I’ve found that all the words in the dictionary can describe the map in detail but it can’t capture the wholeness of the experience – of serendipity in walking the territory. The pauses are portals and I make sure that my words are animated by long periods of silence. I seek what magnetizes me and then write home about the strange journey there.
I had a dream, many years ago, in which I was back at my old school (Islamic) in between a group of 3 religious sisters wearing niqaab, and 4 brothers wearing khamiis. Before us, at a distance was a block of rocky hills that were quite steep. My eye caught something, someone, camouflaged very well in the middle of the rocks, with its side facing us. I realized it was Iblees. Just as I was about to raise alarm, he broke free from the camouflage, swiveled forward and started breaking off chunks of the hills to throw at us. I told the groups to start running but to keep close to me. I was reading Qur’aan, perhaps aayatul kursi, and it created a protective field of light around us as we ran. For some reason, the field was only emanating from me.
I remember this dream as I had a realization that evil is stagnant and exerts its influence through being hidden and not alerting people to its true source. Awareness can’t be contained and power is static. That’s why manipulation and mind control are tools used by these forces. They induce trauma to shut the person down so that they can’t move in a cohesive manner. They trigger the amygdala, which is the offswitch of the human brain because it hijacks the rest of the brain and in particular, the frontal lobe which houses impulse control, future planning (executive functions) sequencing and comparing, attention, speech, memory formation, analyzing feelings of others.
I speculate that the frontal lobe is the masculine energy and the amygdala (arousal, memory, hormone secretion, emotional response) is the feminine. When the feminine is triggered, the masculine is hijacked and made inept.
Perhaps the two groups represented the masculine and feminine energies of my psyche and that through balancing them and leading them, the demonic attacks would be harmless.
I’ve been going to therapy for 3 years, mainly to understand this ancestral baggage of Somalinimo. What I’ve learnt through what was activated and constellated and entangled in my psychic drama I’ve never heard or read it explained anywhere.
Something really stranged entered my psyche when I felt compelled to go to Somalia on a whim in the summer of 2004. It’s like I’ve been weaving or sewing or knitting things I’ve absorbed and observed along the way ; baadiye, townships in Somalia, the diaspora in Kenya, The West and Arab countries. I didn’t know, but I realize I was on an extensive field research commissioned by the divine.
Intense curiosity and passion that threatened to destroy me if I even thought about diverting from that path. You know I tried.
That’s why I trust in the divine wisdom. I see things playing out that I was being prepped for a decade in advance. I’d never have seen it if I gave up trust or hope.
It’s ironic.
Everytime I do something that lifts me up, or I do something I haven’t been able to do before, I always have a week of depression that follows it. Longer depending on how high I rose. Without fail.
I only took note of that recurring pattern this year. It used to cause me a lot of despair before. It’s like a step forward, ten steps back. But that wasn’t what was actually happening.
When I’m lifted, I’m also opened and places deep within that had been out of the reach of my awareness come alive, like buds to the advent of spring. Lodged and lost memories rush to the surface as what was previously dead and stagnant is animated. The paradox of believing nothing will change and the change itself, creates a great deal of uproar and tension and confusion.
I’m acclimatizing. My psyche is adapting, recalibrating, trying to pivot. Much like jet lag or inoculation or muscle ache from a new workout. Any shift has to be integrated because it not only brings something out of you, it also imbues you with new energies.
When I understand this, it’s easier to calm the panicked thoughts down that think we’re going back in time again. I hold space for my thoughts through the liminality, and it’s the most vital part because that’s before the shift takes root and when it’s most likely to be discarded. Much like the body rejecting a transplanted organ.
I’ve had one singular desire buzzing in the backdrop of my life, ever since before I could even talk. It’s like an amniotic fluid, a placenta surrounding me, protecting me until I was able to handle the nature of this world without becoming of it.
The desire to bloom.
I interpreted this in various ways according to my level of understanding and consciousness, but also according to what wouldn’t estrange me from the society. There’s nothing I feared more than desertion.
But, this vision that held me together refused to be reduced to anything other than the true expression of its essence. It refused to conform to me, my ego, my thoughts, my dreams, my fears.
With it, I felt complete, I felt abundant, I felt resilient, I felt accepted, I felt loved. I tried walking away from that to just take my space in society, go through the motions, but having had a taste of that vibrancy, everything felt gloomy and dead. I couldn’t conjure up reasons to persist in hamster-wheeling.
After many detours and planting myself in backyards of others, thinking I could somehow *create* that garden by giving everyone what they desired (the naivety!), I finally realized that there’s simply no way around serving this heart that spoke in a language that was unintelligible but felt right. I knew the next step, but that was about it. I had to download each new phase, energetically.
I had to birth the path emotionally.
In the end, I found the configurations of my garden. It didn’t look like a garden. More like an obstacle course. If you’ve seen Annihilation, my “garden” was basically the inside of that translucent, rainbow dome. It was hella weird. Crocodile-infested swamps. Monsters disfigured from refracted signals of trauma that kept boomeranging back instead of being let free. A dark, humid jungle. The Land of My Shadows. And somehow at the core of it all is where I was supposed to go.
Against all odds, I made it. But there’s no garden! I spent how many years on this impossible odyssey under the impression that it’ll all be worth it because a garden was waiting for me, and now I’m basically faced with a unassembled IKEA universe????
I was angry with Allaah. I felt hurt and duped. Hoodwinked. I asked Him why? What was the point of this elaborate maze when You could just have let me die back then? What’s the point with all this suffering and wild goose chase?
I let it rip. I had carried it for so long, fearful of the repercussions of speaking it. The blasphemy. But I reiterated, I’m not blaming You. I trust and love You, but this doesn’t sit well with me.
Turns out, it didn’t sit well with me because I was carrying assumptions that my mind had drawn with the intention of being helpful by filling in the blanks. Remember what I said about only receiving one step at a time? Apparently, my mind had been tinkering with the negative space and filled it with logical or hypothetical sequences.
Bless you. Intelligence doesn’t work in this realm. At. All. Any more than lungs work in the ocean. It’s a different dimension. I have to be still. I have to make space. I have to listen. And how do you do that with an overactive mind that works faster than the incoming information?
This was my battle. Squished between that mind and this relentless heart.
I accepted the reality and necessity of what I was faced with. I had to clean out the land, change the soil, heal the soil. Pray for seeds of inspiration. Make room. Plant them. Pray for protection. For nurture. For rain. Fend off predators. Set up fences and boundaries.
Wait.
Fend off the acidic rain of doubt and hopelessness from my mind on my heart.
The resurrection of the divine feminine energy was waiting to bloom and I had to stand guard. The rejuvenation of the earth needed it. Needed to be protected from the invasive Mind that had mapped ever single inch and left no space for imagination or inspiration. Clogged.
I write to pass the time. I pray. I truly don’t know what the morrow will bring. I stay focused on the present moment and on balance to avoid getting sucked into the torrent in my mind which is tuned into the external world. It’s a shitstorm out there. But not in here. It took me decades to reach this place. I’m not letting threats on the horizon make me run now.
One thing that is missing from the conversations around climate change and ways to mitigate that is the mentality that started us off on this self-destructive path : conquests and colonialism. How can anything be rooted if we retain the same toxic soil? What’s the point in planting new things when the soil will feed it the old?
When we haven’t acknowledged what we did wrong, as a collective? When we haven’t located and abandoned the neural pathways that keeps channeling those impulses?
The earth knows how to restore itself. It needs nurturing, more than anything else. People are so focused on preventing, withdrawing, withholding when what is needed is a transmutation and a shift in our relationship to it. The excesses and imbalances in human relations are absorbed by the earth. A culture that forces people to dissociate from their bodies in order to survive is absorbed by the earth. A system that promotes materialism and demotes connectivity is absorbed by the earth.
Earth is our common denominator. It’s our collective body. It’s where our collective unconscious is housed. It’s alive. It holds on to memories, trauma. The earth always reflects the state of our psyches. Always. So how can we help it when we’re in really bad shape??
It’s akin to how people focus on exercise and healthy eating when the benefits from that will be undone by the dysfunction we feed ourselves, constantly. We eat more mentally than physically. We consume more emotionally than materialistically.
Our actions are containers. We need new energy.
Telling people to love themselves, to find love within, is such an asinine and cruel suggestion from people who clearly haven’t actually discovered love laying around in their inner crevices.
You receive it, from your creator. God, Allaah, the Universe, whatever you wanna call it. Pushing people into materialism as if it can solve everything and contains everything has also shamed people for their needs that they can’t meet. They’ve had to rely on sketchy sources and codependent relationships to get a whiff of the real thing.
The biggest scam is unhinging people from their divine portals, deserting them and then gaslighting them into thinking their failure is due to what they’re innately lacking and that others innately possess!
