Life in the Time of Genocide

Notes on going through life while Israel murders Palestinians in front of everyone’s eyes.

Photo by author

How does one go on living their “normal” lives while a genocide is being played out right in front of our eyes? Maybe our lives actually aren’t normal. Maybe what we’ve been taught our whole life has mostly been a lie?

I find myself once again sitting by the ocean in Los Angeles. Water has always felt healing to me. Not just because I spent ten years of my childhood on a swim team, but because it has this way of calming me down Watching, and listening to the waves of the ocean makes me feel small in this world- makes humanity feel so unimportant in the grand scheme of the natural order of things. Watching the waves crash on the beach gives me the same feeling that staring into the Grand Canyon does. It reminds me that any negative things anyone has said to me, or about me literally does not matter. Suddenly, I’m reminded of that poem by Mary Oliver:

Wild Geese

by

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving…