POV: I’m Hima - a South Asian, medium brown skin, cis-gender, able-bodied, straight woman living as a settler on the Indigenous lands, T’karonto. I was born in Scarborough, raised Gujarati-Jain, middle-class, with English as my first language. My parents immigrated by choice via London and East Africa and are still together. I have two sisters and no extended family living locally. I experience ADHD symptoms. Much of what I write will be informed by some of these lived experiences.
Five meandering thoughts from a week where everything just feels like a lot:
1/ Enduring post-Trump, fascist trauma
The enduring trauma of the last four years will not be Trump himself, but the machine complicit in his repetitive, cowardly, and blatant harm. His mockery of women, migrant children, and immigrant and racialized communities publicly, without shame or remorse. The fact that he is emblematic of our collective shadow, in a country that still resentfully dominates the global consciousness, is something that we will have to reckon with for decades, if not centuries to come.
Like many, I try to live by the maxim that there is goodness in all people. My breed of empathy is being able to see how oppressive systems and cultural narratives traumatize individuals, families, and communities, and how this trauma adapts into protective and harmful behavior, biases, and decisions. With this frame, I can hold some pretty nasty shadows with compassion.
But fascists make me question everything…..because it just feels evil. There is a difference in operating from a fear of losing white power and privilege and simply not seeing humans - actual living, breathing, conscious people - as actual humans. Fascists, I contend, are the latter, which really rubs up against my own work in embodying abolition futures. It’s a process. Trump may be out, but fascism is on the rise in pockets of the planet. I can’t make sense of it, and it hurts. This has and will continue to be distressing.
2/ The profound in the mundane
My friend/fam, Negin, hosted a ‘We’re Not Really Strangers,’ games night, and if you’re going to be on Zoom on a Saturday night, this option ranks high. In short, it was a very soft and heartening evening. The game is designed to foster meaningful connection by prompting questions, except the questions are deep and excavating. At first, the questions were along the lines of ‘what was your favorite memory from last year?,” and I thought, this will be delightful and chill. But then the questions went from a three to being seen, and while I had a bit of a vulnerability hangover the next day, it was quite sublime overall.
In response to the question, ‘what do you miss?,’ a friend shared something I’ve been holding on to. I won’t go into detail to respect the sacred space - but in short, they touched on the overwhelming profoundness of how no two moments can ever be exactly the same in the same way, no meal made twice can ever taste exactly the same. Even as we transverse what appears to be the mundane, or groundhog day, amplified by living in a time of aesthetic and literary sameness (which I am absolutely part of), fueled by digital melting pots like Instagram and the likes, the reality is there is always, always difference in every moment.
But we have to dare to notice - the aroma, the unique mosaic of fruit and granola that sits on top of your yogurt, how long it takes to brush your teeth one day versus the next, the shape of your morning coif, and what ratio of water to coffee you managed in your americano. How your love might smile at you and if the angle of the tree branches on your front yard has changed. If the sun is out and what part of your bookshelf and body it is warming, illuminating, calling to attention.
The mundane has been exceptionally difficult for me over the last 11 months. Normally, I would equate the feeling to ‘teetering psychosis,’ but since I’ve learned more about ADHD (which I will write about at some point once I’ve digested the fact that I’ve only now learned about my operating system after 36 years), a key feature is that when not adequately stimulated, blood flow to the brain dramatically reduces, provoking a sleepy state. The discomfort is so intense, I can only describe it as feeling trapped in my body. Being bored for me is an affliction, yes, but also a massive privilege.
But like this friend, I am inspired to lean more into the mundane - to try to notice, and find the profound difference hemmed in every moment, day, and week. I might not succeed but like, what else is there to do.
3/ Designing for seven generations
We recorded a conversation between Matthew Hickey, an Indigenous-Queer architect at Two Row - a company name that aims to realign Indigenous wisdom with mainstream thinking - and Midnight Wolverine, an Indigenous-Queer drag king, and poet last week as part of our audio series Desire Paths, presented by Luminato (the first episode is launching at end of the month!). Along with sharing their ancestral stories and conflicting experiences with finding space for their queer identities to exist in Toronto, but not their Indigeneity, they spent time imagining what Indigiqueer futures in the city could be.
Both of them naturally created by two guiding principles:
1) designing for seven generations
2) always asking, ‘what was here before me?" and how can I honor this?
The seven generation principle is based on a Haudenosaunee teaching rooted in the idea that what we create today should contribute to a sustainable and nourishing life for seven generations forward. Practically, that is about 140 years. Embodying this level of foresight in a time of insta-everything is a practice, skill, and intention. It forces you to slow down and breathe into a decision, especially in Matthew's case, who is designing multi-generational developments for Indigenous communities, amongst other projects. The practice is similar to the question, ‘what does it mean to be a good future ancestor?’
I try to ask myself this once a week and the answer, so far, is almost always the same - be so present that your mind, body, and spirit, thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions, can gently nudge you forward into the direction of all of our liberation. Pretty simple! If you’re looking for me, I’m basically operating as a garden snail, asexually reproducing new futures.
4/ Healing through my nephew
My 7-yo nephew, Dhevan, has been online learning for the last few weeks while Ontario went into its second lockdown. I think he is feeling a bit restless because he’s been calling me every other day, which is pretty unusual for him. I’ve spent hours on facetime with this kid, who is outright the light of my life. We’ve eaten breakfast together, shared our fears, did yoga, explored new secret hiding spots, partied on a boat (aka our beds), dressed up in costumes, hid from Jayan (his younger brother), boxed through the screen, played the animal guessing game and Dragon Mania Legends, watched Teen Titans together, compared snacks and dinner options. Somehow every game descends into the hero catching the bad guy, and seriously, carceral logic in children’s programming is very upsetting. He told me he was mad at me, and I coached him into finding more self-love.
About 6 minutes into every idea I present, he asks, ‘so what do you want to do now?’ After five hours of hanging out, I have drained my creative vault. Where do we go from here? The time has not only been a joy but incredibly healing for me. I am reliving my childhood and remembering things I haven’t thought about for decades through him. Children are such lucent mirrors, partly because they are pure consciousness, and partly because they are oblivious to the gravity of their impact. They just bumble on as themselves, blurting out anything on their mind, coincidentally (or not?!) saying the exact words your child self felt decades ago. He is the voice box to my inner child, who was less free than him. When I talk him through his feelings of self-confidence, anger and frustration, I am also rewriting my own story. Thanks kid.
*He called me while writing this to tell me how amazing technology is that we can just press a button and see each other. I read this out loud of him, and he only approved of half of it. He then asked if we could make a TV show about him.
5/ New age spirituality is still just repackaged Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism..
A bunch of young TikTokers have been calling in/out the spiritual community to finally acknowledge that yoga, meditation, certain forms of breathwork, chakras, chanting OM, and concepts around karma, tantra, the eternal soul, de-attachment etc. etc..…is just repackaged Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. I mean, this is hardly the first, or fifteenth hundred time this has been named - the white appropriation of Eastern traditions has been called out for years…but nothing has changed. Thanks Gen Z, ya’ll are so great.
The comments section on these TikTok videos are usually a mix of sincere gratitude and outrage that anyone would push religion onto them, noting that spirituality belongs to everyone. And that is true — no one owns the concept of ‘interconnectedness,’ it just is, and the growth of yoga and meditation in the west have had profound impacts on mental health and raising consciousness. But like many things, white spiritual liberation has come at exclusion of the communities, especially working class immigrant communities, where these traditions originate. Knowledge certaintly is passed on and adapted overtime, but yoga, meditation, tantra, chakras etc. are sciences that originated from deep inquiry, study and creation. Why do white folks feel entitlement over this knowledge, yet demand ‘intellectual property’ in other cases?
The widespread appropriation of ancestral knowledge and traditions have essentially made South Asians guests in their own home. We are not separate from our ancestral traditions, it is part of who we are. When that lineage is erased, it is a erasure of the character and texture of the people themselves. What if agency and connection with our traditions is part of our liberation too?
A friend recently shared that their white stepparent was pleasantly surprised that their new Hindu neighbours meditated. ‘I didn’t know Hindus meditated,’ they said. Can we blame them entirely? South Asians who come from these traditions have been made to simply accept the complete cooptation of their ancestral practices. And perhaps because of the diasporas mass complicity with whiteness, adopting and benefiting from the model minority myth (and essentially erasing South Asian working class struggles across the western world), as well as needing whiteness to recover from colonialists pillaging our economies down to every last dime, maybe the risk of demanding change has either been too high, not worth it, or simply not a priority.
At some point, we will need a process of truth and reconciliation - acknowledging the appropriation, entitlement, and conscious elimination of the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain lineage of new age spiritual and wellness practices that white folks have tremendously profited off, and evolving practices and spaces to include consistent cultural acknowledgements, considering what it means to me in solidarity with South Asian struggles in respective communities, to ultimately return and share power.
Gen Z, you got this, right?
Until next week,
Hima