Before They Taught Us to Hate, We Knew How to Love
You know what I love?
I love the smell of earth after a rain shower. I love the smell of coffee in the morning — not the idea of it, the actual smell, before the first sip, when it still holds all its promise. I love the feeling of a body made sore by a good yoga class, the specific satisfaction of muscles that worked. I love the smell of sweat on a dance floor. I love the energy that lives in me after a night of salsa — electric, unspent, like something was returned to me that I didn’t know was missing. I love a glass of wine exactly when the sun begins to go down, that precise window when the day exhales and so do you.
I love the sound of a child laughing while a parent tickles them — that specific, helpless, total laughter that has no agenda and no performance in it. I love the feeling of cold sand on bare feet in early morning, before the world arrives and claims the beach for itself. I love the first rays of sun on skin. I love the smell of the sea when it’s empty and unhurried, and the sound of waves at night when everything and everyone has finally gone to sleep. I love the silence of a forest. I love the stillness of a city before it wakes up — that brief, honest hour when it doesn’t know it’s being watched.
These things cost nothing. They require no system, no subscription, no permission. They are just the earth, doing what it has always done — offering itself, quietly and without condition, to anyone willing to receive it.
And then, of course, there is the other love. The darker, more sardonic one.
I love walking into a boutique in France and trying on clothes, only to be met by an owner — homosexual, invariably, with the arrogance and entitlement of a corrupt minor king — who looks at you with that particular Parisian scrutiny. The kind that measures your worth in a single glance and finds you slightly beneath his creations. Until the information starts arriving. You live in Dubai. You speak three languages. You are wearing a dress that short and you are Muslim. You watch it happen in real time — the slow, almost physical deflation of his assumed superiority, shrinking back to its actual size, which turns out to be quite small. And then the inevitable question, delivered with what remains of his confidence: Oh, you can wear that in Dubai?
Yes. But the problem, I tell him, is not the length of the skirt. It is the quality of the fabric. Unless it is cotton, silk, or linen, it is not really clothing for us. His eyes go wide, recalibrating. You could tell him that snow in the desert is a hundred times more beautiful than the Alps and he would believe you completely — because he has never looked beyond the edge of what he already knows. He has never needed to.
I think about ignorance often. Whether it is man-made, culture-made, or simply a particular kind of curse. How much does it actually cost a person to love the earth as the extraordinary place it is — to be curious about it, land by land, country by country, culture by culture — instead of spending that energy criticising what humans have no control over? Nature does not need his approval. The desert is also nature. The veil is also a choice. The naked body is also a choice. Neither requires his commentary to exist.
How hard is it, really, to be curious about other humans? People who, like us, arrived on this earth with no instructions — just a life to live, air to breathe, and some version of joy to find. Whether they find it veiled or uncovered, in natural linen or expensive synthetic fabric, in a mosque or a vineyard or on a dance floor at two in the morning — why should it matter? Why has difference become a threat instead of an invitation?
Because they taught us that. Systematically, deliberately, over generations. Under the pretence of patriotism, they taught us to fear and hate other humans. Under the banner of modern values, modern slavery more likely, they taught us that consumption is identity and that spirituality is a hobby — something for free time, never a mode of life. They replaced earth with labs, connection with screens, real food with engineered substitutes, and then charged us for the privilege of being diminished.
And the earth just keeps offering itself. Patient, generous, extraordinary — ignored.
I know what I want. I have always known, underneath all the noise, underneath the conditioning and the systems and the years of performing what was expected.
I want to live on earth. Actually live on it — breathing its air, eating its food, drinking its water. I want to consume less and move more. I want to sit at tables with people from every culture on this planet and eat their food and learn their words and understand how they see the sky. I want to pray inside every religion — not to convert, not to argue, but to find the same god that is being used, everywhere and always, to divide us. I want to touch the humanity in every human I meet, the part that exists before the ideology and the flag and the fear.
I want simplicity. And I want greatness. I have learned they are not opposites.
Today I am asking the universe — directly, out loud, without embarrassment — to make this possible. To clear the path. To bring the right people, the right moments, the right connections across the distance. To let this reach someone who feels the same weight, the same grief, the same stubborn, unkillable love for what this life could be if we stopped letting them shrink it.
If you are out there reading this and something in it recognises something in you — then we have already begun.
And maybe, together, we make a difference after all.