Wishes for Aladdin's genie. What would you wish for? And what is happiness?
- Karen Sole
- Aug 9
- 6 min read
1. The return of letters. In envelopes. With stamps. Delivered to my mailbox, 2. The end of the Gaza genocide, 3. Misogyny.
Correspondence. Letters! With beginnings, middles and ends, forming part of ongoing conversations in that form. And post scripts. Strings of them. You imagine your friend, sitting in their spot, envelope addressed, letter folded and a barely aspirated ‘oh!’ followed by a quick unfolding, snatched up pen, and the P.S.s. I forgot to say I broke up with… or you should see the garden. The zucchini are outrageous at the moment…or you must read The Incredible Lightness of Being or see Lawrence of Arabia…maybe going over onto the back of the final page, below the salutation, a little arrow at the right foot of the page pointing to a promise of more words from your loved one on the other side - just turn the page over. Oh yes, and don’t forget the haunting nature of handwriting. That extension of the person. You knew it was they who had written you from your name and address scratched onto the envelope. Actual handwriting, drizzling a finger over the ink, a caress of the sender’s skin. Who hasn’t done that?
In this realm, those were the days! Whole conversations in exchanges of casual, normal language of ideas, friendship, travel, love, divorce, births, work, family, politics, one thread spanning weeks, and sometimes just one volley going thousands of miles wrapped around a few photos, usually developed at a chemist shop by a technician or just the woman who handed you your aspirin and sticking plasters. Is that who did it?
I’ll use ‘bring that back’ as one of my three wishes when Aladdin comes to call:
We’ll keep email, habibi, but put letters back in the mix.
Yes, all the other genocides too. Stay calm, if you can, and let the particular horror of that one sink in. It has had extensive mentions here before in Israel Is the Macrocosmic Version of the Violent Family Living Next Door, AND The Abusive Relatives In Your Family System, back when I was using caps on all title words that I might go back and change, and by implication The Sizzling Effects of Colonisation Linger On and On, then only slightly tangentially, All the trauma lived out loud, all the kindness, all the love, all the current geopolitics, and all the billionaires and white American dream left out - Mo, the Netflix series - what’s not to like? and my most recent post, Never again has become shut the fuck up.
Since October ‘23, it’s carried out a persistent assault that has riddled my life with holes, not the real visceral ones blasting Palestinian men, women and children, the aid workers, doctors and nurses, and journalists into pieces, but the still not faint ones of a helpless and horrified witness, waking me at night, trailing me round in the day, holding my arms when I try to paint, filling my legs with lead at the gym. I’m not lying, not even exaggerating, and I know you feel it too.
The World Wars came to my childhood home via ANZAC Day, which I only partly understood, and via my maternal grandfather’s silence about his World War I experiences. Later, countless black and white movies featuring, of course, brutal German and compassionate Allied soldiers, followed by full colour movies like Bridge On The River Kwai, full of inexplicable, or at least unexplained cruel rituals: skinny white men sweating under corrugated iron roofs in what seemed to be animal shelters; thunderous portentous music, and inexplicable plots. But I understood or believed that the fact of ANZAC Day would not permit other wars to engulf the world. The never again.
Of course many catastrophic wars had already nuked that before the current part of the Zionist occupation, oppression and now full genocide of Gaza and extension into the West Bank. And there’s no putting that genie back in the lamp. And, look, yesterday was the eighty somethingth remembrance of Hiroshima, a day that passes without mention of more treachery by world leaders of the time. Emperor Hirohito had sought peace talks long before the bombing of Hiroshima, but the American proposals were for meeting in out of the way stupid places in North America, where any envoy from Japan could not be guaranteed safety. , according to Gore Vidal. In the documentary Why We Fight (2005), Vidal said that, during the war's final months, the Japanese had tried to surrender: "They were trying to surrender all that summer, but Truman wouldn't listen, because Truman wanted to drop the bombs ... To show off. To frighten Stalin. To change the balance of power in the world. To declare war on communism. Perhaps we were starting a pre-emptive world war". I’ve pulled this from wiki, but remember his views on this in the collection of essays The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000.
My pieces have focused on the conjoined twins of capitalism and patriarchy in the past, in What Kind of Fuckery Is This, Misogyny Without Borders, and We Need to Talk About Jamie. And Eddie., How Giselle Pelicot Made Us Feel Better, and Our laughter has been honed ‘til it gleams like an axe. So, you could say consistent. Persistent. The issues do not get any lighter or easier. I know you feel that too. It feels as much like time for radical action as it ever did in the 70s.
Once, sitting with my mother on the edge of her bed, when she was well into her eighties, or even nineties, I can’t place the decade, we were talking about her state of being. ‘I’m alright’, she said, ‘and what is that thing they call happiness anyway? What does that word mean?’ Indeed, if we are one, and we are one, then we are only as happy/well as the least well amongst us, and today how can we answer that? Maybe happiness is having enough resilience to carry on, to get up in the morning, do what has to be done, be grateful for what we have and what we get, spread some love, and receive it, too. More or less. That is not to say we are without joy or delight but they are often different or differently occuring.
It’s more difficult some times than others, and everyone has stuff to deal with, in times when war and famine and other catastrophes are absent from where we are, although visceral evidence is delivered daily, or every minute to our phones, so that it cannot be absent from who we are. We cannot be unaffected by the suffering of others in our lifetime, or of our forbears, ancestors, family lines. Here comes the therapy bit. Systemic constellations provide a pragmatic/phenomenological way of working with the generationally collected and currently collective traumas we carry, by recognising what is, opening up our natural resilience which is a resource we take for granted, or perhaps we don’t even acknowledge it. We have it, though, otherwise we would not have made it to this moment, in whatever shape we are in.
There are systemic constellation practitioners around the world, and systemic practitioners who work with you where ever you are in the world - thank you Zoom - and I am one of those. I can stay up late or get up early or in the middle the night to be in sync with your time zone. You can find me at the website and email below, to arrange a time, or book a session directly. I would love to work with you, in English (my only fully competent language), on your issues. I chose manawa because it carries the meaning of heart, breath and emotion, all essential for the embodied energetic processes of constellations. Meanwhile, we all must allow our grief, take action, take care of ourselves and ‘each other’.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.” Rumi
www.manawafamilyconstellations.com Chat, book sessions
manawa = heart breath emotion
karensole@manawafamilyconstellations.com drop a line to arrange a workable time
Karen Sole is a member of the International Institute for Complementary Therapists, and of the International Systemic Constellations Association (isca-network.org), and a member of ANZCI, the Aotearoa New Zealand Constellation Incorporated. She took her first training from Yildiz Sethi yildizsethi.com of familyconstellations.com.au. Karen's profile can be found on the above organisational sites. She participates in monthly professional supervision, facilitator member constellations of ANZCI, ISCA, and informal international groups of experienced credentialed facilitators.
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