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

“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.”

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

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.

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.

A story of ancestry, myth, and the wild feminine that refuses to be named.

A lyrical reflection on the Afghanistan the world never sees—childhood gardens, family, memory, and the quiet grief of diaspora. An invitation to witness a different Kabul.

Rooted in the quiet morning of Northern California, my writing weaves together the natural world, mysticism, meditationand everyday wonder.

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.

Part II