Nazia is out of town again.

There was a pot of filthy water on the stovetop that I used to boil 3 hotdogs for my dinner back on Weds. I only emptied it just now... in order to wash it and fill it back up with water to boil more hotdogs.

And that's when I realized I have become my father.

In my limited experiences, people giving sermons, whether on Friday or on Sunday, have tended to see their mission as providing the right answers when, in fact, a more important and less utilized talent is framing questions in the right ways to get people thinking differently on their own.

Shepherds do not pick up their sheep to carry them to pasture. They get them moving on their own first, and then provide a little guidance.

6-13-14

Marriage is a peculiar kind of vehicle with two people always at the wheel, and every major crossroads of their life sprawling before them through the windshield glass. For travelers who find ourselves in such a situation, may we be blessed with the capacity to communicate honestly with one another, to understand our partners and ourselves, to say I'm Sorry and I Forgive You, to compromise compassionately and fairly, to love and heal one another. May the journey be an adventure, may the company be sweet, and may you reach your destination, whatever it may be, safely and together up to the very end. May we all be good to one another and to ourselves, as best as we humanly can inshaallah.

8-23-14

I'm tired of having my taxdollars kill children. 400 kids in Gaza these past few months. Unarmed black boys who get shot while they're running away. Hundreds of children in drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan over the last few years. My taxdollars should not be funding state-sponsored violence as some macabre scarecrow substitute for justice, for some brittle delusion of security or law and order at the cost of our morality. They should be funding *great* schools for children of *all* backgrounds, they should be fixing our country's woefully decrepit infrastructure, they should be creating jobs, researching the technologies of the future, they should be testing, designing and implementing strategies for sustainable natural resource management to ensure that generations from now important natural resource bases and ecosystem services are still intact so our great-great grandkids can thrive. My taxdollars should not be killing children. They should not be killing children. They should not be killing children.

8-25-14

This morning I woke up before sunrise, and the clouds to the east were steely gray tinged with molten reds and incandescent whites like forge metal fresh from the fire that every day fashions the world anew.

8-28-14

The room is small and windowless, buried deep in one of Washington D.C.'s labyrinth office buildings. The man delivering the sermon at the front of the room is Arab, in his late fifties, and grey-haired from the top of his head to the tufts on his knuckles. “Nowadays you have all these feminists, but you see them and they do not practice the modesty,” he is saying. “What does the Qur'an say about the adultery? It does not say 'do not do the adultery'. No. It says 'do not come close to the adultery'. And how do you come close to the adultery? Through immodesty...”

In the front row, a young man is staring glassy eyed at the khateeb while his fingers nimbly manipulate his prayer beads. Off to the side, a long-faced man with a jet-black beard is slumped against the wall and has fallen asleep with his arms crossed over his chest. A trio of men in expensive suits eye the door and the minutes hands on their platinum wristwatches. And in the shadowed compartment toward the back, two young women see their own thoughts reflected in the other's face, and for a moment the hardness in their eyes softens as they share a silent, commiserating smile.

10-4-14

I find that when I surrender to the Enormity of Things I Cannot Control, the fist of my mind unclenches itself and I can see most clearly the sublime nature of my microcosmic life, all these little things I hold in the palm of my hand by some inexplicable miracle.

10-10-14