How To Be Online While Being Offline

hello again...

It’s December 2022. I’m sitting in my office space in Midtown Sacramento on 29^th and Tomato Alley. To my right, mama jaan sits in a black leather cubic sofa chair. Across from me, my partner sits in the type of posture that says I’m here and nowhere else. To my left is a photo of my father gazing mystically off-camera to the future in a cherry red Ralph Lauren button-up. His eyes are very accepting of his destiny, but his body is holding on for dear life.

I open my laptop at a desk beaming with two hulking selenite towers on each corner, logging in to join a panel on Afghan diasporic memory for UC Berkeley’s Art and Design lecture series. Gazelle Samizay shares about the upcoming exhibit of Afghan artists and writers at the campus gallery. Helena Zeweri clears the air with a synthesis of the moment we find ourselves in, and the work Zelikha Shoja and myself are about to share. She sees our work, in part, “as a way to undo the capitalist and colonial compulsion to make the future knowable.”

When it’s my turn to share, I rush nervously through way too much material. It’s been far too long since I’ve shared my brain in public and there’s so much I’m eager to say. I can’t read my audience, so I blindly chug through it and sneak views of my partner’s loving and encouraging gaze. By the end of it all, I feel high from the lack of oxygen circulating in my body from all that talking. My partner and mama clap, smother me in big hugs and I forget everything that just happened while in their embrace.

I finish some things up at my desk while my audience waits in the foyer. As I walk out, I see mama’s face cupped in her hands. I wonder if she might be crying with pride for the second time in life (that I can recall), but her neck is twisted a little too tragically. My partner’s hand is on her back while looking at me with a ~it’s going to be ok, you’re strong~ nod. The results from a test she’d been waiting for came back as I was joyfully packing up. They weren’t good.

So my programming kicks in and I begin care-taking duties. The next week, on my father’s birthday, a friend abandons me over text message and I get into a fight with my partner. I sleep in the office for the last night I have it, crying for hours on end, grieving the part of me I thought was ready to be with the world.

The next month, the flurry of doctor’s appointments begin. My mother doesn’t want anyone to know what’s going on with her, so I hold everything in out of respect for her sacred bubble. I live out of bags moving back and forth from her home to my apartment, and the rare solace I experience is in Mel’s yoga class at the climbing gym. In savasana, I am able to bring my nose just above the water line from drowning.

My sister arrives in December. I have the peace of her presence as she sleeps in the teenage bedroom she fought demons in for far too long. Mama asks for a healing session from me, so I turn to her, lead her into trance and start putting my hands on her chest. Very shortly after, she begins crying. I encourage her to release with words and hands. The tears become muted howls that shake her insides violently and quietly. That must be where I get it from.

I try to do my December daily newsletter practice, but I don’t know how to be honest in a daily way without betraying my mother. I go dark. I give myself the grace of a Nowruz (Spring Equinox) start to the year because I’m on ancestral timing these days.

In January 2023, I ask a wise, older friend his smoothie recipe so I can help my mother stop taking statins. On Lunar New Year, I am suddenly practicing Nei Gong, an internal martial arts practice, for two days at a Tibetan monastery in the Bay Area. It’s my first time doing anything like this, but it feels like home.

In February, I devour seven books, start a course called “Master Energy Dynamics”(M.E.D.) and practice the healing methods on both my mother and a surrogate Barbie doll with a titanium leg. I start preparing to ghostwrite a biography. In my notes I find scribbles about heroine cartels, Mexico’s prison system, the Napoleonic Code and a quote from the movie Battleship, “be where the enemy is not.” I attend my second Nei Gong retreat on the weekend of my father’s death anniversary. I turn the prayer wheels during our lunch hour in his honor.

In March, I savor the last weeks with my sister. She hears me say “bing bong” quite a bit during her extended stay and asks if I’m doing a Tik Tok trend. “No, I’m just making a sound.” She shows me some videos and I gasp. This isn’t the first time I thought I was in my own world only to be shown “my” secret persona is a collective one. No matter how offline I bury myself, I am still connected to a digital mind. Probably on a DNA level at this point.

I get a text about a freelance project as Nowruz approaches. “Right on time,” I say in my head. In M.E.D. class, the teachers tell us how important it is to “get lost in the hologram.” It’s helpful to hear this because it’s easy to get in the way of something more intelligent (i.e. a holographic field of knowledge) working stuff out. I don’t know what I don’t know, and I don’t know a lot of things these days.

I don’t know if my mother will remember how much I’ve done for her, and I don’t know if it matters. I try to console myself by ridiculing the egoic part of me that needs recognition to feel validated. Then, I pick a fight with my inner bully for putting myself down. I pick a fight with myself thousands of times over until I surrender to the dawn on the other side of depression.

In May, I spend 3 days at a Vedanta retreat between the ocean and mountains of Santa Cruz. I attempt to meditate in the presence of a fully self-realized teacher, Nome. It’s a constant attempt, and I never truly know if I’m quite getting the hang of quietly, un-mindedly, continually sitting in a pre-bliss haze. By the third day, the comfort gives way to a cacophonous thought factory where I sit backgrounded and try not to get involved. Over lunch, a person traveling through asks me what type of meditation I do.

“I don’t know.”

He thinks this is profound, but it feels nothing more than an innocent observation.

In June, I am at a weekend spiritual conference at a hotel in Marina Del Ray before heading into the office in Venice to work on an artificial intelligence project. I play with the idea of Actual Intelligence (lol), posit provocations around technologies that usurp our intuition and free will, and sleep soundly at night after a horizontal hotel room catch up with my dear friend Grace.

Later that week I’m in Frederick, Maryland for an 11 day Nei Gong retreat. I learn entirely too much, I draw in grid-ed notebooks to make sense of the over spill of knowledge. With a new physical form on the other side of 11 days, I drive north to Pennsylvania to witness my partner build a cottage with a generator on 40 acres virtually alone.

Summer in Sacramento slaps the spirit streak to a halt. I am slowly pushed out of my role as a ghostwriter and just become a ghost. I continue my walks to Joan Didion’s house, where I plead with her spirit to help me write again. At the end of the month, I head to Kauai for the remaining few weeks of a Hypnotherapy and Neuro-Linguistic Programming training with a dear friend and teacher. On October 5^th and 6^th I am still integrating from a demonstration where the teacher brought me back to my inner child in front of the whole class. I felt a floodgate of grief and rage on those days; from the sheer magnitude of emotion, I couldn’t tell if it was mine, ancestral, or eternal.

On October 7^th, the day people eerily call “the event,” an Israeli man in our group shares about the attack and his worry for his son. I cry. I cry at random as my personal grief gives way to a larger one. I feel the news in my body before it makes it onto the screen. This time, I have to viscerally sit on the side of conflict that I dared not touch for the 18 years I can remember praying and organizing for Palestine. Instead of breaking me, it broke me open to a level of compassion I worried my comrades would think blasphemous or tinged with betrayal.

In November, I drive through San Francisco to pray with people in another hotel event room in Burlingame. There’s a 50^th birthday party raging across the hall while I hear about miraculous healings and absorb prayer strategies from people all across the Western seaboard.

There is a war

A big one

Between good and evil

happening on Earth right now.

Between conspiracy and reality, confusion and clarity, all and nothing, battles of binaries tugging at the collapse or climb of our consciousness.

After 20 years of being on the streets, loudly proclaiming my allegiances, fighting and proving and showcasing and pleading, I find my place with my people firmly at the frontlines of the future. It is a hidden and symbolic edge, yet the work is just as important. There was a time that I spoke profusely and painfully about how, as ‘marginalized’ people, we need to be seen for all the invisible labor we undertake. I realize now that this invisibility is a crucial part of my work, and plugs me into an alternate understanding of material realities. I don’t need to be on social media or watch the news to know what’s truly going on. I see it in the anxiety of the barista down the street, I hear it in the voice of someone who has struggled all their life to hide their true feelings out of fear of abuse, I feel it in my mother’s pleas for help, I feel it from the river to the north and the one to the west. There is a sadness that flows through me, and sometimes I’m strong enough to send love right back through that channel, but sometimes I get caught/tripped/scared.

After recounting the many stops along the spirit streak, I cry in the sauna to my neighbor Jess about a mentor who has suddenly taken his life. I couldn’t accept the stark contrast between how beautifully this person existed and their tragic end. She consoles me and heartily says, “girl, you can’t be living in the light like that.” The wisdom of her quick response is that our reality is rooted in contrast—I can’t just pick living in one and be surprised the other still exists. She knows what she knows, and there’s a lot she knows that she doesn’t know she knows.

In December: I am in New York City for the first time since I left in 2021. I stare at lower Manhattan from the 9^th floor of a hotel that smells like everybody’s favorite Le Labo scent from that era, and I try to be a gracious guest for my client. The City honors me until I bow out to surprise my sister in West Virginia. I drive back the four ish hours, drop the car off and take the train to a memorial service for this legendary mentor at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

I cry all the tears I’ve been holding back during my trip.

All the tears over the last month since my friend and mentor Charles called me with the news.

Through the last season.

Throughout lifetimes.

Charles puts his hand on me and I cry for him too. I cry for the things I know and the things I don’t know. For the last seven years, he hasn’t once been afraid to see me work at full power and so I show him how I grieve at full power too.

I take this excavation into a holiday party with folks down in Venice Beach, California. Nick writes me a haiku on which he collaborates with AI and his dog. The last line says, “Spiritual Strategist” and my heart illuminates. I have the honor to spend the end of 2023 with a kindred group of people who quietly and diligently tend to the future.

By January 2024, I can feel Nowruz speak to me again. She is reassuring, soothing my fear around taking the first leap, encouraging me to trust the present moment because what’s next is khalas¹.

The first leap lands me in the jungles of the Yucatan on a piece of love founded through land. I’m in the middle of a call with Charles, showing him the casita and telling him about a dream where he shows me a written manifesto and brand identity for his agency. We catch up for an hour and then he asks if I’ve seen his latest work.

“No, show me.”

In the middle of presenting his latest brainstorms I lean into the video call and say, “Charles….this was my dream last night.”

I laugh with the kind of cackle that normalizes such things. The power immediately goes out leaving me with a shocked look on Charles’ face and the broken last bits of audio, “I don’t understand this connection, Hawa, and I’m not questioning it, I fully accept it…”

A truck hauling cement into stripped jungle for a massive new tourist train rips the power lines at the edge of our land to shreds. For a week I bathe in the cenote down the street, store food in ice bins and relieve myself outside. When the power gets restored, two different people write me from different parts of the world about dreams where I visited them and heal them with my hands.

The halo of Nowruz in the Yucatan is especially powerful because the ocean.. she almost takes my life. I swim hard, directly against a rip current and undertow with my beloved pushing me back to shore. Two days later I miraculously reunite with a friend, a goddess really, in the crystal blue waters of a cave filled with slumbering bats. We have messages for each other shared across three languages, so I wrap her in a prism of protection while she showers me with fruit, chocolate and candles. Three days later it sinks in that I almost died that day at the ocean; she almost took my life with those gigantic gentle waves.

In June, I gather with Fataah and a group of dear women in upstate New York. I prepare a two hour lecture and workshop on spiritual warfare, divine feminine archetypes, matrifocal societies and alternative forms of leadership. I guide them through morning meditations, help prepare nourishing meals and hold their secrets in the fortress of my mind. Fataah surprises us with thoughtful gifts on the last day. We all scream like wide-eyed little children, and I notice his heart blast open like a young boy watching the bountiful, joyous fruit of his love and devotion.

Three days later, another 11 days of Nei Gong in Texas this time. My teacher tells me I “just need to let go,” but I tell him I don’t know how or where or why. He picks up his flip flop and drops it with a smile, “like this.” I roll my eyes. He laughs, knowing my struggle first hand.

In July, three years into sabbatical, I abandon the apartment in Sacramento because my time there is complete. All that my beloved and I possess fits into a 10 foot by 10 foot storage unit. By August we are in my sister’s embrace again in West Virginia, and by September we begin a 3 month adventure in Brasil.

I sit among my beloved, two mystical French brothers and a laughing Persian saint wondering how we all ended up together in a car at 4am on the way to a small town called Palmelo in Brasil while the elections happen in America. We hear the election results from a German transplant. We already assumed, but left room for chance between the words of his delivery.

In November, I’m back in the same hotel event room in Burlingame but with my mother this time. She sits in meditation for a total of nine hours across the weekend. I break my silent concentration to bask in how impressive she is. On her birthday that Saturday, she is blessed with free cookies and singing by an old Ethiopian couple as we sit outside their cafe getting blasted with extra strength coffee and love. By Monday, me and my beloved are in the middle of a caravan northeast.

In December, a new home unfurls beneath our weary feet as we pour the contents of the storage unit into a spacious retreat center in the Sierra Foothills. Thank you to all conspirators for this resting place, for the hard work to percolate in.

It’s January 2025 and I’m riding in the front of a tow truck with Anthone talking about everything under the sun. He tells me about his kids, we talk about how much Sacramento has changed, and I tell him he’s hauling one of my best friends to her end after a last hurrah in Mount Shasta. He tries to convince me to save her, but I know our chapter together is over. I yelped, cried, sang, communed and camped in that Honda CR-V, my first car, for the last 4 years. I drove her like a horse on every major freeway from Oregon to the Southwest, pulling 60 mph on the most winding stretch of Redwoods sandwiching highway 17 once I learned how to carve mountain roads like the locals do.

It’s Friday and I sit in my teenage bedroom after I spend the morning hanging out with mama jaan, pulling her healthy body into my torso. We speak to my cousin Ramin as she floats around a catamaran parked on the Pacific side of Panama, crewed by a group of professional floaters and friends. We talk about herbal medicine together with my mother, nourishing the spirit, and how drastically we both have changed since taking charge of our destiny to roam. We are offline across the world from each other, yet we live in each others’ hearts and telepathic dreaming when not brought together by the zig-zagging ping of satellites.

It’s today and I don’t know how to end whatever it is I’m telling you. I’ve been gone for a while. Maybe an experiment in being forgotten. Perhaps an attempt to prove that I don’t need to be “online” to

exist in the modern world.

to be connected

to be hired

to be inspired

to be clued in

to be influential

The Redwoods teach us that a strong heat bursts open a mother tree’s cones full of seeds to carry on after the burn. The scorch becomes part of a greater plan to continue life. This I pray.

I walk out of my pink and orange room as mama jaan walks out of hers. She grabs me and kisses me, smelling like my favorite perfume I gave her to remember me when I’m on the road. I tell her I’m almost done writing. “Good, I was just praying for you to have a good end to your writing.” We smile…

It’s tomorrow, and Season Two of Reality Streaming is coming. This I know.

1. roughly translated to “done” “finished” or “that’s it”