The hand is a throne, and it lives in the heart. It’s where fire, earth, wind, and water coalesce and become something tangible. It’s where you are drawn when you want to be a body and simultaneously more than a body, when you want to come home to yourself and remember.

The memory goes like this: You are more than an aging carcass of bones. You are more than the changing of the tides toward ill favor or fortune. You are not the name they call you by but something quiet and held in secret. An island in the middle of a vast ocean, pure and virgin. Untouched.

You are the hidden paradise. You are the discovery at the end of a long voyage. A land of milk and honey. An earth flowing with womanhood and sweet interiors. You are the thing that made it all worth it in the end.

Every place on this island is sacrosanct. Every place has its own secrets to tell, and its own set of ancient longings. For you are not just a body or mind. No. You contain life itself. The lives of countless atoms branch off into their own cycles of breath and drama. An angry multitude competing for space in the region of the infinite.

When this happens, you must remind yourself, after all, that you are the queen of this land. It is yours to govern. Or perhaps not govern but call into coherence.

Parallel lines coalesce and pour into the valves of the heart. Beneath the crust of the Earth is a river of blood. Life undifferentiated. And you, the pulse beneath it all. Journeying to find yourself in a remote region of infinity, parceled into this small body that bleeds and goosepimples and runs and dreams and shivers in the dark stillness.

Yes, YOU must call yourself into coherence. Recall that you exist outside of time, in many dimensions. And flesh incarnate is merely a map of the cosmos with all its strange meanderings and quantum substances. It is a place where wild hearts govern and longings and griefs alike run untrammeled and free.

What are you saying to me? I am listening. I am open. I am ready.

Star veil.

I wear a shroud of night and I come to you like a breeze through an open window.

Open your window. But be cautious. You will know when the untoward things are near. You will know when the pleasing things are near.

Sometimes the way we come will surprise you and the hair on your head will pulse, and the follicles will dance, and you will feel a surreptitious tap on the shoulder. You will feel a warm presence.

You want so badly for there to be communion and yet you are also afraid, and this is why you fall short of entering the great slumbering secret at the sphinx’s gate.

You talk of wholeness but you do not honor your fragments.

Honor your fragments. Stay with the boredom. Stay with the part of you that wants to bolt.

Do not make the mistake of believing that you are honoring these parts by offering them to ungrateful wretches. This is a myth that must be shattered once and for all.

You can be kind and generous, but don’t toss your pearls before swine. Be the orange blossom. Be the honeycomb. Be the one who wantonly laughs and brushes the curtain of her hair against the sky.

No lover can contain you. So don’t consort with those who are beneath you. Don’t give them more than a glance, or a mere drink from the fountain of your lips.

It is a gift to be given love, and it is a gift to give it.

Do not squander stolen moments with rogues and deceivers.

There is nothing hostile about a vast and open meadow. But people are strange empty fields haunted by memories that will have nothing to do with what you see. Memories that will crouch and leap across the reaches and make you hold out your fingers with longing and snatch them back with resentment.

You want so innocently to give of yourself, and there is nothing wrong with this, but how can you give if you have not offered graciously to yourself first? Give by giving your self back to yourself.

Begin here, and end here.

The earth thrills to see such a luscious gesture. The earth thrills to see the wedding of self and selves.

There is nothing luscious about being ensnared in the trap of a desire that does not belong to you. Find what belongs to you and allow it to sing you alive.

We will not know peace until we have driven out every trace of colonization. Until we have returned to some original semblance of who we were before we became so solidified in our identities.

It is possible to be colonized by one’s own identity, you know. Whether we are struggling against externally imposed narratives or attempting to write one of our own…we are constantly encased in these bodies, which tell us what we think we need to know about what it means to navigate the world.

So you want me to start? OK. Here are some of my identities: Woman. Writer. Activist. South Asian. Brown. Person of Color. Immigrant. Bicultural citizen of the world. Survivor of life. Survivor, period.

When I think of these identities, I don’t see any of them as “wrong,” per se. It’s simply that the exquisite totality of who I am cannot be summed up in any of these. Yes, these are parts of my selfhood, but they are only parts.

Now, by saying this, I don’t want you to believe that I am seduced by the notion of universal oneness and that I intend to uproot every sign of difference as if it were a rotten vegetable wrested from the earth. I don’t want you to think such a thing at all. I don’t want you to believe that in overturning my particularities, I am embracing some generic default that was not put in place by accident.

I simply want you to consider that there is another world. Another world that is just as vivid as this one, in which our diffidence does not occupy the same space as our grandeur. In this place, we are unabashedly ourselves. We are what we are, not despite our struggles and triumphs, but because of them. We are free to glory in this, to relish each aspect of it, as if it were the birthright into which we were born. As if it were the melody that stirred upon our lips when we emerged from the womb.

As if we were born singing. 

As if we were born with wide-open eyes that were not afraid to make contact with each sentient being in its presence.

As if we were magic fastened by flesh and bone.

All my life, I have wondered what it could be like to neither shrink back nor take up so much space that I suck the air out of a room. It is possible to do this from either position, you know.

I know that from this place, we enjoy the largesse of our lives because we believe that there is a power accorded us that transcends everything that has been stripped from us. Our dispossession is real, but so is this other truth that is within our custody.

A seed is a dormant knowing or an immotile polyp destined for nothing but a slow decay in the rutted soil. Not all seeds come to their fruition. Every seed bears a dream, but sometimes that dream is evanescent, promising a rich yield ripe with perfected knowledge, only to wisp away into the sunshine like a speck of dust gone forth to a higher power. As if it never were, to begin with.

Some seeds have no father or mother. They are older than all things that get born. I have felt this way sometimes with the seed growing in my womb. It is a seed that is more my mother than my yet to be begotten. It preceded me, and then it chose me to be its vessel, to hold its fallow oath of starlight and vastness within me like the most beautiful secret. Sometimes I think I am not myself, but rather, this seed.

What is the seed? It is a glimmer of truth in the pale twilight. It is more than a speculation, more than a “What if I did it this way? Then, would the world respond in kindness to me?” conjecture of magical thinking. It is a gnostic tide that overwhelms the senses suddenly and painfully. It bowls you over with the force of its desire to inhabit you. 

Two days ago, this seed rose in me. It didn’t pierce through the topsoil of my awareness but simply showed me a vision of itself in completed form. The same way an artist might have a momentary violent revelation of the spirit of what they are creating, in such a way that they finally understand that they are not the one doing the creating. The idea is whole and mature and older than time; it is simply making itself known by using the artist’s body and spirit as a host and vehicle. In the same way, the holographic imprint of the seed’s realized form washed over me, leaving behind a residue of new awareness.  

We are in a world of shadows doing battle with other shadows. When I speak to a grown man whom I believe to have power over me, I recognize only that his power is the shadow of the frightened child who still lives within him and enacts its morbid fantasies so as to stay a foot or two ahead of the fear. We are dancing with all manner of wounded wraiths, so we’d best tread lightly. Most people are not their humblest and highest selves the majority of the time. They are ever-shifting, metamorphic entities choking on their bile and shame and intent on offering you a heaping dose of the same. 

Every day, those of us who are fortunate enough to be able to see the world as it is (and I dare not count myself among their ilk) recognize that we are always shadow-boxing with the volatile and fragile egos of people who have no idea what their true intentions or motivations are, and who have no way of meaningfully evaluating their own biases or laying waste to their most harmful misconceptions. To drag them out by their hair into the  cool darkness of night, the moon and stars mild and luminous in their clarity above, would be to court the worst in the people over whom we seek influence (and if we are honest with ourselves, control). Nobody likes an earnest truthteller. This is what the seed informed me of, and this is what the seed has brought forth.

When Shawn and I were on our walk today, we talked about money. How we are beholden to it and wish to be free of it all at once. How we hate being under the thumb of capitalism, but how it also offers us access to certain realities we’ve been conditioned to crave and to which we aspire, despite our best intentions.

Biggie Smalls once mused, “Mo’ money, mo’ problems.” I don’t know if this is true, but the sea change in my own life became apparent when I moved up the socioeconomic rung at some point, after years of nibbling on dull, rubbery slices of leftover Domino’s pizza and clumps of watery ramen. Years of bouncing checks and incurring overdraft fees. Years of never knowing if or when I would arrive in that mythical destination known as responsible adult life.

Today, I recalled that as soon as I began to make more money, I spent more money. My tastes changed. I drank expensive wine rather than the cheap $7 bottles with hand-drawn labels you could get at Trader Joe’s, along with your $5 calla lilies. I stopped making brunch, and instead, went out to fancy restaurants with exposed beams and brick walls trying so hard to be rustic but only managing to convey hipster pretentiousness.

There, I sat with people whom I suppose in retrospect were my friends, although I no longer remember their names and it’s been years since I’ve seen them. Everyone forgets who you are as soon as you make the two great escapes: from city life and social media. Together, my nameless faceless friends and I drank bottomless mimosas and ate overpriced avocado toast as we chatted about literature, politics, and other highbrow topics, interspersed with the occasional tidbit of salacious gossip.

I went home and slept off the drink and feverish conversation, everyone straining to be heard above the restaurant’s white noise. Morning faded into afternoon, and I woke up to epic hangovers and a craving for greasy diner hashed browns. I conveniently forgot the exquisite frittatas that I had once so lovingly and painstakingly made in my tiny San Francisco studio apartment. I would serve them in giant wedges on my mother’s kitschy 1970s-style floral plates. In lieu of a fancy beverage, I filled old tequila bottles with ice-cold water that my dearest associates and lovers and I drank from tiny mason jars. You know, before they became trendy and all the wine bars on Valencia Street began to use them.

I laugh when I reflect on that gradual transition from being poor to being something else. Perhaps not quite wealthy, but at the very least, brushing elbows with the privileged and entitled, some of whom made their way into my circle of intimates.

Now, tucked away in our beautiful house in the woods, I have to remind myself that Shawn and I have nothing to complain about anymore. Frugality seems to be in vogue in our consumer-driven age. We no longer live in a city or spend ample amounts of time with people we hate, yet whom we still attempt to impress for reasons unbeknownst to us. What we have is sufficient, perhaps even abundant. Many of our loved ones have commented on how much they envy us our bucolic environment, the quiet predictability of our rural lives.

These days, it feels quaint and satisfyingly rustic to make a cassoulet from scratch, and regressive and gauche to drop a small fortune on an outing with friends. It reconnects me with the ingenuity of my former life as a penniless artist, when I learned to make so much out of so little. When beauty is not something you can thoughtlessly purchase, everything is infused with magic. Like the fairy tales in which the guileless but poverty-stricken young explorer shares what little she has with the local witch, who rewards the girl’s kindness with unexpected abundance.

And then, there was my childhood obsession with rationing small parcels of food for my dolls and imaginary friends, who seemed much more real to me than the people who lived in my house and complained about never having enough. I had other matters to attend to, but in my make-believe games, I never inhabited the role of princess or schoolteacher. Rather, I was the leader of the resistance, smuggling stale crusts of bread to the persecuted and injured during wartime.

Even when I was poor, I never knew hunger, but I could imagine it. And because I had my imagination, I always knew there was something better, brighter, and more significant than being rich.

“Fear is the mind killer,” I should have said after receiving her cautionary text message about compulsory lockdowns across the nation and militias patrolling the streets at night to make sure that nobody looted or rioted. I knew that awareness of the right to civil disobedience was rapidly eroding in this strange new era, but I also knew that reliable sources of information were a rare and valuable commodity.

Instead, I offered, “I know you’re trying to be helpful.” I was conciliatory, not wanting to bruise a premature friendship that hadn’t yet ripened. Not wanting to offer a criticism that might not be received.

“Well, I thought you should be aware,” she said curtly, reading between the lines. “I was doing you a favor.”

I remained silent, but my mind was exploding with images. The amygdala flashing in neon lights, signaling alarm. An entire networked collection of amygdalas mirroring each other’s levels of panic and fear, setting off a chain reaction of neon lights bright enough to power a city and be visible from space. A collective nervous system infected by the virus of misinformation. Of course, it looks a little different from the view on the ground. It looks like entire supermarkets emptied of toilet paper. Ammunition stores wiped out of bullets. Subtle and overt hostilities directed at the people and places where this virus is said to have originated.

“Shame on you,” I wanted to say to her. “At a time like this, our words and actions matter. And here you are, adding fuel to fire. Wrapping the steaming pile of shit that is your fear in a nice pretty blanket of unsolicited information.”

But she was my friend, so I tried to be calm and collected. I tried not to sound like a know-it-all. “Hearing news from a friend of a friend of a friend is a common trope of fear mongering and crowd manipulation,” I explained. “This is how urban legends are born. This is how ugly myths get seeded in the collective consciousness.”

“Maybe so,” she responded, adding an emoji with a protective face mask. “But still, it wouldn’t hurt to stock up on some extra items.”

I decided not to continue the conversation, for at that moment, I was lulled by the birdsong outside my window. The cerulean sky held only a few scattered clouds. A pair of squirrels were climbing the giant oak tree, playfully chasing each other’s tails. I hadn’t seen a groundhog since winter, and one was now happily sunning herself on the lawn. The knot that had formed in my belly slowly dissipated, and I breathed in the sights and sounds of spring.

For all the strange realities that we humans inhabit, there is still a world beyond this one, governed by seasons and cycles.