Skeleton Promenade

The most beautiful gifts I have been entrusted with, I am sure, are the people that I love. Those remarkable beings who have fanned my flames and rely on me to fan theirs. It has been the greatest honor to be witness to their light and share moments of otherworldiness with them.

It is for you that I write this, in a time where I am far, far away. Not in regards to distance but in that of spirit.

To so many that I love,

I apologize for my absence.

Truth be told, I'm absent from myself.

Absent and nowhere in sight.
Residing nowhere and nowhere to return from.

The fire you used to notice,
Once incessant
Now dwindles and with it everything I knew to be true about myself.

I'm told to dance.
Dance
To save myself.
I do dance,
but as a skeleton.
My impassioned flesh has peeled itself off of its bones.
It scurried away, saving its life and hiding in the corners of my memory.
What's left is the skeleton.
And the hanger that I used to merely hang off of

Is now all that I have to hang onto. 

The essence, the fibers that once made up my truth,
My conviction, my passion,  my reason
has left me to my bones
The two-step dance that the skeleton repeats
Pa dum
Pa dum
Pa dum

Numbs me.

So forgive me in my absence.

I am finding impossible ways to warm these cold bones,

Build up new flesh
In the memory of an outfit that I so loved to wear.

And then I will come back to you
In the form of something that resembles
The person you used to know

And love.

Merzouga Nights

After a lengthy hiatus, I’d like to report that the pieces of my puzzle have come together. That my feet have finally found their way, gradually picking up momentum, and lifting off the runway. That I am every morning elevated by a giant balloon which transports and transcends me into an alternate space where the mundaneness and pains of our Earth have been left behind and that my heart explodes at the enchantment I’ve found once again. That when my head hits the pillow every night, my purpose is as clear as those starry nights I spent in Merzouga nearly a decade ago. 

Truth be told, there have been no magical balloons or metaphoric runways. My feet still stumble. Nights have been cloudy, with a fading memory of the clarity felt in Merzouga.  The silver lining I’ve been told to watch for appears as but a glimmer, visible only from the right angle and is persistently hazy, holding no illuminating contours.

Ultimately this hiatus has been filled with many enigmatic undercurrents, still working their way into my consciousness.  I can but feel them, too small myself to understand their magnitude. Yet that they are there, crashing into each other, causing commotion in the form of discomfort and sustaining my intrepid heart is all I have to hold onto. It is all what many of us have to hold onto in periods of breaking. 

As I run this maze, I promise there’s a point to all the verbosity. All I mean to say is that I’m coming to find a certain beauty to this destruction. We are necessarily required to accept and embrace this beauty and purpose if we are to rise from the ashes. There is indeed a beauty in learning what you fear the most, a beauty in facing the fallacy of your perceived certainties of the world and your place in it, a beauty in the precariousness of the present moment and those of tomorrow. And I begrudgingly suggest that there is a beauty in abandonment and the solitude that results. 

Diving head first from a life filled with enchantment at every breath, often painful its own right, into the dark abyss I call ‘coming home’, weighs heavy on my head in the mornings and heavier at the end of each day, making my argument a tough one to buy into. Yet, I can’t let go of the idea that it is all for something. From a life filled with soul mates, daily epiphanies sourcing from a simple mud mask and a Nescafe, a furry feline friend who inspired the storyteller within me and a dance studio—a dance studio, bright and beaming with potential for creation. Leaving behind a life filled with dance, which seemed to make everything come full circle, I’ve found myself in a place void of perhaps the most romanticized elements of my recent past.  Yet, I can’t let go of the idea that it is all for something. Might there be an adventure hidden in what feels like a backtrack motion into a world I left running eleven years ago? 

Perhaps the clarity in Merzouga was a byproduct of a bliss that only a mind unfucked gets the privilege of feeling. An ignorance, if you will. A gap in my understanding that I will never really understand. And that that’s okay. Maybe when our feet walk in a certain direction, our only task is to follow along and trust that there’s a dash of wisdom in each of those funny little toes. That maybe our vestigial pinky is actually a source of great power, paving ways for journeys we never anticipated and crippling us to points where our knees surrender and we face the shit that we have been avoiding, all the while swimming in its depths. That maybe it’s time to face the unknowns of a life we thought we had so squared away. To give way for a new set of uncertainties even if they take the shape of something that shakes us to our bones and challenges the very fibers of our being. 

If that’s not an adventure, I don’t know what is.

Making Uncomfortable Art

It was 2009 and I was sitting in a contemporary art seminar— the curriculum being mostly history (40%), theory (40%), written assignments (10%) and the occasional art project (10%). Using my hands, creating something that held personal meaning, was always the most stimulating part of studying art and so I usually invested most of my time and efforts in that last 10% (resulting in some unfortunate grades).  

Our midterm task was to create a map of “My America”, with whatever medium we like, and to reflect on what calling this land “home” meant to us. Whoever said universities are a microcosm for larger nationalist projects? Hm. 

Anyways, I decided to have fun with this ridiculous assignment. My mind was sprinting, and a smorgasbord of hot words was buzzing around in my brain. Being insufferably political in nature, I wasn’t thinking of sweet tea and freedom like my colleagues. Nor was I into highlighting all of the US cities that I had visited by scribbling their state fruit (despite loving apples!) onto a map of North America. I was thinking imperialism. No, wait. IMPERIALISM. That’s how it appeared in my head. 

Having spent a profound summer in Palestine just months before, I couldn’t shake the reality that I no longer isolated my upbringing in the US from the upbringing that its foreign policy had thwarted for many loved ones abroad. I decided to question "My America" and it's place in the world and I didn't think I was causing any real waves with a message that seemed so obvious to me. After all, how could one talk about “home” without some level of national introspection? Well, it appears it was possible for just about every single student in that seminar. Except bad ol’ me. I just had to “make everyone uncomfortable,” according to one student during my critique. 

America The Hand

Instead of using the land mass of the US to define the contours of my “home”, I used an outline of the almighty Hand that it had come to represent to me. Positioned in an ocean without any other land in sight, the Hand actually holds a multitude of flags within its surface, representing the control and demand that it asserts over other nation states. The Hand also holds testimonies and poetry written by people from these countries that have suffered the wrath of the Hand. Take note that we don’t see faces. We don’t see lands or thriving cultures. Just flags. For this is how I perceive the Hand's vision when it looks beyond its borders. The materials used also have symbolic value: the wooden pallet: a fragile and broken foundation, a gold leaf halo: American glory, the floating mirror shards: American militarism and the barbed wire: a culture premised on defense and closed borders (not to mention the use of barbed material in US military operations). Ultimately, “My America” says so little about me and my worldview. My America is controlling, manipulated by the wrist that serves the interests of the 1%, ready to grasp at whatever it wills. My America made me uncomfortable. And I wanted the consequences of this reality, through my artistic representation, to engage my fellow classmates. And it did, surprisingly creating a first-time dialogue on American imperialism for many of them. 

So in response to the concern that I was “making everyone uncomfortable”, I simply said, “Thank you. That was the point.”

Two Suitcases, Mud masks & A Blog

 Letting go.

With my departure from Beirut just days away, the floors of my room are covered in piles of 'Need to take', 'Maybe,...we'll see', 'Only if there's room', 'Begrudgingly leave behind' and 'What? No. What were you thinking?' Remember, your life, or rather the things in it, have to fit in just two suitcases and a backpack.

I never like to think of myself as having such a fondness for the material things in life. Yet in the process of moving my nest, so many possessions have resurfaced-- hiding deep in the corners of my closet, at the back of my shelves, bottom of my drawers and now haunting my sleepless thoughts (are you visualizing dancing velvet blouses, buttons for angry eyes and long sleeves running towards me and finally engulfing me whole? I am.). Don't misunderstand. I'm not a hoarder and there's such delight in exaggeration. But the fact that we, as a modern society, collect and consume indiscriminately is undeniable and moments like these help to reflect on the affliction we face during times of “packing light”.

This has happened before, two and a half years ago. I remember it vividly. Budapest 2012. The famous 88 Kiraly utca. Roy modeling my dresses, Irina digging through piles of scarves, Shota shaking his head at all the
bags he knew would be his task to take over to the street corner for pick up. It was some going away party. The theme: letting go.

The physical process of filtering out my closet and flat isn’t as paining as what it represents. After all, this closure doesn’t really boil down to clothes, books and a few tubes of paint. It boils down to the packing up and bidding adieu to one’s home, one’s former life, one’s environment and one’s most favorite people. It boils down to the letting go and walking alongside the memories of the nest that was built before flying off. It is such an undesirable process and yet so bittersweet. This letting go coupled with the precarious nature of following my feet elsewhere, inspired by an instinctual desire to seek new adventure, has lent itself to a unique transition that I’ve only begun to understand.

So, about the mud masks. Keeping with the metaphors, a mud mask saved me from my recent pattern of morning faltering. After waking up in a darkened daze and habitually making a mental checklist for the pre-departure madness, I dragged my feet into the kitchen to seek out some comfort (food). And there Sarah was, chomping away at her computer, coffee in hand and a zaatar croissant laid out for me. She was ready to face the day, and had already gotten started hours before. Why wasn’t this me? Why haven’t all the elements come together to inspire creation despite change?

So as we often do, she and I sat together and decided that indeed the elements have come together and I just needed a bit of perspective. A paradigm shift, inspired by the Dead Sea. On my face. Twenty minutes later, after rubbing away a mud mask rich in minerals, and rubbing away all of the dead skin that symbolized my tired thoughts, nervousness and anxiety about this fast-approaching leap of faith (when did faith become so scary?), I write this first of many blog posts, rejuvenated and enlivened by what’s to come next. This free spirit is beginning to find itself unearthed and ready to go, wherever it is that it's going.   

Yes, this move has introduced new feelings into my guesthouse. And I don’t deny that even a free spirit has attachments, ones that will remain intimately within my heart. But I am finding a way to accept this array of emotions and welcome it all. As usual, I turn to Mevlana Rumi for solace:

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor. 

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

(trans. Coleman Barks)