A student gave me a gift of olive oil soap made in Palestine. It’s a small cube, delicately scented and wrapped in smooth paper printed with Arabic words I can’t read.
They came to ask for an initiation. This requires some proof of the condition of one’s heart. But that is not so easily put into words.
Like the words that my student offered, inherently inadequate but also overflowing, the offering of the soap opened a borderless space full of the unspeakable.
“Put it on the altar,” I instructed.
My teacher’s picture is there.
In the sideways darting of my student’s eyes, there was a small hiccup of uncertainty, and in their brief hesitation, the missed beat of an unspoken “Why?”
I didn’t say anything, but I said to everything everywhere: I pray that my teacher take care of this soap, the land it came from, the people who made it.
When I write “praying,” I mean pleading. I mean desperation.
It was the first week of June 2026. I’ve been quieter these past months than at any time since that particular October nearly three years ago. Every attempt I’ve made to describe my relative lack of words lacks words.
I’m not short on feelings, though.
Here is the image that came while I was searching.
An ocean held back by a wall. When the wall is removed, the ocean still holds its place, so full, yet not bursting.
I couldn’t easily say what happened in that June week, or even in a single day of that week, every day full of
another family burning alive in a bombed tent, the brilliant flames make their dark, flailing bodies more visible
and I ask myself:
What if I bathed myself with the soap?
Would it be a helpless gesture or a sacrament?
Could this soap ever again be soap, or will it be
blood and ash and tears and dirty water from a plastic jug,
carried by children with bare feet, hunger, and determination?
Could this soap ever again stand alone, a simple object resting in
the place where I bathe?
Or will it now always be the thousands of murdered people I’ve seen and
all of the pleas of us who are still living?
What was once ordinary has become a kaleidoscope of our own demons.
“Kaleidoscope” brings reflections and mirrors and a style of infinity, but it is not quite complete.
Add a fan that appears to be one thing and then opens to reveal the multiple, modulated leaves of its full incarnation.
Add immersion in a volume of time and sound and feeling.
In my spiritual traditions, there is a special style of instruction for pointing out what cannot be exactly pointed to. Once having received pointing out instructions, the student must make a kind of leap.
Or maybe it is a traverse without a map.
Or the navigation of a river, fully submerged, and how that requires opening all of the senses to survive the swim to the destination.
Pointing out Palestine.
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
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Thank you for this post. There are countless members of this tribe who feel overwhelmed to the point of paralysis when it comes to finding the words. You spoke for and through us. So many posts roll around in my mind and heart especially in the dark of night when I can weep alone when I cannot force my fingers to find the keystrokes that make sense.