A complaint against the senseless killing of innocents. (Maqam Saba)

My heart is heavy with the killing of school children in Texas yesterday, with the killing of senior citizens in Buffalo earlier this month, with the Nakba and the killing of innocent civilians and journalists in occupied Palestine, with killings of innocents in war, state violence, criminal violence, murder, sexual violence, all around the world, every day.

My heart is heavy, but sadly also numbed and resigned to this state of the world. as a Palestinian-American I think I have a condition known as "learned helplessness"...

But Sheikh Imam's song "Ya Falastiniyya" - which I quote at the beginning and end of my improvisation - reminds us that there are those who struggle against injustice and violence. Such struggle is a sign of ultimate optimism, and personally I have always been torn between revolutionary optimism that we can make the world better, and a deep pessimism that our existence is so unbalanced on the planet in this moment in history, that things will only get worse before they get better, if they ever will.

I am not advocating for you to adopt either the attitude of pessimism or optimism, I am simply giving voice to my deep ambivalence, the kind of emotional stagnation that witnessing this kind of violence triggers in me. I think my improvisation is quite stagnant here, but I share it because it is my truth as a human in mid 2022.

I hope you are all taking care of yourselves out there - and as one of my colleagues at work said this morning, tell your people that you love them... share some of the profound love you have inside of you with our deeply flawed but beautiful human family. We are all suffering and broken.