God in Cursive

a seeker's dictionary

My mother tells me that was one of the first words I spoke. Dah was my door into being my own person. It was both a request, I want this spoon, and way to point at a thing, that toy my older brother is holding. Dah is an oxymoron in English, an unrecognized word in classical Arabic, and confusing to translate. But if you try it in your mouth, you can experience it. Dah is the sound of effort. Tongue pushing jaw and mouth open. 

My parents tell me I was eager to speak, that I rushed to get my first word out at nine months. They tell me this is proof I’m an extravert. They say I was a talkative toddler, talking to strangers and laughing with relatives and making friends everywhere I went. 

For years, their comments confused me. The memories that linger with me don’t feel like an extravert’s memory. What I vividly remember is the first time playing in farmland mud after a fresh rain and the day I discovered markers contain fibers you can pull from the clear tube hidden inside the bright plastic shell. I still remember the way those fibers felt in my hands, the way color bled into my palms so serenely, the way they turned the water bottles so pigmented and strange, the feeling of possessing magic potions. 

I am told for most of my life I am definitely an extrovert, but in my memories of childhood, I am often alone. I know this isn’t objectively true. I spent every day of my childhood with siblings or neighborhood friends—usually both. 

My most constant childhood companion, my older brother,  reminds me of our mischievous adventures. In his telling of the stories, I am unafraid and unhindered, an obvious extravert, outwardly directed. In my recollection of those years, I am easily scared, easily broken by blunt words and shrinking from loud voices, often seeking refuge somewhere inward. I’ve spent many years counting the discrepancies in how I’m perceived, how so much of who I am seems to be lost in translation, how I feel obscure to myself and others. There is a word for this: illegible.

For as long as I can remember, I have been on a quest to make myself legible to the world and the world legible to me. 

I imagine that’s why when I first learned penmanship in third grade, I dreaded cursive. I couldn’t understand why we had to learn to write in a way that seemed so superfluous. Cursive was beautiful and intriguing when done right, but I was left-handed and bilingual and barely able to focus in class. Curly words obscured each other. Words were supposed to make the world less obscure—that’s why I fell in love with writing in the first place. 

Earlier that year, I had convinced my parents to buy me a Barbie diary with a lock that I used as a piggy bank of sorts for my stickers and secrets. If someone made me a promise, I wrote it down in my diary. When I found myself confused about playground dynamics or friendship hiccups, I turned to blank paper and wrote my way out of those big feelings. The feelings didn’t entirely disappear, but they felt more legible to me. Words assured me clarity, security, and completion. Cursive, in its cumbersome entanglement, seemed counterproductive. So, I connected my letters in the few classes where I had to and happily forgot all about it when it came to the writing that mattered.

By the end of fifth grade, I started stapling together folded printer paper to create little zines for stories and statements and the occasional drawings. I was thoroughly fascinated by words, telling stories, using block letters to build something resembling a staircase to legibility. 

But as adolescence appeared on the horizon and my family moved across countries—four times in three years—I grew dizzy from all the changes. I was thirteen, and there were no words I could write to guide my way to coherence.  

So when my big feelings no longer fit in my journal, I took them to trees and sky. I started to walk among the Virginia pines and speak my heart in questions. I wondered about God. I could barely stomach the vastness of what I asked or the quickness with which I craved the answers. I yearned for stillness. 

In my wandering, I stumbled on a backdoor and found my way to writing again. The poems in my 9th grade literature textbook (homeschool edition) brought me so much delight that I decided to try my hand at lyrical writing. Poetry became my speakeasy for expressing everything I didn’t know how to hold, a place for all my forbidden musings, things I didn’t yet know how to bring into conversation. 

I wrote my first poems in black and white composition notebooks that I decorated with markers. I used my best block lettering to claim those notebooks as a space for just me and my longing for meaning. I still couldn’t write in cursive, but through poetry I was thinking in cursive. Verses, like cursive letters, are designed for connection—line to stanza and stanza to rhyme. Their ornate beauty invites you to pay attention, to linger—imagery to memory and memory to metaphor.

Through poetry, I let my words flow without the sharpness of rules or the clarity of edges. The poems I wrote as a teenager didn’t roll off the tongue or stir the soul in delightful ways. Far from it, they were a heavy “dah”—grasping first drafts, effortful and seduced by legibility. And yet, I couldn’t stop writing. Contemplating God, silence, space in verses gave me courage. I even started to write poems in Arabic.

The first time I turned to poetry to make me legible to others, I was a sophomore in college, still adjusting to life at a public university after five years of homeschooling and living like a monk. Most people I met during my first year at school later confessed they thought I was an international student because I dressed in a way that was foreign to campus fashion—wearing minimalist Arabian dresses that stood out among the leggings and denim shorts that were popular at the time. I felt obscure in ways that felt lonesome, so I went where I found hope: to a blank page, where I could write my way out of those feelings. I started a blog to share my poetry and musings. It was a Blogspot I called Cliffsnotes to My Heart. With each post I shared, acquaintances grew into friends. The girls who’d smile and keep on walking when we passed each other on campus were now stopping for small talk. By sharing my words, I became legible—and legibility is the prerequisite for conversation. 

By junior year, my words had helped me build bridges into many worlds on campus. My social experience had transformed, and the unspoken crush I’d carried the year before was now texting me every day. Naturally, I wrote a poem about him. He messaged me on Facebook that evening—not only had he missed the heart of my poem, but he seemed more concerned that people might read into it, and by extension, into our growing friendship. His reaction crushed me. I took it to mean that my writing just wasn’t clear enough. Or maybe I was the one who didn’t make sense. Things felt blurry again. I felt strange and small for being so undone by an unrequited crush. The confusion was too shameful for words, so I confined my writing to the mandatory papers for school. I gave up on poetry for a while.

By senior year, I had given up on God, too. 

See, I had found myself in love with God before I fell in love with poetry. God was the word that uttered me out of illegibility. Religion, in the simplistic way I first learned it at thirteen, was the ultimate promise of legibility. A grand theory of legibility. It was clear rules and perennial explanations that stretched across the length of time and spanned the width of the universe. So when I found myself tripping over questions about free will and evil and the origin of the universe, I turned to religious teachers and scholars for answers. Most of them reduced my questions to a lack of faith. I swallowed empty prayers to ease the pain of incoherence. I memorized a dozen prayers in Arabic, and this one became a daily pill:

Our cherisher, please don’t let our hearts digress after You have made them serene through Your guidance, and gift us from You a mercy, You are the ultimate Giver. 

But my heart continued to diverge from the certainty I once knew, and each day brought another reason to question my faith. As my social world expanded, religion quickly lost its ability to integrate the diversity of human experience I was now encountering. I couldn’t reconcile the religious teachings that had me judging other people’s beliefs as punishably wrong when so many of them seemed so earnest and rigorously curious. The religious confusion blindsided me; I hadn’t planned for a life where any other worldview could be true. And what about all the love that had once drawn me to a secluded path just to be alone with God? So when it felt like God was nowhere to be found, I was left feeling deeply betrayed, disoriented in the eye of the storm that is existential illegibility.

Losing my faith was one of the most heartbreaking experiences of my life. It took ten years and two failed attempts before I found my way back to God. In my quest for total legibility, I had overlooked the role of illegibility—and the essential connection between the two. Through the defining experiences that unfolded in my twenties, I came to appreciate the value of mystery, the mercy of uncertainty, and the warmth of all that is dynamic.

Religion, despite its common flaws, was also my door into spirituality, into organic experiences of the Divine. Religion was the legibility that prepared me for the mystery of illegibility. 

Religion is the alphabet for experiencing God, and you don’t learn the alphabet in cursive. You don’t learn to write by attempting poetry. You learn through the clear boundaries of distinct letters, correct spelling, and good grammar. And then, once you’ve learned to navigate with words, you take them with you as maps and venture into unfamiliar territory. Legibility becomes the grace that carries you into the heart of illegibility. The map is not the territory, but the map allows you to experience more of the territory without losing your way. 

Reality is a bewildering place, and words are mysterious keys. How strange that arranging shapes on a page moves energy. Words can make worlds of experience make sense. A perplexing coherence. I have spent so much of my life drawn to this strange art, attempting to make the illegible legible and the ineffable effable. And yet, I have rarely experienced myself as coherent. What I encounter, instead, is mystery. 

Maybe I am Arabic grammar and English vocabulary, American fairytales and Egyptian lullabies, secular education and religious devotion. It’s tempting to tell myself that I cannot make sense to people, that there is no coherent version of a story told in Arabic grammar and English vocabulary, that I am not fluent in any language. And yet, I continue to write.

Writing, like prayer, is how I seek God. It’s not ultimately about legibility. It’s a blank page, a space where energy moves. And in that movement, I realize I don’t know if I caused it to move or if God moved it or if there’s even a difference. Here, I encounter my own incoherence. Paradox has two eyes, and they’re beautiful. Perhaps the point is simply to linger—until the illegibility we contemplate becomes the inspiration for our poetry. 

I never learned to properly write in cursive, but I learned to write in Arabic. In Arabic, there are 28 letters and 23 of them are always connected to their neighbors on both sides. The remaining five letters are asymmetrically connected—joining only the letters on their right. In Arabic, the letters morph into more spacious versions of themselves when they begin or end a word. Arabic is intentionally ambiguous, contextual, and elusive. The written alphabet consists of consonants, while the vowels dance around the letters, suspended in the air. Yet the vowels are the arbiters of meaning, shifting a word from subject to object, like a bird never meant to be caged. Most of the time, the vowels aren’t recorded. In common Arabic, there is every variation of Dah—a single word pointing to both this and that. You had to be there to know what it means. You had to linger.