Words are dancing in the Cosmos

My 50th Birthday This Week: Standing at the Threshold This week, I turn fifty. There is something about writing those words that makes me pause. Not with fear, but with reverence. Fifty years. Half a century of breath moving through this body. Half a century of being carried by a Mystery far greater than my own plans, ideas, or understanding. As June opens her soft golden door, I find myself standing at a sacred threshold. In the Sufi path, we are often invited to see li

A Sufi Reflection on Love, Surrender, and the Vanishing of the Self By Anosha Zereh When I first thought about intimacy, I imagined it as something reserved for romantic moments or private conversations. Over time, I came to see that intimacy is far more vast. It is not confined to relationship—it is a way of حضور, of being present enough to let another soul touch your truth.

To my sisters in Iran and Afghanistan— I write to you tonight not as a distant observer, but as one whose heart beats with yours. If I could, I would sit beside each of you tonight—on rooftops in Tehran, in courtyards in Herat, in dimly lit rooms in Kabul where the curtains stay half‑closed—and place your tired hands between my own. I would say, before anything else: you are not alone, and you have never been forgotten. I know that some days the weight is unbearable: the clo

In Iranian memory, the lion has long stood for courage and sovereignty; here it walks through a war‑torn orchard under the shadow of an eagle and a shrine‑beast. This is my way of speaking about Iran, Palestine, and Afghanistan in the current wars without maps or headlines—only animals, orchards, and the dangerous act of remembering the taste of our innate wisdom.

On being a Muslim woman between Kabul, Tehran, and San Francisco Bay Area By Anosha Zereh When I say I am Muslim, I am not offering you a party, a passport, or a political program. I am naming the wound and the wonder at the center of my being — the place where God looks at God through these borrowed eyes.

A people’s letter from Iran, Afghanistan, and the borderlands, this piece sits with Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s warning about Gharbzadegi and asks what liberation means when it is imposed from above versus awakened from within. It is a meditation on tyrants and martyrs, Western “saviors,” and the quiet, vast freedom that still breathes beneath our borders and our hardest days.

I understand the trauma and rage that erupt as celebration, but I cannot call the machinery of assassination and airstrikes a path to liberation. I was not born for empires or emirs. I do not belong to the turbans that ban my sisters from the sky, nor to the uniforms that baptize bombs as freedom. The regimes that rule my motherland Afghanistan and my adopted home Iran have broken my heart a thousand times, but I will not offer that broken heart to Washington or Tel Aviv as p

My Artistry: Intuitive, Afghan-Born, Rooted in Wholeness The stories I write today rise from Afghan soil, but they follow the path of intuition rather than tradition. They come from memory, from exile, from longing — but also from a quieter place beneath all of that.

For those who pray in many tongues—or in holy silence—this meditation gathers the temple bell, the call to prayer, the rosary’s hush, and the breath that forms Om into one warm cup of morning presence. Arrive as you are; read slowly, and pause where your breath naturally pauses.

The Mirror of Mercy

We are all One

Part II

The Luminous Garden of Remembrance

For countless years, my restless lower self wandered the timeless corridors of longing—carrying the perennial ache: Why was this body called into being? What unseen dream, what secret, rests quietly within my skin? I loved God as a mighty Creator—distant, veiled, always beyond the highest peaks of my prayers. My longing stretched to fill an endless sky; each plea and poem became an arrow sent out toward a beloved, unreachable sun. There were nights when my soul, exhausted and

Stories of women, memory, and belonging, by Anosha Zereh

On this Memorial Day, we remember every soldier, every civilian, every mother and child whose life was taken by war — American, Afghan, and all those whose names history forgets. We honor the fallen most truly when we refuse to let their sacrifice be in vain...

I could not sleep last night, and I will not pretend otherwise. This morning The Times of London printed a sentence that should have stopped the world: "Taliban legalise child marriage for girls as young as nine." The decree — thirty-one articles signed by the Taliban supreme leader and published in the official gazette this month — removes any minimum age for the marriage of girls and declares that the silence of a virgin girl is to be treated as her consent...

My father, Lal Zereh, came to California twice in his life. The first time, he was a teenage exchange student from Afghanistan — full of curiosity, living with an American family, learning what the world looked like from the outside. The second time, he came as a refugee. The Soviets had taken his homeland. He packed up our family and started over at 43 — from nothing. But here is what the newspaper didn't say: He chose California specifically. Not by accident. Not just

I am Afghan, and my wardrobe has always been a quiet rebellion and a gentle love letter to where I come from. At parties in Berkeley or in silence at a retreat in Portugal, my “too much” clothing is simply how life chooses to dance through this body—one Afghan dress, one Indian outfit, one “simple” Western design at a time.

“Form began to soften at the edges; the sense of ‘my’ body expanded into the space around it until inside and outside were no longer clearly divided. What remained was one continuous body of presence, appearing as fifteen people in a room.”