Down Along the Same Stream

A note on Berkana’s New Section

Namaste Friends,

Over the last four years since I began Berkana, it has held space for many conversations and thoughts. I had no clear vision or niche in mind when I started writing because I never meant for Berkana to be about one specific thing. Yet it always leaned toward stories obscured by the tides of time.

There was a vague, self-effacing pressure I created for myself to swim through the ocean of voices I was narrating and find my own. In that way, Berkana has remained, and still is, a writer’s search for self and meaning in a world constantly overcompensating through personal achievement.

I think the point of writing is never being satisfied with knowing enough. The hunger for stories is existential in a writer and perhaps what makes a worthy one.

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In recent years, I have found myself drawn to subjects I was not initially equipped to hold when Berkana began. The world we inhabit now rarely offers stability. To ponder, to doubt, to question, and to grieve at once feels inevitable. So a new section arises naturally, following the evolution of my voice and understanding.

So far, Berkana has moved through themes of post-colonialism (mostly subaltern), intergenerational grief caused by war and displacement, the revival of the archetypal feminine as a means of patriarchal subversion, and the self-cannibalised world created by human obstinacy; destructive war, greed, ego, consumerism, and accumulation. And antithesis to it all.

Lately, I have naturally branched into more personal territories: grief, loss, loneliness, and the understanding of impermanence and interbeing. I began to see how the loss of ecology mirrors the loss of the sacred, how overconsumption and extractive economies have erased ancestral ways of life and the ecotheological wisdom once embedded in them.

I am perhaps quietly becoming a post-capitalist renegade, listening to the vanishing worlds. This may read as a departure from the empire of consumption toward something older, slower, truer. I want to invite you into this world that is opening inside me, reaching outward like tentacles of hope.

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My new subsection, Ecology of Grief, traverses these new horizons of inner and outer life shaped by the world I inhabit. The earlier themes of grief, colonial memory, displacement, feminine archetypes are still going to linger because the earlier inquiries are roots, and the new subsection is the branching that had to happen once those roots mature. I don’t want this to sound like I am losing my childlike curiosity or faith in humanity, or becoming a hardened sceptic. On the contrary, this is my way of relinquishing the lens of cultural conformity and cynicism to revive a sense of wonder, joy, magique, and connection through the world of deep ecology.

Recognizing nature as animate and sacred might be among the few nascent answers we have to the modern planetary crisis. I invite you to explore these possibilities with me. It begins, as always, with our conversations.