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I saw the light of the moon. The moon was full, blazing, cooler and more reflective than the sun. The moon was a mirror.

It doesn’t matter where we are in the world, at what point in time. We all see the moon, if not feel its presence.

As I glance at the moon, I know it glances back to other parts of the world. This always happens.

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I took this photo in my kitchen at home. On the right, my mom is making her signature chocolate cake. On the left, Bilal is making a classic Pakistani dish. Bilal is a Pakistani refugee who lived with my family for a little over a year when I was in high school. My parents volunteer with the non-profit Neighbors For Refugees, which often works closely with Elena's Light.

I have been thinking a lot about Bilal throughout this class. During the photo review session this weekend, both of the photographers in my group showed photos of delicious meals their mom had prepared for them. I asked them for the recipes and we talked about our favorite foods. This reminded me of when Bilal lived with us. In my family, dinner is an almost sacred time - my parents love to cook, so dinner can often last awhile. When Bilal lived with us, he would share Pakistani dishes with my family and my parents would cook classic French food for him. Through these exchanges, he became very close with my family. I have been thinking a lot about the moments and feelings which connect people across cultures. What people choose to share in order to connect reveals what comes to mind when one thinks of "home". I think food is a powerful and beautiful way of remembering home and sharing the positive feelings one associates with home.

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This is a screenshot of a conversation I had with my boyfriend a few days ago. We send each other photos throughout the day to keep each other connected to our lives. I will be visiting him in France over spring break and have been reflecting on my ability to do that. To traverse across space and borders with ease, out of desire and leisure instead of necessity and survival. I have been experiencing a lot of gratitude when considering what it means to travel, what it means to be connected, what it means to have relationships, and how beautiful and unique all of that is. So often tropes of refugeehood erase beauty from its narrative. Saturday's session with the photographers was so impactful to me because so many of the prompts had to do with beauty. Nature, free time, favorite places, all encompass beautiful moments. For Aryana, she identified beauty in nature and the power of the sun, much like Vuong who argues that his body was "everything I hid from, everything that made me want to be a sun, the only thing I knew that had no shadow" (107). I often take for granted my ability to feel beautiful, my choice to seek out beauty, to find it in spaces, places, and people, and how important beauty is for everyone.

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I took this photo on Sunday afternoon on my way to Olin. I really enjoyed the Zoom meeting on Saturday with the photographers and the conversation in our breakout room flowed surprisingly smoothly and was very fun. I was struck by the care and thought that went into each of the photos that the photographers shared, and how willing they were to talk about their thought process and the backstory behind their pictures. The photos for the nature prompt really stood out to me, and one of the photos for that prompt was of the sky when the photographer had been on a walk and the moon was visible at the top. It reminded me of the many pictures I've taken casually while at Wes of the sky at sunset and particularly the times when the moon is still visible during the day, like here. I've also been thinking about the significance of setting On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous in Connecticut, and how, while I'll have spent four years here by next year, I don't really know the state outside of Middletown (and even in this city, I spend almost all of my time on campus).

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I was really taken with Vuong's line: "Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined."

While this line appears in a moment of intimacy, I see its application in many moments when 'help' is on the table. As I explore what it means for me to help, I'm thinking about how our culture doesn’t outwardly support the need for help. Somehow it’s not looked upon well to admit you need help. Or if you need help, there are certain criteria and time restrictions on how much support is acceptable.

This is just one thought-chain from one line of Vuong's book. There were many more I could've chosen. I think more poets should write novels.

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This is me and my nephew, Oliver, at Christmas last year. I love kids and it's been such a joy getting to be part of his life. Working with the kids from Elena's light has been so rewarding and it has reinforced for me how lucky I am to have access to my extended family -- something a lot of refugees don't have. I'm so thankful that Oliver is a quick plane ride away instead of trapped somewhere that I can't get to him.

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This photo is of my family! I really enjoyed talking with Mudasir this past weekend, and I noticed in our conversation that a lot of what we had in common revolved around the sharing of food, and spending time, with family. Her favorite food was pancakes, a typically American food, that many children love, and she eats pancakes often with her family.

This is a photo of my family in my great grandmother's home, in small town Pennsylvania. My great grandfather built it for her when they left Germany because of the Holocaust. This house has been a site of sharing memories, and food specifically, across generations for my family. In this house, my family has shared a lot of recipe's my great grandmother brought with her from Germany, accompanied with the sharing of stories.

This photo was taken on Thanksgiving, which has also got me thinking about the manner in which my family's times of gathering together tend to be tied up in assertions of American-ness, as we usually gather on Thanksgiving and Independence day despite my family not being American originally. These holidays then become a hybrid sharing of German-Jewish food and American foods and traditions.   I am thinking critically about the manners in which my family celebrates and affirms these violent holidays as white Americans. In that, I am thinking about the phenomenon we have discussed of refugees being absorbed into the American nation and asserting American-ness as a manner to assimilate, and thinking about how this is tied to my immigrant grandparents choosing to celebrate these particular holidays.

Lastly, I think Ocean Vuong's novel has got me thinking a lot about loss. My great-grandparents have now passed away, however this photo was taken in their home this past year. Even without them, their traditions and food still stay in my family in ways that feel very special. Though my grandmother is the last person in our family to speak Yiddish, our German-Jewish traditions still pass down in our family, even with food.

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After I finished up my Organic Chemistry experiment, I was putting away my lab notebook into my backpack. While doing so, I ended up scraping my hand with the edge of the steel spiral holding my lab notebook together (just my luck). I washed my hands and went home so I could apply some Neosporin on it to relieve the pain. After all this, I started laughing (I guess ironically?) because of how ridiculous it looked so I decided to take a photo of this. I thought of Weiwei's documentary and the dismal conditions that millions of refugees face to this day. They can get a severe wound on their journey to a purgatory-like refugee camp and they would be LUCKY to have access to Neosporin which probably wouldn't do much for them and here I am, applying Neosporin to a truly insignificant little cut. This trivial thing helped me realize that I can never truly emphasize with refugees no matter how much I study and analyze their struggles because I will never experience what they go through myself.

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This is a picture of a meal that I made with one of my partners. We used almond cardamom bread from Wesshop and as I was eating I started to tear up. Almond and cardamom are common ingredients/flavors that are used in many Indian desserts and recipes, and the whole experience reminded me of home. My experience of home is not felt or found in a physical location/house/country, but it comes back to me in cooking.

Something that stood out to me on our zoom with the photographers this past weekend was the kid who said that New York City reminded her of Afghanistan in terms of the outdoor markets. I wouldn't have associated New York City with Afghanistan personally, and the similarities that this photographer pointed out made a lot of sense.

When home is far away, or has been taken away, echoes of it are found and felt in a myriad of places and ways. Home can be conjured up by visiting a place with similarities, eating certain foods, or spending time with certain people.

Our conversation made me think that when we miss something we seek it out wherever we go in any way that we can.

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My family recently uncovered and digitized some old home videos. This is a screen grab of a family gathering. This is me and my Great Grandma Esther (z"l), who survived Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps. When Auschwitz was liberated, the Russian army mistook the column of liberated Jews for part of the Axis army, and fired at them. She survived that, too. She arrived in New York 8 months pregnant with my grandmother in 1946. She had very little English, and my parents say she spoke in smiles and that she had a sort of buzzing quality to her -- she radiated energy. After watching this video, I can tell that this is true. Reading Vuong's novel made me think about this moment in the video where she is holding my hand and moving it around. She has a vision of what future generations of her family will look like in this country, and as the first grandchild, I represent it here. She didn't have the language to express that vision, but her daughter (my grandmother) certainly did. There were ways me and my siblings and cousins ought to dress/speak/act etc. As a queer and genderqueer person, I chafed at a lot of those rules as they were articulated. But this smile -- a vision outside of language -- is something I can get behind.

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When thinking about what to post for this reflection, I kept circling back to our discussion of water last class and what it means to have an impermanent/unfixed identity. Whether it be the water in Weiwei’s documentary, Vuong’s novel, or the initial images we started this class looking at--water carries strong immersive, reflective, and transformative properties. It acts as a space of sinking, death, and instability while simultaneously functioning as a basic necessity for life connected to ideas of growth and rebirth. It is constantly in flux, harbors an entire world that is largely unknown to us below it, and is a large component of the human body (the human body is 60% water??). So for my reflection I took a picture of some class notes and an old picture of me and my brother by the ocean by my grandparents' old house. This photo also reminded me of Saturday’s meeting with the photographers where the siblings I was in a group with all were thinking about finding peace in still water.

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I took this picture on the drive to work last night – the sky was turning dark, but for a moment, it was all shades of pastel purple and pink. Coming from a day filled with classes to a night on the ambulance, I thought about the transitionary nature of my car ride. It marked not just the welcoming of the evening, nor my movement from bustling Middletown to the very rural town I work in, but also the differing roles that we all play in our communities. I thought about Ocean Vuong’s quote, “words are, in a sense, bodies moving from one space to another. Our very cells, too, are always moving. They are just overflowing, and dying, and being reborn. What is seemingly so static is actually constantly in motion.”These idea of constant motion, of permeability and flexibility, of change and growth – contra to the tropes we’ve discussed in class about single-spot fixation, existing in a liminal space, serving as the antithesis to something that is finite and certain – ring true in many of the works we’ve read in class thus far, particularly those that were written by refugees themselves.

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This photo is representative of what I have been thinking about language and how it is used to reflect the experience of refugees. So much of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is about how language is  an inadequate way of expressing the fullness of one's interior life. I have been thinking about this idea a lot lately -- especially after the Elena's Light event. The families we were talking to have experienced so much, and even if we talked for hours, the conversation we share could never impart the full depth of their life stories. To me, the trees in this image are the "bare bones" of language, and the sky surrounding them is everything that is incommunicable.

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As I was leaving Usdan the other night I just happened to stop and look at the board full of posters, and I saw these three. The immense difference in topics was eye catching, but also just highlighted to me the ways in which we are surrounded by news and discussion of other people's lives that we will never be able to understand across the globe. As college students, especially at Wesleyan, there is a large portion of the university that works to shed light on refugee issues and current news, however I think this also highlights the large disconnect that we have and the cautions we must take when engaging in these conversations.  I think experimenting with different ways to not only initiate these conversations about these global issues, but to navigate the ways in which you can try and evoke change within the space that you are in is complicated and hard to do "correctly". How are we perpetuating the ideas of refugees as "hopeless, stateless beings" in these conversations? How do we approach this with their best interests in mind?