May you live in interesting times

I'm not doing this again.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.”

• Rumi’s The Great Wagon

Just before Covid descended and changed everything, in the autumn of 2019, I attended the Venice Biennale (a dream of mine). I was brought there by Kuwait, assigned to write about their exhibit for a publication in Lebanon.

The poster for the Biennale that year was blue and yellow and I still get shivers when I think about what it said: “May you live in interesting times”.

At that point, I simply loved it because that was something my mom always said when …