer now.”

 

There’s an element of the surreal to everyday life. When I think about this all day of a Saturday in my room, staring at Spring tickling the trees outside, having  zoomed into an E. Lily Yu writing class on “Psychology of Characterization” with folks from Toronto and India at 10am and then stepping right into the Queer Muslim Prison Abolition Reading meeting with folks calling from NYC and West Coast at 12:20pm. This is actually just the new normal, right?

 

Every year Ramadan makes my heart beat faster.

 

In the days before the fast, this is because of fasting anxiety – Will I be able to do it? Will I get through it? Should I not do it? It’s not like I’m suddenly going to be a good Muslim. Should I stop in the middle for some heartbreaking, baby-making procedure? Will my fast hurt this body? I need this body. Where will I get food? I nee food.

 

I don’t have a Muslim bio-family so I often fast alone, but this year the thought of not being able to regularly eat out, of having to cook for myself while fasting, almost did my head in. I went online and got disheartened thinking about having to disinfect things and running out of sanitizing wipes. My mom said that if I stay here with her where I’m quarantining from her also, then at least she can cook for me. We eat at different times.

 

I want to weep with her kindness, and also I want to write a long rant about what it’s like to “try and protect her” from Coronavirus. She’s concerned about me because recently I had a medical procedure, breaking social distance with 4 healthcare workers in a small room.

Wait, This is the part where I add the disclaimer that what’s going on with me isn’t COVID-related.

But why? Why does anybody care? Technically, it’s nobody’s business if I get sick. But that’s not true anymore. It feels lately like somebody else being sick, even somebody faraway, is relevant to me, possibly to the world at large, probably to every single person who comes into the briefest of contact with them, and most definitely to every single air molecule that might vibrate in the air when they speak.

We’re sheltering in place in California because even if we were to think we can survive COVID-19, we have a responsibility not to transmit this new disease. We have a responsibility to put up boundaries, even uncomfortable ones. A responsibility to each other.

Today, Brass mentioned my blog. Apparently, me falling head over heels for a hottie in the midst of a pandemic was “giving her life.” What’s going on between us is hot.

Hypothetically, can you imagine going on a first in-person date, breaking social distance after nearly 6 weeks of shelter in place with a super hot crushy in the middle of a pandemic which has a prerequisite: 2-5 days of feel-it-out discussions as to what your respective roommates do to socially distance, the last time anybody in the household went to a grocery store or any public space, the mutual household disinfection procedures if they receive delivery or takeout, their mask situations; I had a long conversation with my doctor who I was going to see within a couple days of the proposed hangout / distance break, and with whom I would also need to break social distance, and therefore, had to protect my doctor and other healthcare workers. Also, I would subsequently be quarantining myself for 14 days. Yep. Then, maybe just maybe we had to go back after we agreed that it would be safe between each other, having listed our household and my doctor’s preferences and recommendations, and talk to our roommates again to explain our situation and obtain consent. My favorite response was the roommate who said, “Why are you telling me this?” I picture this roommate, a cis male, sewing masks until late at night, making chicken pot pies, trying to simply get through his isolation day after day in his room doing IT work and not seeing anybody, and being forced to hear about his roommate’s friendship who she might now maybe want to kiss and how it might impact him. Ah, the joy of being friends and having to discuss with 5 separate people in 8 separate discussions, so you can get together and . . . hypothetically, of course. Would you do it? Would it be worth it? Did I mention that my roommate decided to move out during shelter in place because she’s always wanted to live alone and her friend’s devastating isolation caused her to leave her apartment so now my roommate can live alone and give her unmitigated blessings to a potential love affair?

Or did I fail to mention after all that negotiation, our first kiss by the beach, staring into each other’s eyes, finally being able to touch after so much yearning, knowing that it would only be for a moment, feeling nervous as all lovers do about the first anything, the sand, a tupperware of cupcakes and blackberries, books by Sufis, scanning the beach for one spot where there weren’t kids playing football, the wind whipping our hair, and the surf churning in grey?

We held hands first.

The first drink at Iftar.

This is all a dream sequence. Or, is it the fulfillment of a dream sequence?

Why do all my fantasies, no matter how erotic, now involve logistics?

 

My email subject line to my doctor: Does kissing kill?

 

Hypothetically.

Hypothetically.

Hypothetically.

 

“Still, you got to admit,” Brass said, “It’s hot.” (As a side note, Brass may or may not have been privy to more details than even I am wiling to share on a Ramadan blog.)

 

You stop asking questions about love. You focus on the everyday. That is exactly the same for some people as trying to make a baby. You are totally and utterly out of control. Your heart is broken. You only get to try. You feel lucky that you can even try. That is Ramadan. That is Coronavirus. You are humbled. You feel lucky that you are alive. You feel lucky that you get to eat. You feel lucky that you have things. You focus on the everyday. You stop asking questions about love.

 

You love. Everyday, you love.

You only know the present.

You only know this love.

Not what will happen to your love.

Not what will happen to love.

 

Love of God brought me to Ramadan. And Ramadan has come to me this year with a surprising patchwork of conversation.

It was love that made me jump onto the call with Brass and so many beautiful faces from my NYC queer Muslim book club within minutes directly after a 2 hour conversation about how to use psychology to write characters in science fiction.

I’ve gotten used to zoom jumping from event to event across the country. This would be unthinkable if I were taking classes or going to meetings in person.

I’m officially able to travel at the speed of light, or the speed of the Internet. Which is faster?

The initial space-time jump left me feeling a bit dizzy. I was going back to NYC. I’ve felt further and further away from my NYC community each year after the move. I’ve moved at least 3 times as an adult, uprooting my social structures and supports. I know this is what happens over time, you lose a bit of connection, the work to keep it gets harder and harder.

 

But Coronavirus is having a strange side effect. It’s connecting me more deeply to some people and causing me to be nearly and totally isolated from others.

The orbits of my life are shifting.

 

This is what Ramadan does. Brings you close. To an unexpectedness of thoughts and feelings. Sometimes people. Your mind is untethered. That phrase is often a negative thing, but here it is not. You can float between thoughts, and the thought that grabs you must be important, or else you simply pass it by.

 

Something about fasting for Ramadan helps me to accept, well, everything.

Fast Brain swims through the ever-looming tower of facts at a slow crawl.

Everything expands and you get centered, when you’re starving.

You have a different sense of gratitude.

 

Did you know that the United States has the world’s largest share of imprisoned people? Did you know that Iran has released 70,000 prisoners? See this piece by Critical Resistance, a leading prison abolition group. Did you know that Public Defenders are being forced to work in Los Angeles without Personal Protective Equipment? California is in the process of releasing 3,500 prisoners, but this is a drop in the bucket for how many people’s lives are endangered because they’re incarcerated.

 

These were the thoughts filling my mind as I attended the prison abolition book group. Public Defenders, a professional group that I admire more than most, are sometimes criticized by abolitionists for our complicity in paving the gears of an incarceration machine. Most PD’s I know acknowledge this on some level. We also feel compelled to stand up in the ways we can for society’s most vulnerable. It doesn’t mean that we’re not part of a larger problem, which is that the root causes of incarceration in this country are about cruelty, racism, and greed. It hurts to live in a place where you can be so brave and do so much good, and like everybody else, be operating in a context that mercilessly, and demonstrably, continues to be the steamroller of injustice.

 

If you can’t make room for complexity, the prison abolition discussion probably isn’t for you.

 

Here’s facts: a shockingly high number of people are behind bars for nonviolent drug convictions (nearly half a million), even more than that if you include crimes that are less serious than nonviolent drug convictions. Prison is an extension of slavery and Jim Crow. This has actually resulted in the imprisonment of Black people, most of all. See Golden Gulag by Ruthie Gilmore, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

 

One of our facilitators, Ra’d, asked a great question in light of these generally undisputed understandings: Why or what do you think causes a negative reaction to the idea prison abolition?

 

I’ve heard many good answers to this question. One came from an imprisoned woman I helped nearly twenty years ago, who was serving a life sentence in Chowchilla and who was also terminally ill. She told me that she didn’t believe in abolishing prisons because “there are some bad people in here, and I don’t want them out in the world.”

 

Fear is everywhere. We cannot hide it away.

 

But that’s not the problem, several people in the conversation said. The problem is that we don’t have a viable alternative to prisons. People don’t know how to imagine a world without incarceration.

---

 

“Twelfth Night” from Fasting for Ramadan by Kazim Ali

 

. . .

I’m alone here and if something happened to me no

one would be here to save me.

 

When Marco had surgery this summer he was so

vulnerable and weak I had to take care of him.

 

His body was frail, his eyes half-lidded, crusted

black-red blood around his nostrils.

 

Every day I would prepare our meals, lean the

dishes, working on thinking of no one but him.

 

Absent-mindedly, I had closed the bathroom door

which he then crashed into, banging his nose, cursing

in the night.

 

Fragile house, my little body, a body that is mine but

is not mine.

 

Says Desikachar, “The world exists to be lived in and

experienced.” And then later, “The world exists to set

you free.”

---

 

Of course not. We can’t imagine a world where the solution to a transgression is anything but punishment. We can’t imagine increasing public services and bolstering everything from health to education programs so that less people would be funneled into the prison pipeline. We can’t imagine that as the first steps toward prison abolition.

 

“We can’t imagine a United States wherein seven years,” as one participant pointed out, “is a long sentence. It doesn’t seem that long in this country, but in other places, it’s unthinkable. Who wants to give up seven years of their life?”

 

Most everyone in our society could never have imagined this pandemic or the devastating impact it would have across the world before it happened.

 

What if it’s not facts that have hampered the prison abolition movement? After all, it’s a movement armed with a very strong series of arguments, a wealth of data supporting those arguments gathered over time.

 

In this morning’s “Psychology for Characterization” class, E. Lily Yu said that rationalization is a shockingly strong human ability. In fact, humans are likely to supply reasons for outcomes and to believe those reasons even if those reasons are simply untrue. People like giving reasons for things so much, that even if they don’t have any reason for something, they will simply make one up.

 

What if we’ve been rationalizing prisons for so long because we don’t really know why we have so many people locked up?

 

Hypothetically, what if experiencing Ramadan and Coronavirus were similar? I mean there’s a lot of cleanliness to both. What if both were about connecting not only to Allah but also to each other? What if we were being asked to fast from social presence so that we could understand the very ways in which we are connected to each other? What if our Faith and our Connection became clearer and stronger because of our deprivation of food, of water, of touch?

 

What about that person who is stuck in the carceral system? What if that person were our business? The same way our neighbor getting COVID-19 is our business?

The same way that one day we were told we had to change, we had to sacrifice, because we didn’t want what happened to strangers across the world and what was starting to happen to strangers across the street, to happen to somebody we love.

 

What if that person who was stuck in a cell right now were our lover, hypothetically? Our neighbor? Our friend? Our father? Our sister? Would what happens to them be relevant to us? Would the word us sound different if you were White? Asian? Indigenous? Black? Latinx?

 

Coronavirus requires all of us to act for the greater good, ostensibly for the survival of our species. What if being here, alone with only whatever Faith we have, we all acted like it was Ramadan. We all took a moment to separately contemplate our connection. If the cure for our society lies in those cheesy lines: Alone. Together.

 

The thought can become a reality.

 

 

Every revolution carries within it, as Frank Herbert author of Dune would say, the seeds of its own destruction.

 

What if Coronavirus were the revolution, the change?

And the seeds of its destruction was its need of connection.

A virus needs to join with us or another host to be alive. Otherwise, it cannot continue to exist.

To think that our species could act together, in concert, to protect each other and to connect, even though we’re not physically together.

To think that we could be far apart with our bodies and still be together with our minds.

To think that our fates are intertwined.

It’s not a radical thought anymore.

We’re already here.

 

 

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The small man
Builds cages for everyone
He knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck his head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.

 

-Hafez, trans. Daniel Ladinsky

Ramadan Day 1 – Roll Call 2020

Ramadan Mubarak.

 

Welcome to here.

Time doesn’t matter anymore.

 

I don’t know about you, but it’s very hard to write right now.

It’s very hard to concentrate.

There is something about the time lately that travels like sand and tastes like beige.

We’ve become sieves, with masks on.

 

Would you believe that I felt calm during the onset of the pandemic because I was too busy butterflying from pain to feel one raindrop? It’s been raining for days, and now it’s starting to hail. I can feel it, I say, tasting the place where the hail cut my tongue.

 

Some of us still want to speak in the storm.

 

I wanted to die as an exchange, my life for theirs, that kind of thing, not that long ago. Now we are all being reminded of choices, who has them, and who does not. I used to be a Public Defender. But I’m not doing very much while our jails, prisons, and detention facilities mete out death sentences. Stoning was made illegal because it was brutality.

 

Now that the stones have diseases, are we all closer to becoming executioners?

 

Speaking of intentions, I couldn’t wait for Ramadan this year because

I wanted to shake my fist Allah,

I’m so very angry at Allah for hurting me bad earlier this year. How I cried. And cried. The year I went to Wyoming, God took something from me then too. What’s left behind is a bitter melon, or only the rind.

 

“Do you think you can you forgive God?” the Doctor asked when I called him from the small town. I took the call in a hunting cabin, ignoring a stuffed bear wearing a leather skirt. I’m funny too, God likes to say.

 

I texted my friend Shades who is visited by that rare thief, a neuro-degenerative disorder who constantly holds her at knife point and threatens to trim her life span. “I feel angry at Allah and unable to forgive for all the bad stuff. I know you’ve suffered so perhaps you can enlighten me on how to not lose all trust and be less angry at God.”

 

“My only advice is to tell G exactly how you feel every step of the way.”

 

I’m so fucking mad at You.

Sometimes, I think You did this all on purpose.

 

I don’t like to workshop with God in the room anymore.

The plotlines have become so ridiculous.

 

I started running again, and then I had to stop so I could have a medical procedure.

 

Every time I ran I thought of my friend Ebeth saying: I love running. The pain in my body is like a relief because when that’s hurting, my mind isn’t filled with painful thoughts. I’m only focusing on how much my body hurts.

 

That’s what I thought Ramadan would be like this year, that the anger would become pure and crystal. I’d get a chance to vent. I’d finally have the space to have a face-to-face talk with G. I’d reprimand G and rail at them. G would give me some tired, lousy platitudes about loving me and about suffering being blessed, too. Also, I would make this blog a MEMO TO G that the pandemic is unfair, that it’s hurting good people, people for whom life has already been a toughness.

 

“When White Folks Catch a Cold, Black Folks Get Pneumonia.”

 

But that’s not what this first day has been like at all. I sat down to write a meditation on forgiveness. My intent for this month is to take responsibility for my inability to forgive some of the people who’ve hurt me. My intent for this month is also to forgive Allah.

 

But, nyah.

 

Today I have been silliness and 80% sweetness (except for the 20% at work where I snapped at some people who were, like me, really tired.)

 

Today I’m happy.

La Paloma sent me a meme that I can’t find. It says days of the week during Coronavirus:

– Monday

– Monday Part II

– Monday Part III

– Monday Part IV

– Fryday (the meme said ThriDay, but I like my version)

– The Day Before Sunday

– Sunday

 

An owl hoots in the Mid-afternoon sun.

Everything is fifty shades of green.

It’s 81 degrees in the California Sun.

 

Kazim Ali wrote us a new poem for Ramadan

 

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From “Absence of Stars: A Fasting Journal” which is in Fasting for Ramadan

Second Day

. . .

Alone in the park and hungry. Hungry and irrelevant.

 

Irrelevant because unable to act.

 

Time was I woke without an alarm and slept with

ease at night.

 

Now I have to struggle to rise in the dark, to feed

Myself, to prepare myself for a long day without

Food, a boat carved hollow so it can float on the

Surface of the sea.

 

The space in the room of the wind created only by time.

 

This rug, six feet by nine feet, silk, lush and thick,

But so fine it folds into eighths and fits into the car

Trunk. I put it down in each apartment I move into.

 

The road of time.

. . .

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Part of why I’m so happy is because La Paloma sent me a text.

This picture greeted me in the morning.

 

There’s a wild rumor that I started dating somebody during the midst of shelter in place, during a pandemic of all times.

 

I won’t dispel it. I will embellish it.

What’s it like to crush on a Friend?

 

We took a walk in the Redwood Forest careful to keep six feet apart. I couldn’t pay attention because the path curved and she was standing so close to me me. I wanted to hold her hand. I could almost hold her hand. We remembered that we could kill each other at the same time. We became more cautious and hiked further apart, deeper into the woods, and our conversation touched upon loss and relationships that we wish could be healed. The trees began their breathing, deep and slow. Their branches touched the sky. Everything the trees said they said in a whisper. I could hear, but I couldn’t understand. We walked until the dusk set into purple and black. I pulled my beanie down to keep warm, and the wool felt soft against the tips of my ears. We found a park bench in a clearing and sat on two ends of it like two acorns. I wanted to hold her hand. The stars lit up and each and every one of them touched the sky. I heard footsteps. She said they belonged to a bobcat. I didn’t know footsteps could touch the sky. A crow shrieked. The sound scatted across the sky. Everything touches something. I wanted to hold her hand. I wanted to be everything or something.

 

I didn’t profess my feelings that night. I drove home to Cupertino at nearly 10pm and came home starved and hungry at 11. My mother had left me a warm meal on the table. I was so relieved when I got through the door that my life wasn’t different in that moment, that I hadn’t lost a friend, that I hadn’t taken an unnecessary risk. That everything could be the same. It sounds stupid given the circumstances, but I need stability right now. I wasn’t ready to release that yearning for something so far away. Yet close enough for us to imagine it.

 

The almost touch.

 

Yet now more than ever what we need most is to be present. To take it day by day. Moment by moment. Because we can’t know when we’ll get to touch some of the people we love. We don’t know when we’ll be in your presence again.

 

I was kind and compassionate to myself.

 

Sometimes, I need to pray.

My forehead kisses the ground.

I’m here, I say.

If I’m going to die, I’m not going to spend my time without you.

 

La Paloma and I sat around on a video chat, both in our beds even though it was the afternoon, because we were lazy cats. We’d attended a series of dharma talks given by Mushim Ikeda with the East Bay Meditation Center. Her topic was the four Brahmavihara, or Buddhist virtues.

 

“What are they?” I asked La Paloma.

She listed three. “Loving Kindness, Empathetic Joy, and Equanimity.”

“What was the fourth one? Here I’ll look it up … oh, it’s Compassion.”

“Guess we don’t really know how to be compassionate,” La Paloma joked. “Mushim said something really great about compassion. I wrote it down. Compassion is distinguished from empathy. Empathy is when we feel the emotions of people around us. Compassion = empathy + kindness + wisdom + equanimity.

Essential to compassion is boundaries between you and others

Compassion needs to be strategic and wise.”

“Why is compassion about boundaries?” I said.

“Because if you take on the pain of others without boundaries, you will end up drowning in it.”

 

Yesterday, before the fast, I was so anxious. “I’m worried that I’ll waste the time that Ramadan gives me. I’ll do something stupid like meditating on forgiveness. I mean it’s COVID times, I feel so vulnerable, fragile, and angry. Is trying to reflect on something so painful going to cause me to lose it? Don’t you think I should be scared?”

 

“What do you mean?” asked Lucy.

 

“I mean, do you think it’ll hurt me to be sitting around thinking about forgiving people who’ve hurt me?” I asked.

 

“It’s never dangerous to think about forgiving anybody ever,” says Lucy, my new Doctor. “Forgiveness is not condoning. What’s the difference between forgiveness, condoning, acceptance, and tolerance?”

 

The compassion we give to others we must also give to ourselves.

Do that now.

 

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A meditation on compassion with Kitten Little via Text.

 

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Don’t surrender your loneliness.

So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

-Hafez

(trans. Daniel Ladinsky)

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