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

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

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.