hello from istanbul.
yesterday as i spent the day falling in love with this city, it was bombed, and people i love around the world were reaching out to me to find out if i was safe. i posted a message that i was safe, but it felt like a lie, so i want to say something more honest.
i am in a country that was bombed yesterday, 4 people killed, over 30 injured. it was a group of tourists killed and injured, apparently not the intended target, but the lives available for taking when the police started noticing the bomber. the bartender at my hotel is from east turkey, he said ‘isis’ with a shrug in his shoulders, a mournful and familiar shake of his head. since it happened i can’t access most social media directly.
i was doing the same thing yesterday as those who died, walking around taking pictures, in crowds, looking up in awe amongst strangers. the bomber just chose a different tourist center in the city. or perhaps it’s because i am kept very local due to my healing but still compromised knee, so i chose the places near my hotel.
so i am not safe, i am just randomly still alive.
and i can’t feel too much of a way about it because i actually stopped believing in safety a long time ago. i was in college when amadou diallo was killed walking distance from my dorm room. i was stopped by a group of undercover burly police, surrounded, guilty of walking while drunk, and i ran home shaking. i was in the subway under the twin towers moments before the first one was hit, i walked home through the ashes of other people and still see ghosts.
i live in a city where water and heat are not guaranteed to individuals, only corporations. i live in a country where we need a movement for black lives because the rate of police/state murder is so high that we don’t want to speak the numbers to our children. where children of immigrants are building a wall to keep out immigrants.
i live in a country where people are so economically desperate that they are uplifting a presidential candidate running on hate speech.
i live in a world where friends die because they take their own lives, exhausted by oppression. and friends die because people are texting and driving, and friends die because they are fighting for mother earth and get assassinated.
i live in a country whose tax dollars continually move towards disrupting stability and sovereignty all over the world, a nation of never-full consumption of the world’s resources, a nation outsourcing growth and greed as our worldviews.
so…i am not safe. we are not safe. if we think we are safe, it is because we are not awake to the intersecting crises of economy, environment, privilege and militarism. none of us are safe, and, as adults, i am not sure i even think we deserve that.
how can we be safe while also complicit in conditions of constant unsafety for others? even the ones who walk away from omelas had somewhere else to go – our planet is so small. it’s reductionist, yes…but all of us or none. safety is an interconnected magic, it only comes from holding each other, whole.
so. what i am instead, what helps me to sleep at night and to laugh with my whole body and to love as many people as i can, is on purpose. i am doing everything i can to focus the offering of my life towards the best that humanity has within us, to be an ultralight beam nourishing what is dignified and healing and collective and miraculous in us.
my soul is intact, thank you nina.
i feel deliberate and afraid of nothing, thank you audre.
i know that god is change, thank you octavia.
i am going to spend another day in this city, more alert than yesterday, and even more focused on the beauty of the people i meet here, the rocks and hard places they are in, the preciousness of all our lives.