Writing, creativity, liminality, oral storytelling, play, poetry, dancing, ritual, & movement have long been part of my life and have even longer been part of my ancestral lineages. This section will be an opening embodied space for art, wordplay, sharing, creativities, explorations, images, happenings, and the what and suchnot.

June-August 2023

Themes: Reconnecting with ancestry through song, music, ritual, movement, hiking, & exploring zoroastrian history in Iran. Exploring & imagining and feeling into different gender presentations as i ride the waves of non-binary genderfluid identities. Voice. Vibrational & tonal qualities of voice felt in the body as spoken from inside out & reverberating in from others inside. Poetry, I made vocal recordings of old poems, and instead of writing new poems I wanted to return to traditions of oral storytelling, vocal exploration, & improv so I am doing more improvisational vocal poetry which I may transcribe later. I experience poetry as a series of colorful images & phrases that run through me, that have a certain tone or melody or flow that resonate with me. I’ve noticed I haven’t written much poetry, but the phrases & images & vocal vibrations of being-with the poetry that emerges in me is always there, it’s just I don’t write it down much anymore. So, instead of writing, I switched to voicing. That feels better in my body for now, writing poetry and editing and re-editing is it’s own process that can be awesome but for now that takes me a bit too much in my head, and I need to be more in my belly, chest, & throat right now.

Also drawing! I’ve been drawing nearly everyday. I’m reading and writing a bit less than I was in the spring, and instead drawing, voicing, improving a bit more. I’ve also done a couple long hikes by the mountains near the ocean. One of my first childhood memories was hiking as a 3-4 year old with my grandpa in Iran in the mountains. Another core memory is as a five year old swimming in the pacific ocean in southern california. I have always been a child of oceans and mountains. I am also exploring my relationship to water & fire elements (externally and internally) in a few ways as that feels like a gentle way to explore zoroastrianism. Grief-work has also been calling me in relationship to ancestry and embodiment. Connecting to ones own ancestry (rather than stealing another persons history) is both empowering and also laden with grief, trauma. We need to hold both. As such although I don’t read much these days when I do read it is mostly more poetic forms like kahlil gibran, mullah nasruddin, omar khayyam, hafez, rumi, & the khordeh avesta. All these folx describe the ways in which love/sorrow are also parts of the same coin. That’s a very Iranian sentiment. Right up there with drinking tea, sitting on carpets, & writing love songs about distance from the beloved and the importance of great wine.

One word of caution though, a lot of these english translations of these works are written with a lot of MCE (Mad Colonizer Energy). So, before you pick that book up, check it. What happens in most popular translations and quotes is removing cultural/historical/religious symbols (particularly anything referencing islam), and replacing it with a sort of rebranding of rumi/hafez as culture-less freewheeling mystics that get white-washed into new age culture & stripped of all cultural identifiers. So, before reading any english translations, please read these articles: The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi & Misrepresentation of Rumi.

Oh, another thing. I’ve also joined the equity & racial justice committee for bay area open minds, a local organization for supporting gender, racial, & sexual diversity, so yay to local community building. I am a part of a few consult groups as well, one with bay area open minds focusing on ethical non-monogamy, gender, & culture, another with the local regional CAMFT chapter, and another one with soco BIPOC clinicians. We are not meant to do this work alone either personally or professionally. I have also completed Intermediate II in my somatic experiencing training in late July, and plan to complete advanced in 2024 or 2025. There is a BIPOC SE cohort in Atlanta that I am considering. Imagine the collective power of BIPOC folks in advance embodiment development! Juicy and awesome. Also, my pronouns have shifted from he/they to they/them, as that feels more right, for the summer at least. let’s see where things go from here. So that’s it for now. Peace out everyone! I’ll drop another line here in the fall. Oh, a final final note. I found it my name means half-moon, which is awesome because I’ve felt a strong connection with the moon from an early age. So, relationship to moon and the way “halves” play a role in my life is also up for me (I am whole yet split, all here yet there, wholly present & yet present to parts of my history that are absent). This reminds me of how different and more flowy, sensual, and organic farsi feels to me. English feels so limited, stodgy, overly precise, explicit. Farsi is a gentle river. English is like a geometric skyscraper. My farsi sucks. I have lost so much in that disconnection from language. This is part of diaspora, we heal from where we are in our relationship to lineage, and there’s always from that place of dislocation and exile a rich new starting point, but we must also make room for the absence. I feel like “halves” for me in my name mean the ways in which I attempt to transcend rigid binaries & dig beneath conceptual knowing to an embodied visceral language that honors that lived-experience has a richness, depth, variety, elusiveness that outrstrips any attempts to codify it into language. I guess that’s why I love poetry.

May 2023

Current Trainings & Growing Edges: I just finished Intermediate I of a 3 year somatic experiencing training! I have also joined a couple new psychotherapy consultation groups that feel more aligned with my values in supporting gender, cultural , & sexual diversity & dismantling systems of oppression in the body. I am being far more intentional in building community, receiving and offering support, and tending to my relationships.

Currently Reading: Decolonizing Sex Positivity by Mo Asebiomo, Polysecure by Jessica Fern, Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown, My Grandmothers Hands by Resma Menakem, & Sharing Breath (Embodied Learning & Decolonization) edited by Sheila Batacharya & Yuk-Lin Renita Wong. I’ve also been reading a lot of poetry about love. As I deepen into working with the body in experiences of ethical non-monogamy and healing relational and sexual woundings, I’m finding that often poetry about love, grief, connection, sexuality, and ancestry offers a richer more visceral and sensual verbal landscape that is closer to lived-experience than more academic writing. I’ve been reading and re-reading Rilke, Gibran, Hafez, as well as more modern poets like Ted Berrigan, Frank O’hara, Robert Creeley. I’ve also been re-reading some old poems I wrote back in the day. I’m vibing more with poetry.

Currently Listening to: L-Fresh the Lion, Public Enemy, the Hu Band, Mohsen Namjoo, Bomrani.

April 2023

For my first mini-entry for April 2023, here is what I am currently up to in my personal life: I am personally currently exploring/reading/processing the book Sharing Breath, Embodied Learning and Decolonization. I’ve also been trying to focus on reading, writing, dancing, and drawing more, reconnecting with the spirit of water and spring, and reconnecting with Iranian zoroastrian-based spiritual practices that center seasonal transformation and fire. The journey of decolonizing the body continues to take my in many personal and professional creative directions that involve honoring both great joy/pleasure/connectivity and deep ancestral and embodied wounding. Rather than study these things intellectually from a protective distance that just reinforces colonization, I am interested in feeling and letting these energies move through and in my body. I’m also interested in exploring the idea of decolonizing polyamory. A lot of polyamory communities tend to center whiteness, and this can lead to harmful enactments of colonizing power structures. I’ve been really enjoying self-expression. I haven’t been enjoying as much trying to “Explain Myself”. In fact, I think this impulse to explain myself is kind of a defensive move to disarm and appease whiteness. I’m going to try to stop explaining myself and just center expression of self-in-community-body-culture-spirit-sensuality and the such. Explaining is defensive. Expression is creative. Explanation is like an intellectual dam. Expression is water and fire. Anyways, that’s my story for April. Maybe I’ll do one of these a month. If so, see ya’ll in May (also, I don’t like the gregorian calendar, having new year on the first day of spring is just so much juicier, props to my Iranian ancestry there, it would be cool to deconstruct the whole idea of a calendar as linear time, rather than cyclical time, seasonal time). PSS, as a BIPOC person in a largely white area it can be tough. A lot of forms of body healing in Sebastopol are so steeped in new age colonizing narratives that they just reinforce the colonization of the body under the guide of liberation. Many folks would rather climb mt. everest than deal with their own internalized and embodied colonization and complicity in and socialization in systems of colonization and racism. This falls under the general decolonizing spirituality idea, so I’m sure i’ll be spitting some shit about that down the road as well.