Category: Love

On yahweh power and hiding out in god's face

5/24/2026

GOD APPEARED TO ME through the leaves and the trees when I was a kid and then not for a long while—that stretch of schooling when rational thinking and material evidence ruled—until I was on my own long enough to start having conversations again with the invisible.

I learned to pray and I learned to convey my requests and I learned to convert faith into a more secular—and socially acceptable—hope. But faith is a much more enduring presence than hope, which often feels fleeting.

I memorized my torah portion at the age of thirteen, commanded to craft an essay on the themes within it. Imagine, at this age, having to say something to a room full of congregants about the deeper meaning of darkness?

But I tried, oh, I tried. God had already told me by that time that I was a poet, a scribe, and I abided. My parents hoped I’d hold ongoing conversations with god but I grew up at a time when loving god and expressing love for god was not cool—it was, at the very least, private—and at most, much too much.

There’s something sweet about believing that god believes in you. I think I held onto that even if I wasn’t talking about it to anyone, not even myself. It’s easy to lose faith in god and still pray to the out-there presence of an infinite beyond and say, “help me,” and “see me,” and “protect me.”

Traveling to places where god’s presence was so obvious, undeniable, and enduring made it easier to start weaving god-presence into my existence. I thank those I met in Zanzibar for reintroducing me to a holy presence in everyday life.

Call to prayer, everywhere. Every time I ate, a prayer on the lips. Every time I entered or exited a doorway, a prayer behind or in front of me. Every time I said hello or goodbye, a prayer for me and the other. Life got rearranged around protection, peace and love, on high.

I learned (or learned again) that all has already been written. I learned (or learned again) that we are puzzle pieces in an immense scattered picture of the universe. I learned how my breath and presence and attempts at consequential kindness held profound meaning.

When I wasn’t talking to god—when I was hiding myself from the gaze of god—when I forgot how to hide myself in god’s face—I was also reeling from the feeling that I didn’t know where I was going or why I’d ended up anywhere.

I thank the Christian mystics for giving me some language for this.

I was raised in a Jewish home—but not the kind that stitched me into a community of believers—ours was more of a collective nod to a history that had hurried away from us. I circled the faith like an American teenager would—with a side-eyed curiosity.

My parents never talked much about their feelings about Judaism or their connection to Jewish life. But my dad always praised yahweh—and that’s the name he used often and always—the most sacred name for god in the holy scriptures.

“Yahweh power’s where it’s at!” he’d chant to us as girls. Can you imagine? I am who I am. I am the one who exists. Daddy! This was the kind of god-love I grew up with—a cheer from the tired jazz man who worked a day job as an English teacher. Daddy, who worshipped music as if it was god himself in a robe of songs!

At fifty, I find it’s easier and most relieving to praise yahweh on walks in the woods, in bird sanctuaries—the magic hedge—the edge of lakes, the fuzzy dunes, all that houses and protects the divine—houses of worship, of course, but also the least expected residences—the nest, the cave, the cloud.

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On falling in love with strangers and longing to belong

2/17/2026

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My ex called me once from Tonga in the South Pacific. He’d flown all the way there via Fiji from Zanzibar, an epic trip that would land him with a best friend who owned a whale-sighting resort on a deserted patch of coast. To celebrate his 50th, he’d made the sojourn alone but confessed he wished I was with him—which felt utterly absurd to me and totally out of touch with reality, because I was spending my days in a hospital room in Sarasota, watching my mother die.

When we move through unfamiliar worlds, we carry with us the familiar world of ourselves inside us, all the old misunderstandings and fragments of our past that form the stories we end up telling to anyone who asks. But so few people I met during the years I traveled asked me much of anything about my life “back home.” I never had to mention that I knew the Shema by heart, God is one, hear O Israel, my Jewish American lullaby. The prayer could be a nightmare if I uttered it out loud.

Strangers keep all kinds of secrets.

I fall easily in love with strangers; I always have, ever since I was a kid. I might have learned this from my mother, who struck up long-winded conversations with anyone she met in grocery lines or rest stops. It used to unnerve me to see her strike up a chat that bonded her to a stranger’s world quite suddenly, but then I also learned to navigate the world with this gift—or curse—when I began to see everyone I met as a sister or brother or auntie or uncle or mother or father, entrusted to guide me to the next station or post.

In Zanzibar, I began to play at belonging as an extreme sport, looking back at the full-immersion method I took to learning language. As the resident director of a Swahili studies program, I enforced the “Swahili-only” rule with my students, promising them that if they abided, they’d pass the advanced tests with flying colors and really know this world they’d visited with a depth inaccessible to the everyday tourist, who had come to look but not to live.

I caught some of them sneaking in English on the bus rides to and from our field trips. Whispering, complaining, asking. Their loss, I’d tell myself. They were locking themselves out of the greatest feeling ever: to feel like you belong here, on the Swahili Coast. These shores have received strangers for millennia—the language is built to absorb the shocks of disruption and grievance that come with foreigners and their many needs. So few ever knew the feeling that they'd finally arrived.

Looking back, it doesn’t surprise me that some of my sweetest friends were kids whose parents green-lit these encounters mostly to keep me occupied and out of their way! In Kenya, I remember a friendship with Irene, in her mint-green dress, who lived behind my dormitory in a makeshift settlement with her brothers and mother. She must have been about 7 years old. She gave me all the time in the world while her family toiled in the shadows, hiding from police who always threatened to tear down their tin house.

Then there was Mohammed, who attached himself to me as a bodyguard, taking me daily by the hand to the coast to watch him float his handmade toy boat on the tiny waves. He must have been about 10. I visited him many times in the coastal village that existed as it had for centuries, in waves of prayer, fishing, and farming. I'd come bearing sacks of sugar and gift them like gold. Before I left for the last time, he gifted me his toy boat—his prized possession—and I still have it sitting on a shelf in my basement.

Transit Slips #17

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On half-here love, proximity, possibility, and praise

2/14/2026

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Once upon a time, I assumed a queen-like status beside a man who lived as a Rastafarian king on the islands of Zanzibar. I towered over him, but that didn’t matter among the hot pink bougainvillea bursting through the bright sunshine on his coastal compound. We were an unlikely pair, formed out of a single utterance one tipsy night in the velvety darkness: “tumpumzishane,” he said—“let’s soothe one another.”

And so began a strange, impossible love affair with a man more legend than discernible fact (at least to me). I noted his mother’s ledge of green plants in metal cans lined up on her verandah in the city, thriving in the tropical heat. I noted his care for the land and his willingness to dole out hours of listening to neighbors as he stroked his scraggly, braided beard in the shade. I noted his soft tones and his exhausted bones, worn down by decades of building bungalows with his own calloused hands.

I also noted, though, his drunken deep dives—days at a time—into pools full of demons, his endless litany of rages and complaints, his incoherent babble in the middle of the night that woke the sleeping dogs, and those tepid apologies days later in the harsh judgment of the morning sun.

I know we tried to love each other in ways that felt familiar, but there was no “we” for the duration—just an I and a You, coordinates in a current constellation in the night sky. I kept mistaking proximity for possibility.

I lost myself in endless reggae playlists. I sipped moringa shakes by the pool, rolling cigarette after cigarette while chatting with the many single Italian mothers who came with their children to swim and splash in the pool (carved in the shape of the continent.) I wore a magenta bathing suit that matched the bougainvillea and tried to forget that I had a self.

Let me say more about all this later, because I want to talk now about a different kind of love I learned on the islands—a Sufi kind of love.

One night, as a freelance journalist covering a famous music festival, I took a long walk down dark, winding roads on the outskirts of Stone Town to a small, unassuming madrasa lit like a lighthouse in the darkness. We arrived at Zizi la Ng’ombe, where men in crisp white kanzu and kofia quickly organized busati (mats) to accommodate the boys and men who would kneel for the Maulidi ya Homu performance.

What transpired was a spellbinding form of dance and praise poetry rooted in Swahili Islamic tradition. Maulidi usually refers to festivities related to the birth of the Prophet Mohammed, but this particular performance--ya homu—is a rare form that invokes the motion of a “steady wind.”

The performance locked me into a percussive trance, the dancers swaying as a collective body, their faces lit, eyes wide with exaltation, cringing or pinged with ecstasy. Sibilant sounds slithered through the song. They moved as one in praise of Allah, a choreographed crescendo of sheer passion.

At its climax, the dancers shuddered and shook on their knees, swooping backward onto their backs and rolling up again into undulating ocean waves of sound. They pounded their fists to the floor, then abruptly lifted themselves, reaching their hands in unison into the air, as if reaching for God’s love, receiving it, and placing it immediately back into the folds of the dance itself.

These Sufi songs felt like "love letters to God," I wrote in my notebook, attempting to describe the slow build, frenzied climax, and gentle release back into the mundane world of the everyday. "The form taps unabashedly into the eros of spirituality, expressing through mind, body, and voice a love much larger than ourselves."

These quotes are borrowed notes from an article I eventually published (the magazine no longer exists) about this experience. All of it still holds true as a snapshot in my body’s memory of what I felt that night, sitting barefoot on the floor of a packed madrasa on the outskirts of town.

Witnessing Maulidi ya Homu dancers changed something in me about the way I want to experience love—of self, God, lovers alike—exaltation and reverence.

I keep thinking about Martin Buber’s notion of the “mysteries of reciprocity.” It’s through the alchemy of relationships that God sneaks in and rearranges the furniture while we’re making dinner in the kitchen. This really only works when I can show up inside myself, however.

So many past loves experienced me as only half-here, and that wasn't fair to me or them. But that’s the way it is sometimes with love-in-becoming.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Transit Slips, #14

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travel far now

On yahweh power and hiding out in god's face

On falling in love with strangers and longing to belong

On half-here love, proximity, possibility, and praise

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