Our ancestors felt this way, too.
Tiny thoughts on our grandparents sitting around a hearth talking about dreams passed down to them.
Welcome!
Hi friend, thank you for subscribing to this newsletter. Here, you’ll find the thoughts that keep me up, photos that make me grateful for our world, and other surprises I’ve found in places I didn’t expect. This newsletter gives tiny thoughts and tiny adventures some room to breathe, keeping these moments from falling through the cracks of social media. I’m curious to see what new doors of connection a new medium can open. Thank you for being here.
The wonders:
Last weekend, I spent copious amounts of time near water and the waves’ repetition reminded me of nature’s resolve to let go, no matter the circumstance. Additionally, I spent more time on FaceTime with my family in India. I’m on the cusp of starting a new job which prompted relatives to share past visions reserved for themselves and present dreams woven for me. My parents’ pasts—and therefore also mine—are stored within people, within homes, within another country. My family is tethered together through our daily phone calls. It’s made me think about family history and the immigrant experience, one of sacrifice and hope.
As an immigrant boards a plane, boat, or makes a journey by foot, their hope becomes more concrete as their body, mind, and life move across the Earth. The held hope transforms into a heralded dream, and their envisioned future passes down to their children like an heirloom. I sometimes ask my parents more peripheral details about the calculated losses which moved them to leave India and the calculated expectations which pulled them to stay in America, weaving their narrative together in my mind since I was too young to remember it for myself. Their story, like that of so many others, is one of hope, mostly for their children. Although my immigrant friends and I are now adults going to graduate school, navigating odd jobs and new cities alone, we also stand on a past created and mapped by our parents, grandparents, and ancestors—especially women. We inherit the trials and tribulations they scythed, the hopes they tilled, and the dreams which sprouted thereafter. Hope is not created ex nihilo—it is churned through a mix of fear, desperation, and belief. While we inherit dashed dreams that never came to fruition, we also inherit ambitious optimism and desire for better. When my generation dreams of law school, music deals, a meaningful job, or raising a family, the hope that burns bright and rests in our chest today was sparked somewhere distant long ago, in the hearts of our grandparents, perhaps as they sat around a hearth and recounted stories of their ancestors placing weighted dreams unto them like blankets. One day maybe I too, will pass on dreams to my children and family members, wishing for them to surpass my own wishes once my visions have passed their deadlines. Immigration is a story of love and hope, an idea perhaps conceived during a silent prayer, its manifestation unspooling during a physical journey across land or water. We cannot stand by and watch it turn into a story of fear and hate.
Things I’m keeping an eye on (and you can too!):
Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s a comic book that rekindled some delightful comic reading memories while stealing my breath with quotes that aptly describe nuances in power, emotions, and struggle. Navigating a broken land with broken confidence = relatable content. Some of my favorite lines are:
“And I must now reckon with what is loose in my country. The hate fades. And we must now reckon with what we have done to our own blood.”
“I have lost my way, I have lost my very soul. To get back, I must see beyond myself, beyond my deepest truths. To get back, I must see things not as I feel them to be, but as they are.”
“I was wrong. My enemy is not a beguiler, but a revealer. She brings out of us all the awful feelings that we have hidden away. So I know now that this is who I am: Might. Shame. Rage.
“In a life so wholly occupied with work, enchantment often has no option but to emerge from the trivial.” Apoorva Tadepalli’s thoughts on meaningless and meaningful work.
Community Center:
If you have any wonders keeping you up or thinking during this pandemic, please drop a comment in the discussion board! For any personal comments, feel free to reach out via Twitter, or by email. Can’t wait to listen. Sending lots of love.