I hesitate to record the mundane. The things that feel so ordinary in my day-to-day life that I don’t even notice them. I struggle to notice them, or maybe some are just so sad and so complex that I don’t know how to relate to them; I loose my sense of self sometimes when meeting what is now my life. I see a lot of pain around me and I find myself needing many hours of doing very little in order to stay at peace.

…

The young mother.
I find her holding her baby outside of my door. She is crying, but not with sobs or tears; just with eyes that are far away and a breath that is stuck in her chest. I can see it. The baby is for once sleeping quietly in a bundle.

We’ve been to church together and we’ve talked, briefly, but now she struggles to meet my eyes and even though she is calm, I see that she is out of herself. I see that she wants, needs to ask me something and how her needing it is in itself so hard for her. She tells me that she is lacking money for the rent and that the landlady has told her to pack. She doesn’t ask me straight out.

“How much do you need?”
I ask her quietly and she tells me. My hand feels clumsy when I reach out to touch her shoulder.

The sum she needs is not much. For me.
For her, selling bracelets on the streets and needing medical appointments for her baby, it is a lot.

“I promise I will give it back before you leave,” she says.
“Don’t worry about it,” I tell her.
I know that she will pay it back but not to me, just as I will receive the debt but not from her. In this life, when bargaining with kindness, the recipient is not always important.

…

I am swayed by the world tearing itself into bloody shreds. It feels endless. Ukraine, Palestine, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, more places than I can hold in my head. My social media channels are filled with the rubble and I read and note the dates of protests but me, I am quiet. I don’t speak unless spoken to and my thoughts have taken quite a few turns around the subject of activism, its how’s and its what’s.

I get carried along in the discourses and the protests, emotionally and intellectually. At the same time I notice myself opposing taking action. Or maybe it is paralyze. The discourses are equally making up social belonging and maybe my wish to participate is simply me wishing to belong in a wider sense, to build community through sharing opinions.

…

My friends and the glaze that sets behind their eyes as they smoke.
I never say it to any of them, or anyone else, what a pity I find it when they smoke themselves beyond sense, beyond words. I watch the weed remove the sharpness of their intellect; it is submerged in the haze and I see how their thoughts start to loop and I see how along with that their pain is eased and it makes me so sad to see that this is what it takes for them to feel peace. That their pain is so great even as they treat me so kindly. I watch their addictions kick and demand from them in the small gestures; my friend snapping his fingers to be passed the joint; the way he casually removes the filter from the cigarette with his teeth to be rolled in with the joint. The addiction, too, like a baby tied onto his back, always carried and needing its daily maintenance. Shaping his body and movements.

I sit with my friends and I receive them, with pain and all, just as they receive me. I think that all we need is really just to be seen. Later as I walk home I breathe out that of the pain which has clung to me or I sing it and it flies from me like swallows over the Kasbah walls.

…

I see a strength in the voices that protest and I think that maybe it is a choir within which my voice, right now, is not crucial. And maybe my voice is needed right now to carry this discourse but somewhere else, in a different time frame. The discourse of love, peace, patience and understanding.

I believe that I am needed. I believe that the way I live my life is needed; my way of getting to know people in hiding, people having gone through extreme suffering but also my way of integrating the stories I hear and my way of being by myself, of dancing on the beach, of doing the things that keep me whole. I believe that all of these things are powerful ways of moving the world towards the direction I want to see it go and that these stories, this being, all of this is parallel to the shouts of ceasefire, the pleads for justice, the stands against wars and murders.

It is great force to stand still and take deep breaths in a storm.

And it takes me a great effort to remain calm; to maintain the space within myself which is peaceful quiet and beautiful and into which I place the stories that I am entrusted with.

Into which I place my self when I am sad or scared or going through so many changes that I lose my ground.

In the end I believe that I am a part of drawing out the same circle of wishing a world of peace, love, patience and understanding. Maybe I am drawing it out from a different side, but someone needs to fill in this part, too.

My time to scream is not now. My time is to remain calm, focused, slow and loving. Our world needs changing and it is changing, radically, whatever we think of it. I am ready to help channel and to help deliver all which needs to come.

Thinking this, I set out on my task with new determination.

…

Myself as I wake up in my dark room.
The first thing I nervously check before everything else is the time and if I am lucky there is 1% battery left and my phone will provide me with it for a second, displays the brand and model name and goes black like the room. I don’t know why I care.

The hands and feet and nose are cold. I make myself a ball inside the sleeping bag, it takes me ages to get out and up and I never know how many. I meet the cold tiled floor with clumsy feet off balance and turn on the sharp light and I don’t ever know what motivated me to do so in that exact moment.

It is not all days that I happily skip to the market.

Some days I stroll to nowhere in particular, not looking up or feeling hunger or longing. The languages around me and the bridges I lack; I could insist on speaking English but I am too easily swayed, mostly I feel that pointing and smiling is enough but some days I feel so bottomlessly alone. Not even having an internal language with myself, no symbols to understand the vague movements of emotion resonating through and along me, my purpose so vague and new and previously un-felt that pursuing it often feels like inventing unicorns, like making up new languages altogether and maybe I am, still a stranger even within my own skin. Maybe that is what it is. Maybe I’m just sad because nobody ever told me (and I didn’t know to ask) how tedious and boring and un-specifically difficult it all is.

…

(This story told in pictures.)