MUSA

Hello! How are you? It is that time of the year where I send you a long something to read. A few years ago, I began the practice of distributing a letter to my friends and family as a kind of reflection on the endings and beginnings and the in-betweens that truly matter in our lives around Christmas time. Last year, unfortunately, I was recovering from Covid19 and couldn’t muster the anything, not the words and certainly not the energy to write one. This year, I hope to do this justice and cover for the year missed. But fair warning, what I wish to communicate and the words I currently have access to in this very late evening may not be commensurate. I seek your pardon in advance when you encounter these failings in my reflection.

I begin with a story I have told many times. The story of Moses. Every child born into an Abrahamic faith professing family knows this story well. In Christian ideology, Moses is considered the one who walked so Jesus could run. He was the beginning of the idea of liberation. Black people especially, have over the last few centuries, given the political and economic climates many of us have had to live through in that time, found comfort in the idea of a man ordained from birth to be a solution to oppression, saved himself that he may save. It is for this reason that the story of Moses is a church and masjid favourite in predominantly black demographics. He’s the one who could when all else and all others couldn’t afford to even dream of doing anything towards liberty.

Today, I would like to present to you my way of understanding spiritual material. We begin by laying the tracks of perception. While all other ways of interpreting this work of literature are infinitely useful, for this particular one we have ahead, I’d like for us to lay them down and in their place adopt this; let us look at the story of Moses as the story of our lives, and especially as the story of our relationship with our inner selves. To serve this end, we will view ourselves as Moses, as Jochebed, as Miriam, as Pharaoh, as the Israelites, as as as… well as everything in the story. Each part of the story will represent either a part of our conscious or subconscious interaction with ourselves, or a reaction from ourselves to said interactions. It’ll make sense shortly, I promise.

Shall we?

Moses begins his life like we all do, in his mother’s womb. Like all our dreams do, in the secrecy of our deepest selves, growing slowly and steadily, gently being nourished in darkened protection. The incubation period, the time when everything inside of us conspires to create the foundations of our dreams is sacred. Often we belittle this time as “wasting time” or “taking too long”. We become impatient with ourselves and give ourselves motivational speeches such as, “Do it afraid, do it anyway!”, and my personal favourite, “The best time to do it was yesterday, the second best time is now.” When I encounter people who have swallowed whole modern motivational content and are struggling with the anxiety of feeling they aren’t enough that this kind of worldview is bound to create in them, I begin by reminding them they are born of the natural, capitalism is not. To truly honour ourselves, we must allow us the fullness of being natural, and of existing in the rhythms we see the rest of nature existing in. You are creative and productive because that is natural, you are not an instrument of continued production without regard for rejuvenation and replenishment. That is capitalism built on the mechanisation the industrial revolution brought us. You are a human being, not a machine punching out products at rate X per hour. Nature, which you are a part of as a naturally occurring thing, takes her time, values rest, does her work from a point of self expression and not fear, and generally keeps everything in an easy and comfortable balance.

Pregnancy is a beautiful metaphor for this. Things that are precious to us often require that we begin by growing them in isolation within ourselves. Nourishing and nursing from within that which is still too fragile to face the world is not laziness, it is honour. We live in a world that has a disdain for private contemplation, careful consideration and meditative approaches to living and especially to work. Our current default is, “Do! Do! Do! Prove yourself by doing!” Pregnancy is deliberate, slow and calculated be-ing. It is intentional in a way only the things that are truly godly can be. Both parents are required to ensure that their own bodies are healthy enough to sustain the creation of another’s body. The father begins his journey of protection in the womb, with his DNA being the primary contributor to the placenta and amniotic sac. The mother is responsible for carefully selecting her diet choices to fit the child’s needs, even as the father’s protection provides that additional barrier of filtering through, such that only that which is truly nutritious and necessary is fed to the child. It is also the mother’s responsibility to listen, or as we refer to it colloquially, to respond to cravings. In spiritual terms, the parents are the parts of ourselves where the thought begins. The unobserved observer. The ultimate authority within. In moments of joyous celebration ideas come to us, and like Archimedes, we often leap in excitement, exclaiming that we have found the thing. We have found god. That joy is the orgasm that began your journey as a person and is the same one that often commences our journeys to the solutions we seek in life. Unlike pregnancy though, the, “Eureka!”, moment sometimes comes to us long after the internal incubation has already occurred and we are ready to begin the work. It must be said however, that such occurrences are rare, despite our frantic efforts towards forcing life to be that way.

You are a human being, not a machine punching out products at rate X per hour.