Wintering of the Soul

It’s October. I wait for two hours on an outdoor roof to get painted at my cousin’s kheena (henna) night in Kansas City, Missouri. It’s nice to be in a new setting, breathing wet air, walking new grass, voyeuring home decor through midwestern windows. I spend a week with 8 family members piled into the bride and groom’s home before three chihuahuas and two cats return from their pet hotel.

We grew up living on top of each other, taking turns with impeccable hosting duties as caravans of Afghans roll into far-away cities to celebrate or mourn en masse. Our wedding celebrations are a minimum of 3 days and our mournings are carried on the backs of women for a minimum of 40.

This cousin and I have uncannily similar weirds (we giddy-up like horses when crossing in front of the TV), nerdiness (we both went to “magnet” schools) and emotional processing (delayed). I observe this as we share in the excitement of cleaning his coral reef tank. Coming from such a big family, there are repeats of certain traits, personality types, affinities and even life events amongst the cousins. Life doesn’t feel so serious when witnessing the limitations of creation…that’s a cozy thought I’ve tucked into my noticings. There are only so many archetypes we can cycle through and we’ve caught them all…on both sides of the family.

The day I land in Virginia, a state that “Is For Lovers” as its slogan says, it’s my father’s birthday. My sister picks me up from the airport and we drive first thing to the cemetery to wish him well on a serene Fall day. I don’t have time to bring flowers, so I arrange a sculpture of leaves under his name. My mother asked me to relay the message, “I’ll see you when I have the time” along with the laugh that came after. I knew she meant it in a “when the literal only time comes I would ever literally see you which is the time of death that is assigned to me by God” kind of way. Our double speak does not translate morbid, yet medicinal, humor into English very well.

We head to our aunt’s house after the cemetery and hear of a terror threat at the mall near her place.

Wait…that’s happening again?

For a month, I stay in the room I was living in when 9/11 happened, portaling into long-forgotten memories of lock downs and keeping cool walking past tinted SUVs in the neighborhood. In 2021 though, one of the two aunts who lives there is floating in the memory loops of dementia. Even when she forgets who I am, she readily treats me like family. That’s how we were raised. It feels like a blessing that she doesn’t remember too much.

I call a dear friend to let him know I am on to the next leg of travels and the first thing he says is, “You’re really swimming in the DNA over there, huh?”

I didn’t mean to, it kind of just happened.

I wake up to the smell of turmeric eggs and homemade chai shudeyh (milk tea) every morning. I find a trail to take my contemplative morning walks on, but to be honest the trail kinda finds me. A stray cat pulls me off the sidewalk and down a path that ends in the middle of rolling fields of green. Then, a cacophony of birds magnetizing me to the edge of a forest where I giggle at a patch of itty bitty wild strawberries guiding me down some muddy squish to a stream. I follow her windings to a couple wooden bridges and eventually a quiet place to sit. I pick up the telephone, dial into this Northern Virginian landscape and, after a couple rings, a blue heron swoops in just a few feet over my head. A gatekeeper granting passage for my swimming lessons. Thank you. I rub reddish brown mud into all ten fingerprints. Good to be home again.

The next day, I visit young hunger strikers advocating for climate justice in front of the White House. I sit between a man who calls himself the “Truth Conductor” and another man who runs a “peace flag wisdom camp” according to my journal. The white paint of the block house across from me feels unnatural, almost neon, compared to the low, bright cloud cover that day.

Only the really young children stare at the hunger strikers before being corralled into tourism selfies while I sit nearby. One little girl with green eyes, about four years old, stops to stare at the yellow banner and line of young people in wheelchairs before catching up with her father who stands to my left. He paused, gently turned her around pointing toward the activists, explained hunger strikes and how climate change is a big deal.

He speaks to her in Dari.

They are Afghan. I smile into my lap.

Thankful for the pause, acknowledgement and well-timed message from this brother, I know it’s time to leave.

I request a day of making mantu (dumplings) with my aunties so we can tell stories about the past without dwelling in them too much because we need our bodies to fill and fold dough squares in the here-and-now.

It works.

We watch old films in Hindi and Urdu, and auntie asks me every 5 minutes if I understand what they’re saying. “No, but I like the colors and the outfits. Can you tell me what’s happening?” She’s jokingly disappointed I didn’t learn while watching these films as a child and I’m glad she remembers that much before she forgets I asked her to translate.

Most everyone on the loyal lion side of the family knows at least four or five languages. The double speak doubles and I begin to see how we war and weave with words as a family, as a clan, as countries, as a species in a 3D web over a technicolor dance scene. I can talk about one word 3 different ways for 15 minutes and that would just be a start.

There are moments swimming up this stream that I feel winded, but it’s not over yet.

Sissie drives us to Harper’s Ferry and I fall in love with West Virginia. I’m happy she lives there, because Virginia just flipped red to businessman and first-time politician Glenn Youngkin. He was the managing director of the Carlyle Group in the years surrounding 9/11, when the company stood to gain from defense contracts in the ensuing wars. He later went on to become co-CEO before leaving in 2020 and announcing his candidacy. His campaign is also fueling culture wars over critical race theory in the public school system.

So “Virginia is for lovers” ….of what exactly? Hard to tell where the love is these days, that’s why I’m sticking to family.

Climate activists, including the hunger strikers, confront West Virginia state senator, Joe Manchin, for cashing out on coal and blocking legislation on measures to mitigate climate change. These confrontations happen outside his yacht and MaSeRaTi. I let myself read a few headlines despite my media fast. I know this isn’t my fight, but I need to feel a little angry today. Close tab.

Somewhere in the migration pattern of these months, a farm constructed in the name of peace summoned itself into my google maps. I booked the only available room and drove two hours through an autumnal haze to nest in a cobb structure overlooking flocks of sheep and blistering leaves.

I tuck groceries away neatly and chant into a room full of ecstatic hearts after settling in. I join the community potluck as it morphs into 11pm coffee and philosophizing with the remaining wakefull stewards of the land. I find my quiet here. I find quiet in the unspoken words of a widow because we are in the liminal contemplation between the language of war and weave. We feel each others’ plots before the need to speak them. She decides to bring me a gift from her room and the tears finally come.

On the final day, I gift her a heart-shaped stone from Mount Shasta and she reels. The earth is better at talking than I am. “Did you see the snow this morning? We’ve had four seasons this weekend, how bizarre and beautiful,” I shared. In the past month, this is the second city I’ve seen manifest this rapid cycle phenomena.

On a final walk around the sheep’s pen, I ask for a message while looking to the clouds. I feel the wind pick up behind me, turn my head to the left and there in the sky two slow thunderclaps lap at the edge of the horizon. OK, it’s time to go now. The car is packed swiftly and I follow a family out as they go on for their slow walk in the woods. We only met late last night but their child has already walked into my room twice and calls me lovingly by name, “Hawahhh!” As I peel out onto the highway, the sun comes out to end any and all ominous atmospheric conditions for the entirety of the trip.

Somewhere between these paragraphs, Marlanda Dekine leads an exercise on calling our ancestors for the spiritual ecology leadership program I’m in. Rowen White leads the next class into questions around our responsibility to inter-generational chains of memory. In these final course lectures the mirrors are strong and affirming.

I don’t know where or when I’ve been over these past few months. Migration, memory, communication and contact are passengers though. I am not alone.

~

It’s been five months since I left my job, since I committed to a sabbatical from capitalism. There is so much work that goes into resting, into unwinding from implanted inner monologues, into feeling my way back into part of something whole in the face of a dominant reality’s precision splintering technique.

Ego starvation, invisibility praxis, peeling layers and offering them to the fire, actually wanting to know the concrete answer to “what if I could be happy?” instead of fantasizing about a forever ethereal possibility. Listening with and not to. With a witness, with a room full of strangers, with the land, with those who aren’t bodied anymore, with grace and ease. Finding certainty in refusal. Of accolades, certificates, stamps of approval. Finding power in learning through a gut brain and not a brain brain. Waiting to be invited (like a vampire, my sister says) instead of forging my way into spaces. Sitting inside of geologic time, thinking about how to create for a world beyond this lifetime. Missing deadlines.

Harvesting insights from these chains of memory. Nestling them into the hearth of a wintering soul so that I may activate in their study and seed a memory chain for whoever might be looking.

~

I haven’t meant to be a ghost, but sometimes this labor is done best unseen. And if you are to be seen, it’s helpful to be seen by those who aren’t spooked easily.

~

The message for this final month is to prune, to get my house in order. I am attempting to catch up on as many loose threads floating out there as I can, no promises. Using up extraneous skincare products and extending the life of facial toner by adding purified water to a depleted supply is both a highly effective hack and satisfying ritual. Gifting away precious possessions because our mnemonics work together is complete. Closing tabs because I can feel them when I sleep in the other room. Not giving a fuck about grammar. Flattening hierarchy as automatically as breathing.

I want a lighter load.

It’s so nice to know what one wants.

I’ll end with a line from the winter chapter in one of my fav pieces, The Autumn of Capitalism:

“Regeneration requires death, but it doesn’t require ending.” 

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I’ll be posting daily for the rest of the year, so keep an eye on your inbox for streams. Can’t say what each day will bring, just trusting this process of surrender that has guided me through the gauntlet of 2021!

To all the new followers since the last stream, thank you for being here and I hope you’re keen to stick around for the daily emails, or you can mass delete them to your heart’s content. Replies and comments are encouraged and most welcome. The first stream is here in case you haven’t had the chance to read:

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