tender contributions

On Monday nights in Milan I have been cycling over cobbled streets to a salsa class where I dance with strangers whose last names I don't know, cry in the arms of a grey haired Puglian who looks like an Italian Laurel from Laurel and Hardy, and slowly remember what it means to be alive. This is an essay about dancing as survival, about Alice Walker, about the grief of cities we have loved and lost, about sweaty palms and letting go, and about why the permission we keep waiting for was never anyone else's to give.

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In an activated cultural moment, where stories of harm are resurfacing and shame feels both deeply personal and profoundly systemic, I explore the question of consent in storytelling and what it means to write from the body. Drawing on reflections from a writing group with Sophie Strand and Noor Tagouri, as well as conversations from Becoming the People with Tarana Burke, I examine how sexual violence is not just an individual wound but something shaped by the systems we live inside.

Through the work of Alexander Chee, David Bedrick, and Riane Eisler, this piece traces the movement from private shame to structural domination, asking what kind of world produces this silence and what it would mean to tell new stories rooted in repair rather than harm. If shame has been inherited, perhaps so can partnership. If systems were made by people, they can be unmade by people.

Another story is possible.

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With today's new moon in Sagittarius, I'm sharing the seed that has shaped my year and my life: grief-tending. What it is, why it matters, and why I believe it's some of the most essential work of our time!

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A reflection on living inside another person’s interior world, told through a Milan apartment, a shared library of books, and the quiet intimacies that unfold across time, space, and the unseen.

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Eight months after breaking up with my Italian partner Nico, I returned to Milan seeking closure but found an opportunity for deeper healing. I realized I'd been turning away from love not because it was harmful, but because it didn't arrive in the shape I expected.

Moving from London to Milan had meant losing everything that defined me - my community, work, and sense of belonging. I carried this grief and cultural isolation into our relationship, projecting my pain onto him instead of facing it myself.

When we reunited, I experienced what I now understand as relationship anxiety - intrusive thoughts that arise not from danger but when something tender is touched. I learned to distinguish between my intuition and my fear, and to hold paradox rather than demand certainty.

This is a story about learning to receive love as it actually is, intercultural relationships as acts of resistance, and partnerships as practice grounds for transformation. Sometimes a person can be a place, and love can take root in imperfect soil.

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For the last twenty‑two months I have been searching for words to meet what is happening in Palestine — trying to weave rage, grief, and sorrow with my own life, to connect the personal to the collective. This essay reflects on images, dignity, and dehumanization, on Steven Donziger’s devastating figures, on the hunger strikes and gestures of solidarity that ripple outward. Written during a 48‑hour fast in answer to a call from Gaza, it is both a witness and a plea — that we remember every life is a universe, and that how we respond matters.

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Soft Landing — a tender offering

A space where I share the unfolding of my new offering, Soft Landing — and everything that’s led me here. I write about change, grief, tenderness, and becoming. About trying to live and work in a way that feels more human, more spacious, more aligned. This is a place for the quiet process, for somatics, sweetness, slowness, and the soft courage of staying with what’s real. For anyone in a moment of transition, navigating the in-between, or simply longing to soften and explore what else might be possible.

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The Throat Chakra of the World is a personal, political, and poetic exploration of voice, resistance, and myth in a time of collapse. In this space, I reflect on identity, activism, collective grief, and ancestral memory through the lens of Palestine and far beyond. This podcast is part of that unfolding. I hope that, together, through this piece, we’ll trace the power of expression as a portal into truth, embodiment, and the possibility of new worlds.

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In this episode, I open a door I’ve circled around for years. I’ve written about the loss of my father, the grief, the absence — but not often about who he really was, beyond the fact that he was my dad. Here, I try to bring him into the light a little more. I speak about memory, music, and the invisible threads that continue to tie us together. I reflect on how sound has been a bridge — how it holds what words cannot, how it continues a conversation even when someone is no longer here. This is a story about what remains, what’s passed down without explanation, and how music became the place where I remember him most clearly.

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In this tender and reflective episode, I mark five years since the start of the pandemic—an unacknowledged threshold that continues to shape our inner and outer worlds. I explore the quiet griefs we’ve carried, the social and spiritual dissonance we’ve lived through, and the parts of ourselves we may have lost along the way. From personal shifts to global ruptures, from leaving the city that once held me to navigating transitions in work, identity, and joy—I reflect on what it means to live in the after when the before no longer exists.

We speak about nervous system overwhelm, the loneliness of disconnection, and the ache of living in contradiction under capitalism. There’s grief, yes, but also flickers of aliveness returning. I share thoughts on the power of ritual, on making space for what still matters, and on the possibility of choosing joy as an act of devotion, even amidst collapse.

This is an invitation to pause. To remember. To feel. To ask: Where were you five years ago—and who are you now?

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