Posts

Space

Image
A Limited but Unrivaled Space Humanity inhabits a thin strip of the universe between worlds as grand as the infinity of the cosmos in which we are engulfed and as infinitesimal as the subatomic particles of which we are composed. Both the microbes slinking through nanometer-wide crevices on our skin and the black holes swallowing entire galaxies light years away remain elusive to our limited perception. We thus make our space in a truly narrow realm, even more so considering how fleeting our waltz with this eternal universe is. The mere decades that encapsulate our entire existence shackle our space to a particular time frame– to an uncertainty of the future and to an inability to control the past. Our space is now, where we stand, on this physical plane. At times, the ephemerality of my life in tandem with my fixedness to Earth seems like a chain encircling my space. How fascinating would it be to experience life on another planet? To travel through a deep-space nebula cloud? To...
5 comments
Read more

Cooking

Image
Cultural Identity in Cooking Singed and tattered towels; burnt pots and pans; metal utensils on nonstick pans: my journey with cooking began with catastrophic damage to the kitchen and a pair of immensely regretful parents. The summer before my junior year, I made a resolution to meal-prep all my food moving forward as a personal objective of independence, and the kitchen, with its daunting unfamiliarity, morphed into my unconquered arena.  While "burnt" perfectly encapsulates the dawn of my cooking voyage, I gradually found myself able to distinguish between a panoply of spices, estimate ingredient quantities, extract ideal flavor combinations, and incorporate nutrients in creative ways. My dishes ranged from baked falafel salads drizzled with homemade cheese to peppers brimful of chickpea flour stuffing. After a year of cooking, I surprised myself and my family with two entirely unexpected outcomes: for one, I was regularly producing edible, desirable food, and seco...
2 comments
Read more

Belonging

Image
Belonging Light Years Away The earth constitutes about 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003 percent of the observable universe. Such an infinitesimally minute statistic is unfathomable to our human minds, but what we can grasp from the seemingly endless nature of space is our conscious distinctness from the unthinking voids that surround us as well as our physical connection to them. The electrical impulses that fabricate our emotions and the macromolecules that synthesize every one of our bodies all share the same beginning with the billions of galaxies dotting our cosmos. Alone under the night stars, accompanied by my camera and tripod, these thoughts consume me, and I experience belonging– a snug sensation of unity with the universe and with humanity. Witnessing a blanket of stars on a clear night is a modest reminder that what I refer to as “my life” is merely a series of natural events– just like any other phenomena in nature, and this gives me a sen...
Post a Comment
Read more