it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
–Mary Oliver, from Invitation
B said that she used to think that Washington Square Park was the center of the world. When I walk through the center of the park and feel the mist from the fountain settle on my face, I can close my eyes and imagine it as the center of my universe too, the axis upon which everything rotates.
As we grow up and step further into the world around us, if we let ourselves, we realize how much of the world exists outside of our own happiness and sadness. As a storyteller, I think about how my world intersects with the world around me. And sometimes it consumes me.
“Overwhelmed” by Britchida
On the heels of October 7, I was set to make my way to New York City and stay with a new friend’s mother. Everything about the world was teetering and crumbling, and I felt apprehensive of staying with my friend’s elderly Jewish mother. I wasn’t worried about not being welcomed. I knew from her emails that she was warmly and eagerly awaiting for my arrival. But rather, I was worried about my ability to hold heaviness for someone whose identity and life work placed them more intimately close to the violence. But B never tasked me with holding anything. All I was asked was to to witness the humanity of someone moving through stages of grief and anger at a shifting world. I could do that. I wanted to do that.
I am grateful for the ways that B and my joy and suffering collided beyond Washington Square Park; how we could hold each other’s humanity intact with the simple acts of sharing space, food, and bearing witness to each others stories.
We are bearing witness to the genocide of Palestinians. Every day since October 7 without a ceasefire I have questioned the world and the people around me more. It is unbearable to be witness to a genocide, and unfathomable to be the Palestinians living and dying at the hands of it. Those who have managed to survive exist permanently within June Jordan’s questions of what those of us should do who did not die. If we are each other’s harvest, then the land is glaringly dry. I watch as the world awakens to the interconnected truths of our oppression and bondage and pray that the seeds being planted may be an early harvest.
When I think about the harvest, I am reminded of an Alice Walker quote that says that land belongs to those who have buried a body in it. She goes on to say, “We love the land and worked the land, but we never owned it.” Those who are Indigenous to the land would never destroy it because they are the land. Palestinian writer Liane Al Ghusain writes, “We are the land and the land is us.” Placemaking cannot be the work of destruction.
I moved through my time in New York holding life and death in a way that only a city of such multitudes could. I asked myself how I wanted to show up in this moment, found ways to consume without being consumed. I dug deep into the soil of my humanity and moral compass when people I’ve known for years turned away from me, blocked me, and stopped returning my messages. I breathed through the pain of confusion when people I admired remained silent in all areas of their life, and “both sided” their way forward. I watched and noted how people lost jobs and opportunities for bearing witness to the truth. I soothed my soul with poetry and the words of the ancestors. I let my grief radicalize me.
Palestine will be free. In this life. It is inevitable. The only question is who you or I will be on that path to freedom. I am brought back to the story of Esther in this moment. The reminder that God would have always saved the Jewish people from the King’s decree. The story was about who Esther would choose to be in this moment in God’s calling.
This is Esther’s crucible. We often are led to believe that the entirety of situations rely on us to do something, but we are one individual. So often the world goes on without us and we are but one of multiple who can act in most situations. But when provided the opportunity to act, the decision whether or not to act is a reflection on who we are; it it our moment to determine if we care about the fate of those around us or only about ourselves. When faced with this decision, Esther chose to be courageous and to act as one who has a position to do so. Esther is often seen as as a biblical character who exemplifies courage and integrity while trusting God to protect and provide for her, but this reading does not go far enough in rooting the events in the fact that Esther does not name God in the text. Esther exemplifies courage and integrity as one who lives out her calling in a moment. We don’t have to name God to know that His truths and His power course through our veins.
I want to look Palestinians in the eyes and know that I made commitments to not abandon them. That their lives matter to me, and I will fight for them. That I wasn’t afraid of what others could do to me in this life. That I want justice in this life.
***
I entered my birthday season on a plane to the other side of the world. My trip to New Zealand came at a time I was asking myself how to hold the pain of the world alongside the joy that I would still feel each day as I met with friends and family on the road. The entirety of our world still exists whether we want it to or not. I think about the laughter and songs shared on the plantations and remind myself of ‘joy still.’ That resistance means to move beyond the state of oppressor wishes us to remain in. I am so often overwhelmed by the Grief in this world. I feel the magnitude of my water sign when I am flailing in wave after wave of pain and uncertainty. But when I let joy in, I can float. Even if just for a moment. And though it feels so small, I reach and remember moments in New Zealand as I moved toward 35 that held me up out of the water:
- the hug and laughter of a friend not seen in years
- a stranger singing happy birthday at the top of a summit as the sun broke through the clouds
- the warmth of the sun on an empty beach as I forged a new friendship
- lunch on my birthday remembered from a chance encounter on a wine-filled island
- the smile between travelers who keep running into each other from a hostel to a bus ride
- the splashes of a waterfall that brings you back to life
Not everything is lost.
As I lean more toward the communities formed and forming around me, and away from despair, I feel stronger. Capable in this year of new life to be the woman that Palestinians and others suffering around the world need me to be. It’s the Palestinians themselves who have taught me so much about the durability of hope, how faith grounds us and provides visions during the hardest of times, and what it means to refuse to be forgotten or erased. To make the world look into a mirror at its moral rot and face who it has become. How to heal and become something new. In the face of genocide, Palestinians are the steady whisper of “I believe that we will win.” I pray that 35 will root me in the lessons they never asked to teach.
We know that things must burn before we can rise again from the ashes. But God, Earth — she has been on fire with little relief for so long. We often repeat Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s words that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” but I am tired of the back breaking work of bending. Of knowing that the bend itself sits atop those who wait the longest, crushing them in the process. I think it’s time for me to lean into what being a creative calls me toward. What I need instead of the brute force of bending is the creativity of making the possible. To breathe life into a new world, with new ways of being.
Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free
Not to save the world in a glorious crusade
Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain
But to practice with all the skill of our being
The art of making possible. -Nancy Scheibner
Thirty-four invited in more questions than it gave answers, and permanently altered the way I see the connected struggles in the world. I pray fervently for guidance in year 35 for how I am being called to meet this moment as Esther met hers. That I will seek light from the goodness of those around me and remember the words of Nayyirah Waheed: I do not need to be a fire for every mountain. I can be water and soft river my way to freedom too.
Maybe God asked me to move so I would already be in motion to act when this occurred; to see pain and hope from multiple spaces and places.
I remind myself that in the pain of loss is the beauty of what I have gained. A better alignment to my purpose. Closer connections to those who fight for a new world, and the clarity of the things that stood in the way. My vision has never been more clear. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
To 35. To this next world.
May we both continue becoming.
Odelia Younge 