YOU ARE WHO I LOVE

power courage softness

Happy Valentine’s Day beautiful friends.

I’m sorry to send two mails in one day, I try best I can to be mindful of cluttering people’s inboxes but today is a special day, and sometimes we have to lean into the chaos.

How has your day been?

Has it been full of the quiet beauty of the everyday?

Has it felt like a day of love?

I really, deeply hope so.

I’ve struggled a wee bit knowing how to be here on this platform I so adore as it feels so different from other places in many ways.

It is an altogether different format , which is why I love it, and at the start I was so taken with the idea of being able to start afresh.

The promise held by a brand new space felt the way it used to when I moved country, job, friendship group, relationship. Part of learning to live alongside trauma for me has been the endless cycle of cutting, breaking, ending. The desire to run away from places, people, lives, but mostly myself. At the beginning on here I imagined trying a whole different approach to the space than I had on Instagram. Inventing a new self.

In place of posts on trauma, emergency, ecologies of care, the things people might be expecting, I pictured beautifully curated stacks of books.

Posts on light & ink pens & colourful candles in beautiful enamel holders.

Sophisticated, sleek, clever, like many accounts I so love. I imagined a way to keep this space curated in the ways so many people (mostly gorgeous book blogger accounts) do with their online spaces.

Oh, and flowers. I knew there would be flowers. I wanted a gorgeous, quiet space of solace. I guess I wanted the nest I used to have before a baby, and increased ecocide, and political hell, and genocide. I wanted, at the start, to feel free of burden. The burden of feeling like I had to be a particular way, a way that didn’t feel as free or interesting or cool of beautiful as other ways I maybe could be. In unpicking it now, I realise it wasn’t about comparison with anyone else. It was about comparison with my own self.

It was about self worth, which is always what it’s about for me in a new place.

The truth is though, I am, with every new place I inhabit, learning to understand I need to show up anywhere I nest in my authentic truth.

And that self is heartbroken in ways i can only try to convey. This morning I sent out the first part of NESTING, a course that is, at its core, about safety and love.

About making home in the world, our lives, ourselves.

So here is where my heart is this evening, as it is every evening: my heart is in Palestine.

This morning , tears streaming down my face, I read for perhaps the hundreth time, this astonishing poem by Aracelis Girmay, the opening lines in the image above, introduced into my life when I needed her most by my beautiful friend and exceptional poet herself Victoria Adukwei Bulley.

I cobbled together a few lines, nothing in comparison to her beautiful ones but I hope and trust in the same vein and from the same place of deep ache deep love.

It has taken me 14 hours to decide to share these words here, to write this unscheduled post which I guess is really a post about truth. I sent these words to Aracelis Girmay. I dunno, something about these last few months has made me brave in ways I’m still trying to understand, and so I thought , fuck it, I am who I am, and I am learning to love that person , and I LOVE YOU, and so here we are —

You teenagers mothering your baby siblings through genocide with tenderness and with hope YOU ARE WHO I LOVE,

You auntie rocking the body of your dead niece, whispering sweet memories to take her to the other side YOU ARE WHO I LOVE,

You father collecting the parts of his baby to grieve him properly YOU ARE WHO I LOVE,

You mothers telling their babies the bombs are only the party as the war ends YOU ARE WHO I LOVE,

You grannies making the bread balls when the flour finally finds you to keep you community from enforced famine YOU ARE WHO I LOVE,

You beautiful Hind begging and scared and trusting and how we let you down, YOU ARE WHO I LOVE

You circus crew giving the children of Gaza ; your children our children joy in the darkness YOU ARE WHO I LOVE,

You doctor throwing off her coat, running like the fires of a place not quite so bad as where you are YOU ARE WHO I LOVE,

You male medics singing to the babies and swaying them as any mother does YOU ARE WHO I LOVE,

You beautiful, tender, strong people of Palestine, rising and rising and reaching and teaching us how to love and how to love and how the fuck do we learn to LOVE,

YOU ARE WHO I LOVE.

—And these words below are the ending of Girmay’s original —

‘How “Fuck you” becomes a love song…You at the edges and shores…saying “No!” and each of us looking out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love You are who I love You and you and you are who’

YOU ARE WHO I LOVE, Palestine.

Never ever ever will I stop loving you which really means doing all in my power to help you get free.

Artists , writers, creatives, dancers, lovers of this world are deepening into love right now and it is at the guidance of the people of Palestine.

Palestine, you are freeing us.

You are reminding us.

You are guiding us.

It is ok to be an artist and write your own story in the midst of this horror.

I would argue it is actually essential work. And it is absolutely totally completely ok to, at the same time , and in the same space, speak the truth that is the need for the immediate ending of this horror.

We are much less separate than they would have us believe.

You are me. I am you.

We is the only word we need right now.

Oh, and LOVE, always LOVE, LOVE that knows no bounds or borders.

Girmay replied to my message, and I wept again.

The three main words she gave me, for her response was a gift the like of which I’ve never known, were —

POWER

COURAGE

SOFTNESS.

Yes there will be flowers and yes there will be candles and yes there will be stacks of gorgeous books but there will need, too, in this space of mine, to be power, and courage, and softness.

We are writing new worlds here, and as such, we need new maps, we need new language, we need new hearts, we need new minds, we need new tenderness, we need new love.

But I have the sense that these new ways are really old ways, ways we came into this world with, ways we are being called back towards right when we need them most.

YOU ARE WHO I LOVE YOU AND YOU AND YOU ARE WHO