Nadin Hadi
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Nadin Hadi

Writer and storyteller.

MythWriting

The Seal Wife

21 February 2021 0 comment
Friday Beauty

Friday Beauty – Louise Glück

16 October 2020 0 comment
Writing

Don’t We Touch Each Other Just To Prove We’re Still Here?

25 August 2020 0 comment
MythWriting

The Seal Wife

by Nadin Hadi 21 February 2021
written by Nadin Hadi

Once upon a time, up in the North, in the islands, where green foam flecked waves meet blue sky, there was a young fisherman.

It was summer solstice, and he was heading home in the half-light haze, the simmer dim, when the sun floats beneath the horizon and glows under the water as the moon rises full in the sky. A time of in-between.

He was kicking a stone down the path, following the curve of coast around to hidden cove, when he hears it, stops. A sound that makes men feel delight and terror.

Women’s voices and laughter.

Laughter like the clear stream rushing over stones. Floating on the twilight breeze to his frozen feet. He shakes himself, he inches closer, peeks around the edge of the cove and his breath stutters at the sight in front of him.

A group of young women, dancing on the sand. Wild, alive, hypnotising. Running in and out of the water, splashing through the waves, spinning on the sand gold beneath their feet. Sinuous shapes moving, dark eyed, dark haired, skin shimmering in the light. Beautiful in the wild way dolphins are, diving through the breakers.

Are they naked?

He hunches down, watches in wonder, tinderbox blaze in his chest, and a shimmer grabs his gaze on the shoreline. He sees shining seal skins scattered on the sand.

As many seal skins as there are women dancing.

Something lurches forward in him at that.

The women.

The shimmering seal pelts.

The stories the old ones tell of the selkies, the seal people.

And he looks at the women, looks at the seal skins. Thinks how it would be fine thing to have one of those. A seal skin. A woman wild like that.

He wriggles forward on his belly, quiet, half an eye of the women, unseen. Closer, closer, closer. Reaches out and seizes one of the skins.

The moment his hand touches the warm velvet fur of the pelt, the spell is broken. One of the women sees him, screams, and they scatter like startled birds. Startled, seen, they snatch their seal skins from the sand and dive into the green waves, women disappearing under the water, sleek silver seal heads rising up in their place.

All but one. The youngest, the prettiest of the women, is running too, frantic. She can’t find her skin. She cries out to her sisters, those dark eyed seal girls slipping away in the ocean.“Wait! Help me! My pelt is gone.”

The group pauses. One turns, as if almost to swim to the beach, but there’s a voice from the one leading the pack.

“What would you have us do? Stay in your place and give up our skins? I think you wanted to get caught.”

Then they are swimming towards the horizon, arrowing through the waves, disappearing, not looking back, leaving her on a strange shore with this strange man, holding her seal skin in his hand.

She walks up to him, slow and the fisherman looks into her eyes, this impossible wild alive woman in front of him and he’s a goner. His heart breaks right then at the sight of her.

She reaches out, salt water streaming down her face, and says to him, “Will you give me my skin back? Please. I want to go home with my sisters.”

Now, the fisherman, maybe he’s not so different from you or I. An ordinary man with an ordinary life, and now he’s had a glimpse of the numinous, the big mystery, standing here in front of him.

He feels the ache, the opening in his chest when he looks at her, and he thinks, “If I give her skin back, I’ll never see her again. I’ll never feel this way again.”

Some iron in him hardens. “If I let her go, this kind of beauty will not touch my life again.”

His fingers tighten around the fur, as he says to her,

“I’ll give you my hand, my heart, my fortune, my life to share to make together. But I won’t give you your pelt back.”

The seal woman pleads, she begs the fisherman, and she realises, as sometimes we all do, at certain times in our life, there’s nowhere else to go.

When he turns, she follows him to his stone croft on the cliff tops and eventually she falls asleep in exhaustion in his bed.

As she dreams restless, the fisherman takes the seal skin and he hides it away. In the morning, she asks him for her skin back. He doesn’t answer. Instead he brings wild flowers woven into a crown, shells that shimmer like pearls, saves up for fine cloth from the market, leaves them on a table as his reply.

He is used to fishing, to patience, waiting on the ocean, watching for hidden shoals, looking for a glimmer of his reflection, of what he feels in her face.

When he goes to sea, she searches the cottage, she feels the echo of herself there, but she can’t find her seal skin.

Days stretch into weeks, weeks into months, a year, they fall into the rhythm of a life together. The fisherman goes out in his boat, the seal wife keeps house, cooks, cleans, mends his clothes.

She stops asking the question and her grief becomes a hidden thing, unspoken. She goes out on long walks over the sandstone cliffs, gathers mussels, steals the gulls and cormorant eggs. She lies the cool hollows of the dunes, watching the sea, breathing in salt air, sees the shadow of seal heads popping up from waves and tears streams down her face.

She never goes into the water.

Then, there are children.

First a son, then a daughter. Dark eyed, like their ma, strong swimmers both. She straps them to her, as she walks the coast and tells them stories of her sisters, life under the water. The villagers tell the kids, your ma’s an odd one. At night she combs her daughter’s hair and sings strange songs around the fire.

When the boy is old enough, he goes out on the boat with his da. Every time, they bring back a hefty catch of silver– herring, mackerel, cod. They eat well and the fisherman is a kind of rich. A full belly, fine wife, a beautiful family.

Except sometimes moods sweep through the seal wife like a storm tide. There are sharp words at night, heavy silences in the morning and the air crackles like lightening. Makes you want to itch out of your skin.

There are days when the selkie woman doesn’t get out of bed at all, not for her husband, not for her son’s coaxing, not for her little girl’s pleading.

She turns under the blankets and stares at the wall, unmoving. Her daughter stirs the fire then, puts on the oats, curls into her mother, presses her face into her mother’s hair.

The silences get longer, the words get sharper and one morning, the same fight, the old fight, the same question asked, the space in the bed between them an ocean.

As the fisherman, he slams the door, he thinks how she doesn’t look much like the shining girl he found the shore on the solstice these days.

When he looks at her, he sees tired woman with cracked hands and strands of silver in her hair.

When he leaves this time, the woman gets up, starts searching the house again. She throws the pots and pans on the floor, turns out the cupboards, tosses the clothes in a pile, in a frantic frenzy.

Her daughter’s seen her do this before, again and again, but this time she asks;

“Ma, what are you looking for?”

The selkie woman tells her, “Your father took something of mine a long time ago. He keeps it hidden somewhere. I’ve never been able to find it. It’s precious to me, it’s part of who I am.”

And the little girl thinks. She remembers seeing her da late at night, when he and her ma have been fighting, her ma, tired out in bed, salt water stained on her face and sleeping, seeing her da getting something from the chimney rafters, thick, soft and shining, holding to his face, breathing it in.

She grabs the good chair, clambers up the beams and brings it down, a cloud of silver in her hand.

“Is this it?”The girl will never forget the look on her mother’s face, clutching the fur of the pelt. It’s like she’s seeing her for the first time, this woman who is her mother but someone else entirely too.

As she wraps the skin around her, her daughter would swear she’s younger, eyes like the morning, hair like midnight. The selkie woman flings open the croft door and she is running, running, running, heels kicking up stones behind her.

The little girl calls after her ma, small legs stumbling in the sand, and she falls, cries out, and her ma, she doesn’t back, as she dives into the green blue water. Then there’s nothing but the silver flick of a seal’s tail, a sleek dark head moving through the foam flecked waves.

When the fisherman came home that night, his heart broke a second time. They say he spends his days on the ocean, his nights walking the beaches, looking for the selkie woman who was his wife.

She never came back.


Myths can be a wild way of telling the truth. When the songs don’t reach you, when the poems don’t move you, stories were an old kind of medicine that could reveal a deeper truth about your life, who you are in the world and the world in you.

With stories, we all have each of the different characters and energies inside of us, the possibility for all of it, vast landscapes and worlds. The exterior and interior worlds aren’t so different. We might relate to one moment, one journey more at a particular time in our lives.

To be mythically literate is to learn what kind of story you’ve living in. Stories can be an anchor point, the images showing us the way to dive down into the world of soul to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our lives.

Here’s a few questions to consider in light of the story.

When have you stopped in your tracks by something impossibly wild and beautiful?

When might you have reached out, wanted to steal a seal skin to keep something in your life?

When were you left on a strange shore?

When did you do the leaving?

What part of you, what wildness, might you have had locked away in a relationship?

When might you have been the daughter, suddenly seeing a new side to someone?

When may you have wanted to snatch your seal skin, dive into the ocean, away from the life you’ve been living for years, back to a different version of yourself?

21 February 2021 0 comment
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Friday Beauty

Friday Beauty – Louise Glück

by Nadin Hadi 16 October 2020
written by Nadin Hadi

“At the end of my suffering, there was a door.” – The Wild Iris

Last week, Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I remember reading the news, my hands covered in dust as I packed up my abandoned office, and a warm glow of affection rushed through me. That surge of pride I get when artists I admire are recognised for their work. The home team done good. The Nobel Prize is the latest of well deserved accolades. She’s also won the Pulitzer Prize, and she became the US Poet Laureate in 2003.

Louise Glück is an astonishing poet. She weaves the personal and the mythic in ways that are vivid and revelatory. Reading her sometimes leaves me stunned, a bird flying into a window.

I first came across her a few years back. I was researching underworld stories, descent myths of women journeying, taken into the dark. I was reading Averno, a collection where she explores and retells the myth of Persephone, the Greek story that’s the foundation of the Eleusian Mysteries. It’s a popular subject for art and poetry, a myth that’s been retold and retold. One that I know well, that I keep coming back to again and again. And yet I was floored.

Averno looks at mothers and daughters, consent, complicity, power, winding between perspectives. She makes them real, with lines that are precise, sharp and stunning.

From Persephone The Wanderer

Persephone is having sex in hell.

Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know

what winter is, only that

she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades.

What is in her mind?

Is she afraid? Has something

blotted out the idea

of mind?

She does know the earth

is run by mothers, this much

is certain. She also knows

she is not what is called

a girl any longer. Regarding

incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The last line that closes the poem is one of my favourites in poetry. You can read the full text here.

In A Myth Of Devotion, Hades is creating a world for the young woman he has captured, who has captured him, with all the echoes of death and the maiden, dread and desire. What life is there in the underworld? What love is there in the darkness?

He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.

Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,

the other turns—

Glück’s work is often unsettling and uncomfortable, because she turns towards uncertainty. To ambiguity. There’s no neat morality plays here. Her poems gleam with awe and wonder, with struggle and survival. They tend to be longer form. She asks your attention as a reader, and if you’re willing to give it, the images and emotion she paints pour into you and can leave you changed. 

“Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you’ve no longer been bested by these events.” ―Louise Glück

The Wild Iris, one of her best known poems comes with a story that’s comforting as a writer. Glück had been suffering from writer’s block. She hadn’t written a line for two years, but the image, “At the end of my suffering, there was a door” had been with her for years. There was an ending to that fallow period. She sat down and wrote the poems that made up the book in five weeks. It went on to win the Pulitzer prize.

I have her full works from 1962 – 2012 sat in front of me. I’ve been leafing through them this week, reminded of how much she is a poet for our times. A well deserving winner. I want to offer Witchgrass to close, which surges to a crescendo of defiance and affirmation. A reminder of claiming your place in the world.

Witchgrass

Something
comes into the world unwelcome
calling disorder, disorder—

If you hate me so much
don’t bother to give me
a name: do you need
one more slur
in your language, another
way to blame
one tribe for everything—

as we both know,
if you worship
one god, you only need
One enemy—

I’m not the enemy.
Only a ruse to ignore
what you see happening
right here in this bed,
a little paradigm
of failure. One of your precious flowers
dies here almost every day
and you can’t rest until
you attack the cause, meaning
whatever is left, whatever
happens to be sturdier
than your personal passion—

It was not meant
to last forever in the real world.
But why admit that, when you can go on
doing what you always do,
mourning and laying blame,
always the two together.

I don’t need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

I will constitute the field.

Friday Beauty is a series of emails I send about one beautiful thing I’ve encountered that week. If you’d like beauty in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

16 October 2020 0 comment
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Writing

Don’t We Touch Each Other Just To Prove We’re Still Here?

by Nadin Hadi 25 August 2020
written by Nadin Hadi

Somehow, you grow lonelier

than the world that contains you.

That is why you so

want to be touched.

– The World by C.X. Hua

It’s been six months since I’ve been held or touched by another human.

At the start of the year, I moved out of London. Seven years in the city had scraped at my bones. I wanted more community, more quiet, more space. The move meant I could live by myself, closer to nature. I’d chosen Stroud. I knew one person there, but otherwise moving was a blank canvas for a new beginning.

Like all of us, I had hopes for the year. I landed in my new flat in March and found myself in isolation.

The world changed and I was in a new place. I threw myself into volunteering. I’m good in crisis. I’ve had practice. It’s part of how I like to identify — strong, resilient, capable. But the weeks stretched on, and that surge of energy was unsustainable. It crept into burnout.

There were days in lockdown when I felt like I was dissolving. That I might disappear. There was that Groundhog Day surrealness, waking up to blue April sky, sunlight slatted through bedroom blinds, a sheen of unreality, day after day. Waking up to disorientation and dread, time distorted.

Is this really happening?

There were moments when I couldn’t feel the edges of myself.

I’d wake up some mornings exhausted and break into raw sobbing at the strange enormity of it all.

There were those message in a bottle tendernesses. Calls, emails, I sent to people I loved in different times of my life, different places and received in turn. I hope you’re okay. I hope you’re safe. I hope you and your loved ones are well. A wish, a protection spell we tried to wrap around each other in the face of the unknown. How our strange new world called us to reach out as we stayed in.

When you live by yourself, it’s a kind of solipsism. The New Age crowd like to tell you, you create your own reality. When you live by yourself and work by yourself remotely, it’s doubly true. What you do, what you don’t do shapes your mind, your body, your days. That can be freedom or a millstone.

I found comfort in routine. Yoga. Meditate. Journal. Go outside. Write. Cook. Read. The endless hoovering. Laundry to be done. Dishes to be washed. My world shrank to the domestic, to battles against dust and hairballs, a life in yoga pants and no bra, and getting up still to work every day.

The silence of lockdown became an exhausting digital roar. When I opened social media, it felt like a wasp nest my chest, buzzing with anxiety. I unfollowed everyone on Facebook.

The overwhelm came with a cutting away. I had little energy, little headspace to spare.

Which relationships were feeding me? Who and what did I want to interact with? What’s important to me?

My physical world had become small. No car, no driving licence, plans thwarted by lockdown, the radius of my life stretched as far as I could walk.

My friends were in London, in scattered towns hours away, in different countries, the distance between feeling much the same. There was no-one near to share a bubble with and in a new place, it felt like too much of a vulnerability to ask to strangers, who I did not know, who might not be able to meet me in that.

I’d go out to the woods, my hands trailing through the velvety brush of new leaves, the rough edges of stacked rock walls, moss, trees. I’d trade distance smiling hellos with dog walkers. Sometimes the dogs would break loose, dart to me, tails wagging, jumping up to be petted.

Day after day I’d go. I watched the slow shift of the season, how the wildflowers blossomed in the meadow, the leaves unfurl. I’d take my shoes off, feet in the earth. Breathe in the smell of the trees and rain. You are real, this is real, you are alive. Feel the ground, feel the earth holding you.

In the 1960s, an American primatologist called Harry Harlow tried to measure love. He separated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers to investigate a hypothesis — that monkeys needed not just food, but maternal love and physical affection.

He put the babies with a wire mother with a nipple and a bottle for food and a cloth mother, soft, touchable, made for holding that had no food.

When they frightened the monkeys, they ran to the cloth mother. They spent more time with the cloth mother. There are heart wrenching videos of tiny monkeys opening a door just to look at cloth mother through a window.

In the absence of people, I made my own cloth mother. I burrowed into bed, and stacked the pillows around me, one pressing against my back, curled around another against my belly.

I’d sit with a blanket wrapped around me, swaddled, holding myself, right hand on my left ribcage, palm against my heart, left arm over the top, left fingertips cupping the curve of my right shoulder. Feel your heart beat. Breathe.

I took my comfort from screens, went for careful walks with people spaced two metres apart.

Touch is relationship. Touch is connection. It is bridge and boundary. It places us in the world and in relationship to each other.

There is you and me and the space between us and if I touch you, if you touch me, I know myself, and I know you. How do you touch me? How does that change me? How does that show me who I am? Where do I end? Where do you begin?

“Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here?”

– On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

In Romania in the 1980s and 1990s, there were thousands of babies in overcrowded orphanages who suffered from neglect. They weren’t held, soothed, touched, given care and attention. The neglect changed the shape of their brains, an imprint that marked the rest of their lives. The children are adults now and most are carrying the legacy of that neglect — social and emotional challenges, long term mental health issues.

Harry Harlow did another experiment in his exploration of connection and love. He put monkeys in steel chambers for three months, six months, twelve months, without any contact from other animals and humans.

He reported that “the effects of six months of total social isolation were so devastating and debilitating that we had assumed initially that twelve months of isolation would not produce any additional decrement. This assumption proved to be false; twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially.”

We are and we are not monkeys. Most of us are not completely alone, although it might feel that way on some days. Most of us are not in steel boxes, but if this time has confirmed anything for me, it’s that prison and isolation is inhumane.

We are wired for connection.

We need each other.

In May, my friend sent me a photo of a book she was reading.

Highlighted in blue was “After a disaster, everyone fucks.”

I get that. I get the people who just met someone and decided to do lockdown together. Who got back together with an ex. I get the reaching out for closeness and comfort. I read about secret raves in London. My friend tells me about covid parties in Berlin. I get the desire to spit death in the eye. I understand the defiance and the rebellion even though it’s not my choice.

For me, it’s more about intimacy.

There’s a line from an Ilya Kaminsky poem:

“Soaping together — that

is sacred to me. Washing mouths together.

You can fuck

anyone — but with whom can you sit in water?”

I rattle around my flat to a flickering carousel of memory. Things I’ve not thought of in years surface in the silence. When I was 24, I volunteered in southern Tanzania, with all my white saviour wanna save the world naivety.

I spent six months in a village as part of a health education programme. There was no running water, no electricity, no phone network. We’d wash with buckets from the river or have cold showers in the town hostels.

When the programme ended, my boyfriend, a Peace Corp volunteer turned up at my village on a motorbike to take me away. I swung on the back with my bag, hair streaming in the wind, and we tore down the road to a lodge a few kilometres away that felt like a different world.

We’d rented a cabin, with a log fire, a bed with soft white sheets and an immense bath tub, the first I’d seen since I’d arrived in the country. He lit the fire, carried me to the bath and we sank into water, the heat seeping into us and held each other.

In the morning, we walked through gardens, pine and eucalyptus heavy in the air. Under the gold morning sun, the lake was a green mirror, covered in water lilies, pink and white. He wrapped his arms around my waist and I leaned into him, held by him and that warmth and beauty.

I remember evenings curled up with lovers, reading to each other in candlelit rooms, my head on their shoulder, legs tangled, feeling the vibration of the words rumble in their chest, eyes closed, soft, loved, safe. Friends over for dinner, sitting on the countertop talking as we cook, leaning in for a hug.

Lacing my arm with a friend’s as we walk down the street. The friend who holds you and holds you through tears and crisis, their body wrapped around yours whispering to yours, reminding you to breathe. I love you, you’re okay, I’m not going anywhere.

Dancing with someone, being joyfully swung into a lift, a spin, the sense making mystery of moving together. The gentle sweetness when a semi stranger tucks a label back into your shirt, when someone brushes a strand of hair from your face, or an eyelash from your cheek and holds it out for you to blow.

What does intimacy mean now? What is safety? What is closeness when our intimacy could make each other sick? Who do you let close to you? Who do you trust? Who do you let into your world?

My skin hunger eats me. I want to hold my friends. I want to be held by people I love, and yet the idea of that tenderness feels scalding.

After too many months alone, I have become brittle and strange and touch might shatter me. I will fall apart. It’s not that I want to hold anyone. I want to be held by someone I love who can hold me through that with softness.

Back in the spring, I remember conversations with friends. “When this is over…When things get back to normal…”

I kept holding onto milestones. Bargaining. When we get an antibody test, when we get a vaccine. Or maybe I get it and then I’m fine. Immunity and done.

Trying to make sense out of uncertainty, grasping to the idea we can control this, slam the lid on Pandora’s box, tame the beast, slay the monster.

Back to normal.

None of these have come to pass. The antibody tests aren’t consistent and reliable enough to know. A vaccine is a long way off and long-term immunity remains a question mark. We live with unknowns and uncertainty. I know things are going to be hard for a long time.

I watch birthdays flicker by on Facebook. Plans cancelled. Events, festivals, and holidays evaporate. We all have our griefs to carry through this, some small, some large.

I know I’m luckier than many. I’ve not been sick, lost a parent or a loved one. I’m not shielding. I’ve not lost my job. I’m not a single parent waking up each day to look after my kids in this vast unknown with shut schools. I’m not the social care worker hands red raw from washing, lips cracked from wearing masks, going back on shift after her father’s funeral. I’m not caring for a partner with cancer, shuttling back and forth to the hospice, the fear wrapped around my heart.

And yet our grief doesn’t get lightened by comparison, by “Other people have it harder.” They may do, but your loss doesn’t get any smaller by your diminishment of it.

I think these times ask of us a sensitivity, empathy and kindness when we talk to others of how their world might be, a recognition of what their losses, their challenges may be. We all have our different experiences with this.

Some people seem to be doing just fine. Others of us are finding it hard. There are days when I’m in tears. You might be lucky enough to be more resilient, or more resourced than somebody else, that these strange days haven’t impacted you as hard as others yet.

That might come up in different ways. If you’re fortunate enough to have something, you probably don’t realise what it’s like to be without it. How it could be a foundation stone for your life you take for granted.

If you’ve been healthy all your life, it’s hard to imagine the heart-breaking exhaustion of being chronically ill. If you’ve been financially secure, it can be difficult to really understand the grinding despair of being poor.

It might be in your relationships, if you’ve got a close family, a partner, a strong network of friends, people close to you, weekly family calls, siblings to pop around and visit, emotional and practical support you can lean on. Not everybody has this.

It could be your physical space. If you have a house, with a garden and dog, that’s a different experience to living in a flat share in London with near strangers, to being homeless.

It might be your ability to access mental health support. I got a therapist back in April when this all kicked off, who I’m grateful and lucky to have. I know too well that’s not available for all.

There are many more.

This is wealth we perhaps don’t recognise. I’m not judging anyone for what they have. I mean to say, poverty of any kind is crushing and that gets crystallised in crisis.

We’re living in a time of what psychologist Pauline Boss calls ambiguous loss. She came up with it in the 1970s to describe a kind of unresolved grief.

It’s for a loss that isn’t clean, doesn’t have a finality. I feel like it’s woven into the loss of a future we imagined, the normal we won’t get back and the uncertainty that stretches out in front of us.

How do we live now?

We all have our own risk calculation based our understanding, our own situation, where we live. It’s been easy to see that become charged. For us to blame each other, judge each other for our choices. In the UK, the lack of clarity from the government has not helped.

Here’s what I understand. 80% of cases are mild, but 20% are not. It’s not binary, it’s not, you could be hospitalised and die or, you could not notice you have it and be fine.

There are the covid chronically ill, the long termers who have been through weeks of exhaustion stretching into months of strange symptoms, honeycombed from the virus, brain fog, heart, liver, kidney problems. It’s happened to the young and healthy as well as the older and more characterised at risk.

Which is to say, I know this is serious. I do not take it lightly.

I wear a mask. I’ve spent most of the past six months inside. I’m in my 30s, I’m healthy, no pre-existing conditions. I live somewhere with a lower transmission rate than the rest of the country. I live by myself. I work at home by myself. My circle of respiratory contacts, the people I share the same air with is very small. I’m aware of my privilege that my work and life allows me that.

On paper I’m low risk, but I tend towards caution. Much of that has not been for myself. It’s been the care I felt I owed to others, who might have to carry the consequences of my choices.

As lockdown eased, not much in my life changed. It might have been different if I was somewhere else where I’d been there longer and was more settled.

I see friends going on holiday and travelling. Going to the gym. Instagram shots of groups, couples out camping. People date. I cycle along the canal past the brewery where people are chatting, laughing, drinking at their assigned tables. On Saturdays the market bustles, some masked, some not, some better at social distancing than others.

I’m on a call with a work friend in LA, who describes how the world seems to have split into “the house people” and “the outside people”. They’re saving the economy, we’re saving healthcare, he jokes.

There’s been the stutter stop of this year. All of my new beginnings frozen. The liminal in between ness of moving stretching out. I feel caught between lives and I’m moving beyond being a house person now. Moving back into relationship with the world.

We’re on the edge of the end of summer. I miss the world we had, even though I know we will not get it back. The winter is coming and I need something to hold me through. I need to find my way in this different world, find myself in this new place.

Life goes on.

Last week, a friend of a friend I’d reached out to nearby called me up. Hey, do you want to go for lunch? She picked me up and we ate at a café, the first time either of us had eaten out since March. We talk and laugh and hatch plans for the autumn for art and beauty.

A friend in London encourages me to come down and I may brave the train, mask on and go. I get an invite for a grief ritual to share our losses. An email lands in my inbox, new driving tests to reopen. Compromise and risk. My world may get a little bigger again soon.

I write. I make art.

One way or another, I keep reaching out my hands.

Title from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

25 August 2020 0 comment
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Dishoom's Gunpowder potatos
Friday Beauty

Friday Beauty – Tastes Like Home

by Nadin Hadi 14 August 2020
written by Nadin Hadi

“PUT POTATO IN FRIDAY BEAUTY”

“JUST ONE WORD”

“POTATO”

My friend Emma and I spent two days rapturously screaming at each other on WhatsApp about potatoes. It started as an offhand comment about being CARBS AND WAILING days away from your period.

“I’m planning on making the gunpowder potatoes from my Dishoom book for dinner. Just that. A mountain.”

Given I was CARBS AND WAILING days away from my period too (being in separate cities is no barrier to the witch coven synchronisation of cycles), this filled me with ravenous hunger and a wash of memory.

I looked up the recipe, opened my fridge and started to cook.

At the risk of sounding like the (former) London dwelling working in media hipster I resist being, Dishoom is a chain of Indian restaurants that started in London. From Bombay with love, writes their website. They’re a tribute to the old Irani cafes in Bombay that were run by Zoroastrian immigrants from Iran.

The one in Shoreditch was one of my favourite places to eat in the city.

I always ordered the gunpowder potatoes.

1. Boil a large pan of salted water. Add the potatoes and cook until just tender — 12–15 minutes.

Last summer, my friend David was over from the States for a few weeks and I got to show him my London, the places I loved. I took him to Dishoom for lunch and he grinned at the décor as much as the food, the carved dark fret wood panels, the courtyard area with plants, the tiled bathroom with brass taps. His visit was the start of these Friday Beauties after two weeks of me sharing parts of my world with him, he nudged me — wouldn’t it be cool if you did this?

I met my friend Damien there for brunch, and we sat and talked for hours, parked at our table outside, re-ordering for lunch, and the waitress smiled at us. Naan bacon rolls, flakey crisp vegetable samosas, black daal, creamy rich and sinfully good, bowls of greens — grilled broccoli, snow peas, kale, crunchy, citrus sharp and spring fresh. I ate with people I loved there and I laughed a lot.

2. Meanwhile, toast all the seeds in a hot dry frying pan for 2 minutes until fragrant.

My tiny Irish mother hails from a small town in Galway. She learned to cook Indian food for my Pakistani dad from Madhur Jaffrey cookbooks, yellow paged and pencil marked in the kitchen cupboards.

She’d buy whole spices from the Indian corner shops, and toast them in a pan, the smell scenting the house. We’d have tandoori chicken marinated in yoghurt with garlic, ginger, lemon and spice overnight for Christmas and birthdays, dashed with red splodges of food colouring because you ain’t gonna get tandoori ovens in the suburbs outside Loughborough to give you the authentic look.

I learned from her. She set me to chopping, stirring and peeling. When we’d been fighting, what was sharp between us got soothed by the silence of cooking together, hands busy, anger melting away. She grew up on a farm, where she’d pulled carrots and potatoes from the dark earth, kept chickens for eggs, and spent spring lambing out in the fields. She smuggles back legs of lamb from Ireland in her suitcase when she visits, kept in pride of place in the freezer.

She held her suspicion of processed food like a family grudge. No McDonalds for us as kids. Cooking should be done from scratch with real food. On Sundays, we’d bake mini sponge cakes for school packed lunches. 8 ounces of self-raising flour, 8 ounces of caster sugar, 8 ounces butter, 4 eggs, a dash of vanilla essence, spooned into patterned cake cases. They’d sit in my lunch box, next to a tangerine, which she’d already started to peel.

We say I love you in a thousand ways.

Whatever was happening, the kitchen was a place we’d actually talk to each other and listen.

When I think of it now, I realise how many quiet acts of love were in it. She learned to make food for my father, from another place, another culture she had not been to, that she did not know. A taste from home. The daily ordinary devotion and sometimes domestic drudgery keeping her family fed. Food cooked, on the table, meal after meal, day after day, the dishes done, the kitchen cleaned and out to the shops to do it again.

Inheritance is many things. Food and cooking are something she gave me.

3. Crush them in a pestle and mortar, then set aside.

My cupboards are filled with spices. There’s already fennel there, cumin, coriander, turmeric, garam masala, chilli powder, mustard seed, bags of whole spices from the corner shop.

Everything is biography, says Lucien Freud.

In between house-shares in London, I stayed with my friends Bronya and Chris, crashing in their spare room as I went through the weeks long ordeal of housemate interviews and house viewings. When I opened their kitchen cupboards, there were spices, but more herbs, and zaatar and sumac. Bronya’s Jewish, and that, the Middle East and Israel comes through their food. They keep a kosher kitchen, plates for meat and milk and host Friday night dinners, rich with friends, light candles for Shabbat and celebrate the week and the rest.

We cooked together, danced in the kitchen and sat around the table that looked out onto their downstairs neighbours’ garden, with visiting fox, and ate. Bronya’s a hugger and sometimes she’d reach out and wrap her arms around me. Chris, who is Welsh, made us shakshuka for brunch, eggs baked in a spiced tomato sauce, something he’s learned from Bronya, from her friends, her community.

She told me how when they first started dating, he made her porridge for breakfast. She took a bite and grimaced. It was inedible. Bronya was gently forthright. I’m sorry, but I can’t eat this.

A week or two later, the dates were going well enough she was staying over again, he made her porridge again. It was the best she’d tasted. He’d bought an Anna Jones cookbook and learned. One of the many reasons he was a keeper.

Before lockdown, I sat in their kitchen with a cup of tea, watching them in the ballet of chores and tasks, juggling a toddler and a newborn, cooking together, the routine of family life, meal after meal.

For breakfast, Chris handed me a bowl of porridge, infused with ginger and pushed over a jar of fresh berry compote. It’s some of the best I’ve ever had.

4. Drain the potatoes and steam dry in the colander for a minute.

Emma’s making gunpowder potatoes, in her flat, in her kitchen and we text in shared glee.

Someone should do a delivery service that is just potatoes.

Triple fried chips, roast potatoes in goose fat, garlic mash with sea salt and black pepper.

Rosemary baked new potatoes. Hasslebacks.

Hash browns.

WHY IS NO ONE DOING THIS?!

When I lived in London, when life got hard for either of us, I’d invite her over for dinner. I’d ask for use of the living room with my flatmates and I’d cook, and sometimes send her home with Tupperware boxes of leftovers.

Sweet potato gratin with lime, chilli, peanut butter and coconut milk. Daal. Sage butternut squash soup. Carrot and roasted chickpea salad with pistachio nuts, parsley and a tahini, olive oil and lemon dressing.

The food I’ve learnt to make for my no dairy, no gluten, no meat, friends tends oddly towards orange, but hey, it’s a choice for that to be a feature ,not a bug. The last time I cooked for her was in her flat, a mushroom risotto I’d overdone on the booze, with toasted pine nuts and parmesan.

If I love you, I’ve fed you. If I’ve fed you, I love you. Food and the sharing of it is a love language of its own. Here’s my home, here’s my hearth, my heart. Come over, I’ll cook. Weekend brunches, story dinners, pot lucks. Food is all kinds of nourishment.

It’s one of the many small aching ironies of lockdown that for the first time in years I have my own flat, my own kitchen, a dining table that stretches out I bought with guests in mind and I can’t have people over for dinner, for lunch, for breakfast, to sit together, to drink tea and talk.

These days, too often food is something I do in front of a laptop screen. But sometimes it’s cooking together in different cities, sometimes it’s the phone on speaker, talking as you cook and photos of the shared food you make.

5. Heat the grill to high. Put the potatoes on a baking tray. Brush with oil and grill until crispy and browned — 5–7 minutes. Turn the potatoes over and repeat to crisp and colour the other side.

I’m munching on dried mango as I cook. It’s been tropics hot and heat heavy, an Indian summer heatwave in a country fundamentally not built for heat, and when it gets like this, it’s a Pavlonian craving. Eat mango.

When I slump on a chair and close my eyes, it could be a decade ago. I could be in my flat in Gizenga Street in Zanzibar, above the book shop, opposite the big mosque.

Except that flat had fans, air that moved, and a wooden balcony that opened onto the streets, with cool tiles under your feet, where the street vendors would push barrows, with fresh mango, with a twist of salt and chilli. The salt crunched on your tongue, the chilli tingled and burned against the ripe bursting sweetness of the mango.

Zanzibar had Zoroastrians too. They claim Freddie Mercury as a favoured son, for tourist merch at least, for the few years his Iranian family lived here when he was a kid. Tucked away in the winding streets is a Zoroastrian temple where the fires once used to burn.

The islands are a melting pot, nestled off the coast of Tanzania in the Indian Ocean. You see it in the architecture, the old Arab fort on the seafront, the mosques. Stone Town’s streets with the arched grand carved dark wooden Zanzibar doors that are a blend of Indian and Arabic influences, ornate with floral patterns in startling geometric symmetry. The brass spikes studding them meant to deter elephants, an Indian heritage.

Zanzibar was known for spices. Under Omani Arab rule, the islands sold coconuts, slaves and spices. There are spice farms there, where I learned nutmeg grows inside a fruit like a peach. Slice it open and the nutmeg is the glossy brown stone buried inside the white flesh, wrapped in the red lace of mace. Wander through the streets and you can buy curls of cinnamon bark, sticky dark vanilla pods, and cloves. If you get the boat over to Pemba, the scent of cloves rolls off the island and the bees make smoky sweet amber dark clove honey.

I learned how to bake cinnamon rolls from the Pioneer Woman in Texas, grinding fragrant curls of bark harvested from trees on the island. I scraped fresh vanilla into pancakes, made pilau rice with chilli, cardamom and cloves.

Sometimes I’d wander the five minutes down to the street food market in the evenings to eat. Zanzibar pizza, more a savoury omelette meets crepes, filled with minced meat, chilli and coriander, mishkaki meat skewers cooked over an open flame, samosas — called sambusas here, sugarcane, lime and ginger juice, tooth rottingly sweet and cool.

I worked for a small publishing company and edited a cookbook out there. Walking to work, I’d often buy breakfast, mandazi, fried dough balls not unlike a doughnut, flavoured with cardamom, sambusa, cassava crisps again with chilli and salt. For all the fresh fish and seafood on the island, lobster, prawns, swordfish, red snapper and more, my sea creature food aversion felt like a waste.

Life there was much about food. I met my fairy godmother there and we’d have four-hour long teas in the Archipelago café which looked out over the ocean, where we’d drink passion fruit juice, chai, share cakes and talk. When it was full moon, my friend Peter and I’d go for sunset moonrise drinks on the spired rooftop tower of one of the quieter hotels, watch the sun slip into the ocean in orange red glory and the moon, a pale golden coin, rise from the other side of the island.

There was a family restaurant hidden away that served a hibiscus and tamarind juice I had once that was sweet, tart, cool and so so good I’ve never forgotten it. My friend Leigh Ann and I spent a day in my kitchen making pineapple hooch called Tapu Tapu from a recipe one of her co-workers gave her. I found the dated photos on my phone memory, cheersing with champagne glasses.

Food can be travel, memory and home all at the same time.

6. Put the crushed spices in a large bowl with the melted butter, spring onions, coriander and chillies. Remove the potatoes from the grill and divide each one in half, using a metal spoon so you create rough edges. Put the potatoes straight into the spice bowl and toss until well combined.

Life has gotten very simple in lockdown. I’ve been thinking about food from the start. Small gratitudes. I have cupboards full of food, I can pay my bills for the electricity to cook. On my harder days, sometimes food is comfort — a tray of roast potatoes, a bowl of spaghetti carbonara.

Sometimes it’s a chore, especially when past me has failed on bulk cooking and frozen portions. Then I eat oatcakes with peanut butter for dinner, whack on smoothies for the vitamins, and binge on bad snacks — bags of Chilli Heatwave flavoured Doritos, bacon fries crisps, and a Vienetta from the Co-op because that was the only damn ice cream they had. I’ve ordered pizza three times and I miss London’s take out game often, but mostly I cook.

I go to the market in the morning each week, and pick up my vegetables, buy fresh local eggs, get bread from the local bakery, sometimes with a croissant, a pain au chocolate, and in one memorable moment of curiosity driven sickly regret, a cronut. Sometimes the stall folk are only other actual humans I speak to in a week.

When I was community volunteering, I worried about food. I still do. I worry about food poverty. I talk to Damien who started a food bank this year feeding families in North London and has got land to start community gardens. I donate to the food bank and projects here.

I worry about harvests, biblical swarms of locust devastating East Africa, the Arabian Gulf, and with India and Pakistan on alert. Our food is global — the coffee you drink with sugar, the rice, our chocolate comes from cocoa beans grown mostly from West Africa and other equatorial regions, our fruit and vegetables are largely flown in from Europe, our farms depend on Eastern Europeans to pick and pack our food.

We only produce 52% of our own food in the UK. We’ve got a dark harvest growing this winter that will reap bitterness, when Covid meets Brexit agriculture import price rises, falling food standards as EU regulations evaporate and the US hammers us to take chlorinated chicken in a trade deal.

Rising food prices, recession driven falling incomes and a government that does not seem to care enough and certainly not about all. Millions of households in the UK are already going hungry. It’s hard for us to look clear eyed at the immensity what’s coming. We get frozen not knowing what to do and turn away.

When I feel like that, I’ve learned to ask myself, what can I do around me? What’s something small that would help?

Stroud is big on local food and organic produce. There’s a farmer’s market, community farms and local food co-operatives. On my alpaca and llama questing walks, the public footpath takes me through fields and local farms where there’s chard and kale reaching up through the earth, sheltered under polytunnels. One of my co-volunteers offers me a squash plant from his allotment, there are seed sharing groups, a woman selling tomato seedlings to buy. Swing by and drop some money in the honesty box.

I live in a flat with no garden, no space for window boxes and I think about hydroponic food growing. About turning my back wall into a living garden space. I read about the Sikh community kitchens feeding thousands. I see the local free food fridges cropping up in Stroud. Take what you need. People ask to see if they can drop off the vegetables from their gardens — we’ve got extra to spare and want to share. There are soup kitchens that have been feeding the local community for free, neighbours dropping off meals for people on their street they didn’t know six months ago.

What I know, what I’ve seen in these times, is we want to help each other. We want to be kind.

I grow herbs on my windowsill. I make shakshuka topped with the coriander that grows in gold tin can and eat the rest of my gunpowder potatoes. I prep carrot and chickpea salad for a picnic with a friend who’s driving up to see me with blackcurrants and strawberries from his garden.

I think about what hospitality used to mean. When a stranger knocks on your door, you open your home and you feed them. What happens when you sit down with people, break bread together and eat.

How in feeding others, you feed yourself.

7. Add the sea salt, lime juice and kebab masala, adjusting them to taste, then serve.

Dishoom’s gunpowder potatoes recipe in full is here. They are godly.

Damien’s food bank is here and if you can spare a little, donations would help people hugely.

The Trussell Trust can direct you to your local food bank in the UK if you want to donate, volunteer or need support.

Friday Beauty is a series of emails I send about one beautiful thing I’ve encountered that week. You can subscribe here.

14 August 2020 0 comment
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Friday Beauty

Friday Beauty – The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

by Nadin Hadi 26 June 2020
written by Nadin Hadi

It’s rare to find something that is exactly what it says it is. Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a delight. Delightful. Delight full. Delight filled. I smiled so much reading this book. It felt like sitting in spring sunshine after a long cold winter dark.

Ross Gay, the poet and author of this collection of essays, set himself a task, a practice. Starting on his 42nd birthday, he would write about a delight every day for a year, draft them quickly and write them by hand.  

I rememberthe book drift through my awareness. It popped up in Brain Pickings, and I’d see sections quoted in some of the poetry blogs I follow. I loved the joy and the generosity in them.

I thought I was going to read one a day, after breakfast before I started work, a simple read for my jittery attention shot pandemic brain.

I read the whole damn book in two days.  

Writing is always an invitation, a way of sharing. This is how I see the world. Come sit by me for a while. The essays invite you into Ross Gay’s delights, into his world and invite you to consider your own, to pay attention, to cultivate delight.

One of my favourite questions I’ve been asked is a simple one. What is it like to be you right now? Gay’s essays are luminous with this, an embodied aliveness, rooted in who he is, noticing delight, and what that means for him as a black man in America.

They shine with tenderness, the quiet act of choosing to notice beauty, in every day ordinary life, in a complex and difficult world. They’re wry with humour and so generous.  There’s a blend of memoir, biography and reflection that I love in writing, similar to why I love Maggie Nelson’s work. The anticipation of a vegan donut, the community garden he works in, the satisfaction of pulling up bindweed.

Woven through his observations is a point he makes in Joy is Such a Human Madness

“And given as I am writing a book of delights, and I am ultimately interested in joy, I am curious about the relationship between pleasure and delight… I will pause here to offer a false etymology: de-light suggests both “of light” and “without light.” And both of them concurrently is what I’m talking about. What I think I’m talking about. Being of and without at once. Or: joy”

A few sections from my favourites:

Loitering

I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands NO SOLICITING / NO LOITERING stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring in under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over.

The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: ‘to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,’ and ‘to travel indolently with frequent pauses.’”

Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygaggle, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered a critique or, when nouned, an epithet (‘Lollygagger!’ or ‘Loafer!’).”

Is “lollygag” a Minnesota thing? Because my mom says that all the time.

Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must’ve been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues.

For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be ‘loitering.’ Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception.

A Patagonia jacket, colorful pants, Tretorn sneakers with short socks, an Ivy League ball cap, and a thick book not the Bible, and you’re almost golden. Almost. (There is a Venn diagram someone might design, several of them, that will make visual our constant internal negotiation toward safety, and like the best comedy it will make us laugh hard before saying, ‘Lord.’)

It occurs to me that laughter and loitering are kissing cousins, as both bespeak an interruption of production and consumption. And it’s probably for this reason that I have been among groups of nonwhite people laughing hard who have been shushed — in a Qdoba in Bloomington, in a bar in Fishtown, in the Harvard Club at Harvard. The shushing, perhaps, reminds how threatening to the order are our bodies in nonproductive, nonconsumptive delight.

The moment of laughter not only makes consumption impossible (you might choke) but if the laugh is hard enough, if the talk is just right, food or drink might fly from your mouth, if not — and this hurts — your nose. And if your body is supposed to be one of the consumables, if it has been, if it is, one of the consumables around which so many ideas of production and consumption have been structured in this country, well, there you go…”

Joy is Such a Human Madness

“Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be. She said, ‘What if we joined our wildernesses together?’ Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.

And what if the wilderness — perhaps the densest wild in there — thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) — is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith’s term, the ‘intolerable.’ It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?

Is sorrow the true wild?

And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that?

For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.

What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.

I’m saying: What if that is joy?”

I mentioned this last week, but it’s worth mentioning again. Krista Tippett did a gorgeous interview with Ross Gay which brought me so much joy.

26 June 2020 0 comment
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Friday Beauty

Friday Beauty – On Being

by Nadin Hadi 19 June 2020
written by Nadin Hadi

In these strange days, living by myself in lockdown, there were days, weeks, when my concentration was shot. I couldn’t pick up a book, I was exhausted by screens. Compulsive doomscrolling ate away my peace of mind, watching a film, or a TV show felt too much like work, too divorced from reality, a kind of junk food distraction to numb out. I’d call and Zoom with a handful of friends but stretches of time when I’d sink into silence.

That’s when I’d flip on On Being. On Being’s a public radio show, a podcast with Krista Tippet. The blurb says this:

A Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast. What does it mean to be human? How do we want to live? And who will we be to each other? Each week a new discovery about the immensity of our lives. Hosted by Krista Tippett.

I found it a few years back. Krista had been the last person to interview Irish poet and writer John O’Donohue before he died and I remember the immense beauty of that interview,  on the inner landscape of beauty. How it rang inside me like a golden bell and to borrow from Charlotte Bronte, changed the colour of my mind.

Some of that was John, wonderful John, but it was Krista too. Conversation is an art. An interview is an art, and Krista is one of best interviewers I’ve ever heard.

I was listening to an interview she did with  Seth Godin, a man who’s done thousands of interviews in his life and he, like other guests, was delighted to be there, as a listener and a fan. Hers is the only interview he sends to people. Because she brings out the best in her guests.  Because Krista is as Seth says, so generous as an interviewer. She listens, she asks attuned interested and interesting questions. Because the episodes are a delight of a conversation, the kind that’s a privilege to listen to and a joy to have.

The kind you’d have over dinner with a really good friend, new or old, where the ideas are bright, where you find yourself stepping into another world. There’s laughter in it and sharing and deep listening, kind curiosity, to be with complexity and such a willingness to understand and like Rilke says, to live the questions.

The conversations made me ache for days walking through art galleries and sat in bookshop coffee shops with my friend Emma and talking poetry, writing and ideas. The kind of nourishment I get when I talk to my fairy godmother where our conversation loops and weaves activism, plays and people, evenings when I’d cook and invite people over for story dinners, or go over to dinner with friends, the richness you get when you sit down with people and you really hear them, you really see them. 
Magic.

I learn when I listen to On Being. I stop to write down books, Google people, and scribble down sentences, a web of ideas woven, interconnected growing in me. Part of the magic for me is her guests are a forces for good in the world.

There’s a phrase I learnt from her interview with Jacqueline Novogratz, hard edged hope, which I love. She leads a company called Acumen, that works in creative, human centric capitalism, backing people who want to do good in the world, including a pair of young entrepreneurs who had the heart-full audacity to say, we want to eradicate kerosene in the world, how do we bring light and electricity to the poor? Not as an act of charity, but as collaboration, solidarity, to make the poor partners in the endeavour. Committed patient compassionate passionate action.

There’s an edited version of the interviews that’s an hour and she shares the unedited conversations too, which if I have time, I always listen to.

I sank in the bath and listened to her interviews with writers and poets Ocean Vuong and Ross Gay  (so joyful. The laughter in his voice was such honey and delight.), and as she does with poets, she invited them to share their work and I’d close my eyes and let the beauty of their words wrap around me. I stayed up too late last night listening to her conversation with therapist, author and trauma specialist  Resmaa Menkakem on race, cultural trauma and embodiment, which made me catch my breath, cry in recognition and smile in hope.

Because in these days which were and are dark, when the enormity of the times we’re in felt crushing, On Being was a quiet beacon. There is good in the world. There is beauty. There are people who live the questions, who choose radical joy and practice delight, who know to live with love and to act with love isn’t about softness, it is about the fierceness of integrity, the willingness to admit when you are wrong, the courage to look at injustice and inequality, and the urgency of now, and have the moral imagination to imagine and say yes, let’s make a better world. And do it.

19 June 2020 0 comment
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Friday Beauty

Friday Beauty – Small Kindnesses by Danusha Lameris

by Nadin Hadi 22 November 2019
written by Nadin Hadi

A short simple Friday Beauty this week.

Small Kindnesses by Dansusha Lameris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

22 November 2019 0 comment
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Friday Beauty

Friday Beauty – A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

by Nadin Hadi 1 November 2019
written by Nadin Hadi

A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”

Lost, losing, letting go, standing in a threshold, between the known and unknown, I picked Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide To Getting Lost out from the shelves in the house I’m staying at. I’ve always reached to books, to story, both as escape and a doorway into new worlds. Rebecca Solnit was a name I’d known but not read until and the book is a beautiful exploration of lost, loss and through it, finding and discovery, the geography of spaces and selves, who we are in relationship to a place, to people to others.

I’m in the unfamiliar now. Terra incognito, walking towards the unknown. I stay in a different part of the city, streets and Tube stops unfamiliar. Where the hell is Wapping? The train stutters and disgorges me in strange places, outside of the familiar patterns and places of my old life in East London. A temporary suspension of a life, before a move somewhere yet not known, not yet decided, in transition, being with losing, loss, grief.  I feel unrooted, outside my routine, my space, unwilling to invest into new patterns for a temporary place. Curious at what I still carry in me as things are stripped away.

Solnit says, to be lost, is to go beyond what you know. That involves growth but also decay, death, transformation.

“The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle. In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who “knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay. But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is psyche, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming.”

I travel for work and I’m back in the familiar. I know hotels, planes, in between spaces. How to bounce between countries. I have been someone who travels. When I’m stopped by the airport for yet another random screening, I think how a sense of belonging is often predicated on others responses to you. How my face marks me as foreign to be questioned, my Pakistani and Irish name. A woman between cultures, between lands. “Where are you from?” people ask. “No, where are you really from?” In the days post Brexit, there are the yells and whispers in the street. “Go back to where you came from.”

“There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.”

The policeman flicks through my passport, my past ports. “A lot of travel,” he notes and I’m grateful the old one, with its stamps from Sudan, Lebanon, and Malaysia amongst other places sits in a drawer. I think of the different people I was in those places, a life lost, left behind.

“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names.

This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”

This week, my former love reaches out. “It would be nice to know how you are.” and I hold the needed silence between us. If I could, I would say, the woman you knew no longer exists in the spaces we shared. She is gone. You cannot know her anymore. She doesn’t exist because the shared story, the shared places and spaces are lost and I have not the space or the desire to reweave another between us.

“The stories don’t fit back together, and it’s the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt… The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the memory loses power. Over time you become someone else.”

I’m travelling now through lostness. My teacher and I talk about surrender and loneliness this week. Loneliness as something to carry, how embracing it teaches you compassion and how to bless others. How surrender can open you up to grander landscapes than you can possible imagine. The life you dream for yourself is nothing compared to what God imagines and dreams for you if you can let yourself be in that unknown.

1 November 2019 0 comment
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Friday BeautyUncategorised

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

by Nadin Hadi 11 October 2019
written by Nadin Hadi

Sat in front of a fire, with a black cat nestled beside me, who insisted on gently resting his paw on my arm to cuddle, I finished up this book this week. It is exquisite. I know Vuong’s work as a poet. His collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds left me breathless and his debut novel is just as devastating beautiful.

Part memoir, part fiction, it tells the story of a young Vietmanese gay man, writing a letter to his mother that she will never read, a coming of age story about being immigrant, being gay, living in America, about his grandmother who fell in love with an American GI in Vietnam and bore him daughters, his mother who works as a nail technician, and his own life. 


It is stunning and layered and he combines vivid sensuous language with simplicity. It’s a story about immigration, surviving violence, surviving poverty, about growing up, about America, about grief. 


Some books break you open. It’s that Kafka line “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” When I read Vuong, I read him as someone who loves poetry, in wonder at his incredible talent for distilling complex ideas into simple devastating sentences.

I read him as a mixed race woman who has her own experience of immigration and outsider, who had to be both guide and map for parents who don’t know how to navigate this world, who wrote letters for her own mother aged nine, and is being asked to do so again faced with dementia and a fracturing family.

I read him as a girl who grew up in violence, who grew up in a family that carries trauma like dark hair and eyes, who knows love and family can be complicated things. The first time I read anything of his was in the New Yorker. It was called A Letter To My Mother That She Will Never Read and I read it and then closed the computer screen and wept.


A few lines from the book, but they cannot touch how his language and images deepen and grow with each chapter, how they sweep you away.


“Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in the season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.”

“I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.”


“I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”

11 October 2019 0 comment
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Friday Beauty

Friday Beauty – Living Myth podcast by Michael Meade

by Nadin Hadi 6 September 2019
written by Nadin Hadi

Living Myth Podcast

I don’t remember the rabbit hole, the desire path that brought me to Michael Meade’s Living Myth podcast this summer, but I do remember how I felt. There was the calculation of timing. 20 minutes for an episode, a justifiable nugget. Looking through the images and titles. Hitting play. I’m normally in frenetic multi-tasking when I’m listening to something, dishes to wash, tidying to do, a companionable soundtrack or song to speed along whatever has to be done. Except I found myself slowing down to sit and listen. Found myself hitting play on another episode. Then another. Now I listen every week.

Meade is magic. There are two qualities I find myself drawn to over and over again with the teachers who call to me. Integrity and embodied lived wisdom. The depth of knowledge, craft and mastery that comes from dedicating your life to a soul calling, to being of service.

Michael Meade has spent his time studying rites of passage and mythology from cultures across the world. He takes them as medicine and offering to the gang kids getting shot in the ghettos he works with, to the seekers who come to his retreats. He holds up a prism to our world, all our challenges and griefs, and remind us of the bigger story, the great tapestry of all things. Creation, destruction, how to make sense of our troubled times, with African teaching tales, Japanese fables, Native American stories, and Amazonian myths. 

I have a feeling if you spend enough time with the myths and poetry, you can’t help but live them. You can’t help but become them. If you choose to learn Rumi and Hafez and Rilke and more by heart, to carry them inside you, the word magic will change you. A lodestone, a pole star, a beacon inside you. 

There’s one story that’s been echoing me. In the shadow of the deep cave that looks out onto the land in Turtle Island, the Old Woman of the World lives and sits. She is a weaver and spinner and she gives each soul passing through the cavern out into the world its own particular twist of fate. It is the work of a life to find out the pattern of your soul, your unique gifts and genius. It’s not about how much stuff you can acquire or to hold fast to a prescribed moral code. It is to become who you really are. There are no mistakes. All of us have our gifts, our genius, our magic. I look around me and I can see glimmers of others. Wild dance medicine woman. Silver tongued heart speaker. Fire hearth village builder.

When your earth walk comes to an end, you come back to the cave of the Old Woman of the World and in the dirt on ground, she sketches out half of your pattern of your soul. The life you lived imprints on the ground as the other half of the pattern. A mirror image, a harmony, the note, the song of soul. In some lifetimes, we get caught up in forgetting. In others we move towards the pattern, our soul’s purpose.

Which one am I choosing? What pattern am I making?

6 September 2019 0 comment
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