on God in the everyday

Growing up my Aunty used to make me wash my hands before touching books. It came from wudu, which is a cleaning process that Muslims do before praying or reading the Qur’an. In our house, books were not allowed to be on the floor or near feet. Books—no matter if they were textbooks or Goosebumps—were holy, dignified, precious.

One of my uncle’s would tell me about the story of Prophet Muhammad: how an illiterate man went to a cave and returned speaking poetry, which became the Qur’an. But the proof of a divine miracle rested in that: poetry. Poetry was the proof that Allah existed. Poetry was the language of God. And the idea that poetry, this divine way of communication, could be caught in the ears and the mouths of everyday people, at any moment, if they humbled themselves and were ready to receive.

Something my aunt also taught me was that our relationship to Allah was our own. That this wasn’t a thing that required an Imam, or someone else to interpret anything for us. If we humbled ourselves, if we got still, we could listen. And that relationship was one that couldn’t be taken by anyone else.

There have been many moments in my life where Allah and the divine have seemed like concepts outside of myself, something divine and therefore not something a basic ass human like myself could access. So many moments where there seemed like a barrier around God and the divine, something that made them out of reach, so exalted and therefore, had a certain kind of stinginess or scarcity to them. I think so much of my unlearning, and in some ways, my re-membering, really comes from the belief that Allah, and that the divine, is inside all of us, accessible to all of us, and in the everyday moments that we have. The divine is not scarce. The divine is not stingy. It’s everywhere. And when I start to look at Allah that way, I start to see the miracles and the synchronicities of the everyday, I start to feel less alone, and I remember how deeply we are held by the divine.

Last night I had two of my best friends over for dinner, who are fellow poets. We were talking and I was slightly tipsy & feeling myself, & started talking about my understanding of some of the history of poetry. And I was just talking about how so much of the project of poetry (or at least the poetry that interests me) has, historically, been based in the art of the colloquial. Of trying to get as close to everyday speech as possible, and in so doing, show the elevation and innovation of everyday language. And literally when you look at many of these motherfuckers—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shakespeare—they were trying to capture the colloquial, they were trying to freak on their everyday.

When poetry started to become more associated with the language of the elite, the idea that you had to be ‘learned’ in order to read or understand it came forth. Similarly with God and religious institutions, came the idea that you needed to have someone who can interpret it for you, or that you had to be a scholar in order to understand. That you needed a degree, that you needed a professor, that you needed something that ordained you in order to just be able to understand. And, the introduction of doubt: that perhaps you weren’t good enough, qualified enough, smart enough, to be able to trust what you were hearing, what you were seeing, what you knew deep down.

And yes, Shakespeare is hard to understand now. Shit, I need a translator to get him. But that’s because language evolves, it’s not static, and this motherfucker was white and English and innovating on language over 400 years ago. So our everyday is no longer Shakespeare’s every day. And there’s a bunch of people who think that language that feels like Shakespeare’s is the only way to write poetry, so they sit there and mimic and imitate, without realizing the thing that makes him so genius, was that he was actually listening, capturing, and freaking. And that actually, what makes poetry feel alive is that—the presence, the listening, the slowing down, the being with, and the freaking.

There are so many colloquials to capture. We all have different everydays. Each one of us has a different version of our own colloquial-ness, a different version of all the communities we come from and our specific and unique and beautiful intersections, that makes our language so fucking fly. None of us can write the same when we really come down to it, when we do the work of actually listening to ourselves and how we talk, to be influenced by our surroundings rather than mimicking our surroundings. Because writing is the act of witness, how we see the world, how the world reveals itself to us, and the communication therein. And that is poetry. And that is divine. And in that, is miracle. What that means is that we get lifetimes of poetry, lifetimes of language and innovation, lifetimes to interprets how each of us sees and relates to the everyday, to the colloquial, to the divine. Alhamdullilah. I am in awe.

A few days ago there was a tweet going around asking writers who don’t have MFA’s to share their stories to affirm that there are many paths to being a writer. I don’t have an MFA, I dropped out after I went to a program for a year. I left for many reasons, some that were really good (ie, things in my career) and some that were very hard. But while I was there, I found the institution to be hard on my heart & art, and in that moment, at that time, it was not good for me. Sometimes I wonder if I would ever try and get a MFA again, and I keep that possibility open, but I think I would be able to navigate institutions like that smarter now, rather than feeling so at the whims of them. I would be able to have better boundaries around my work, that honor my spirit, my own philosophies of creation, while not internalizing the sometimes very harmful ideas of creation that white-centered intuitions often hold.

And also, not having a MFA has, of course, contributed to the way that people sometimes engage with me and my own doubt of myself, particularly around if I’m qualified to do certain things or not. That is very normal in a world that really deeply relies on institutions as the bearer of knowledge, and as the marker of who is deemed as qualified to do certain work. And yet, it can still feel deeply painful, especially when I know the answer is that I am abundantly qualified to write, to teach, to learn, to hold space, and to explore language.

A teacher of mine, Kenneth Jover, often says—we’re qualified to do the work we are meant to do because we love. Because we are loved. Because we chose to love. Because we show up with love.

What happens if we start to change our qualifications to include love as a core component of the work that we create, of how we’re qualified to do what we do, of what makes us able to do something?

I am a writer in so many ways because I love to write. Because love brings me to the notebook, to words, to the quest. Love for my people, love for my communities, love for myself, love for my friends, and love of language. Because of that love, I honor my work. I show up steadily, I learn all I can, I sharpen my tools and refine and refine so that I am able to capture. I show up diligently because I love. From my love, rigor is birthed. Because love is not passive. It’s a discipline. It’s active. It demands work. I love and so I allow myself to be transformed by my work, and the work of others. I love, and so I transform my way of seeing, my way of being, my way of participating in not only my work, but the world. I love and so I try to humble myself, I get ready to receive, and I give gratitude.

One of the greatest gifts that I’ve learned through the practice of poetry is seeing the divine in the everyday. Of slowing down a moment and seeing the threads of what’s happening. Of seeing how the mundane can be the extraordinary. Of how so many things are just begging to be noticed, begging to be paid attention to. And what happens when we pay attention. When we slow down and linger on an image—whether that be fantastical, or whether that be an everyday ordinary image.

Sometimes I get nervous when I’m about to read a book that I know is good because I know that, if I show up with the right presence, the right openness, it can undoubtedly change my life. Some books take me years to read. Some lines of poems I’ve read I think about daily. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think about a line break from a book I read years ago. I don’t mean to sound dramatic. But it’s also true. And true for all art: a song, a movie, watching someone dance or dancing. The act of creation. The act of witnessing someone create. What it opens inside you.

x changed my life.

It’s such a big statement. And yet, through the trajectory of our lives, of our day to day showing ups, we make choices every day that change our lives. The choice to be present with someone. The choice not to. The choice to open. The choice to close. The choice to go on a walk and put our headphones in and shut the world out. The choice to go on a walk and not put our headphones in, and be present with the wind. Everything is a choice. And everything alters our movement, the ripples we put into the world, and what comes back to us.

It makes me think of not resisting that phrase, but actually embracing it. Not to be stingy with what changes your life, but actually to open to the possibility that your life is changing at all times, that there are all these gentle fingerprints of influence that contribute to the totality of who you are.

I feel similarly about love. So often in my life I’ve tormented myself with the dumb-ass questions of: but was it real? Was I really in love? But this love was deeper than this love?! So does it count? But what if they didn’t love me back?

What an absurdly human thing to do: to compare everything, to intellectualize it until we deny what is there. To let our doubt take hold and then run that shit to everyone we know: but is this love? How do you know? Are you sure? What if I’m wrong?

What if we just claimed it, if we were less stingy with it? What if we allowed it to change our lives? Our big loves and our small loves. The person at the bus stop you locked eyes with. The person you dated for years. The person who you were only ‘talking to,’ who was in and out of your life. The toddler crossing the street with their mom. The corner store clerk who has skin the same color as your fathers. The tree outside, that’s so steady in its tree-ing. Orion in the sky. The waves crashing at night. All those moments that had love in it. All that love.

Love just is. It’s all the time. It’s every day. When we access it, we access so much of our relationship with the divine. And love with one person will never be the same as love with another. Love doesn’t feel the same all the time, there’s no one size fits all for it. There’s only presence. There’s only miracle. There’s only being. And, when I know that, when I make space for that, I can let go of the anxiety and the doubt of the question and I can just trust. And I can stop being stingy with love, and actually realize, like Allah, like poetry, it is in every moment, it’s in every day. And I don’t need a translator, and outside definition, to feel it.