Historically, Nowruz (Now meaning: new, ruz meaning day) marks the beginning of spring and the new year in the Persian calendar. It has been celebrated more than 3000 years and symbolizes the victory of light and spring over darkness and winter. It is when the earth begins again, and when people hope that life can renew itself.
“when people hope that life can renew itself”. Now It feels more personal and close than ever.
On the surface, Nowruz looks simple, right? People prepare for the new year and slowly transform their homes and surroundings. Everything becomes colorful. People clean their home from one month earlier, go shopping, gather with family and friends, prepare traditional foods, and set a table filled with symbolic objects representing life, renewal, patience, and hope. In the end, it’s a celebration of beginnings. Celebration of renewal.
At least, this is how I felt about Nowruz and how it looked like when I was a kid. Lately, however, it has been difficult to think about renewal.
Hejmo is planning to hold a gathering for Nowruz on March 24th. I have been thinking about that day more often than I thought. Do I have the capacity to be there? Would it exhaust me? Am I avoiding it out of fear? Or could it be something else entirely, an opening to reconnect with people from my community? Perhaps even a small step toward healing?
I honestly don’t know.
These days, as you know, my country, Iran, is going through more than I know how to hold. I wake up each morning with the same quiet panic already waiting for me, as if the day had begun long before I opened my eyes. My heart is racing before I even remember why. I try to focus on ordinary things like cooking, taking care of my home, doing the small chores that make up a day. For a brief moment it almost works. Then I read the news. The terrible news. And something inside me collapses again. There are mornings when the weight of it makes me wonder how people continue to live as if life were still proceeding normally.
Sometimes I try to escape it, to numb myself with distractions, anything that might interrupt the endless stream of devastation. But even that small attempt of self-preservation brings its own guilt. I feel ashamed for looking away, ashamed for not reading every story, for not fully witnessing every life that has been lost. It feels as if I am watching the slow destruction of my own country from a painful distance, close enough to feel every tremor but powerless to change its course. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to grow up in a place where war and political struggle are distant headlines rather than daily realities. A place where people can read the news for a few minutes and then continue their day. When I think twice, I realize how ignorant I am. That suffering is never truly distant. At the end of the day, there isn’t a single thing in this world completely irrelevant to me. The same goes for others.
Somewhere along the way I stopped talking about these things with my friends. Not because they do not care, but because the words themselves have become too fragile. There is something unbearable about carrying the most important grief of your life and realizing you cannot place it safely in the hands of the people closest to you. The loneliness of that realization is difficult to explain. Even the smallest disagreement, the faintest controversial remark, can make me feel like the ground disappeared under my feet. It’s as though every sentence now carries a hidden edge, ready to cut deeply if one isn’t careful. Every word feels like it might threaten something essential; my sense of safety, the survival of my country, the fragile lives of people still living in Iran.
And yet I keep reminding myself that in moments like these, what we need most is connection. Not the kind that fills silence, but the kind that allows people to sit with one another in the presence of pain. Somehow we must learn to hold each other through what we are living, through the pain, to let our grief flow toward one another rather than harden into silence. But if I am honest, the thought of that kind of closeness terrifies me. I’m afraid of what might happen when we finally begin to speak. What if the space we hope will allow us to reflect and remember together becomes something else entirely, a chain reaction of wounds reopening, a room filled with echoes of our own unresolved traumas that never had a chance to heal? Even the mere thought of it makes my entire body tremble with fear.
However, everything I have learned until now keeps reminding me of a simple truth: people who endure the most unimaginable hardships also need the greatest sense of safety and connection. But what kind of safety do I need? What kind of safety can we offer to one other? Safety as “protect me from danger and shield me from pain” or the kind André Aciman describes: “What is happening right now and what lies ahead is going to be very difficult. Fear not. It will come. Right now you may not want to feel anything. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame or guilt, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Just remember: I am here”
My thoughts circle back to Nowruz again.
What is Nowruz really? How can I take refuge in Nowruz for safety? Is it strong enough to hold me, to hold us? What makes me wonder is how Nowruz has endured hardship and change for thousands of years. It has outlived empires rising and falling, wars, invasions, destruction, genocides, revolutions, cultural suppression, poverty and every other calamity you can think of humanity has ever created. It survived humanity’s most brutal and darkest periods. It waited for the moment when winter gave way to spring.
How has it survived all of this? If Nowruz has lived through centuries of suffering and upheaval, what does it ask from us today when we face our own struggles?
The longer I live, the more I realize that its endurance tells a deeper story. Nowruz is not just about new beginnings. It’s something far more fragile and far more resilient within human life itself.
It’s a bit unfair to not give credit to the people who tried to keep Nowruz alive. For me, Nowruz is an example of humanity’s effort and resilience. Nowruz did not survive on its own. It was held, protected, repeated, year after year, by those who refused to let it disappear. Perhaps the answer lies in the way Nowruz has always existed, not as a monument or a tradition, but as a pattern. Perhaps, it’s about continuity. It’s about people choosing to hold onto something, hold onto each other to continue.
I imagine the relationship between humanity and Nowruz like the weaving of a carpet. Perhaps Nowruz is the strong weft we need for humanity’s intricate and fragile existence and we, humans, are the warp holding Nowruz together. My relationship with Nowruz exists through others. And perhaps our relationship with one another exist through the connection Nowruz creates. We are like thousands of threads woven together, when each generation adds a small strand of continuity and hope. Every generation weaves its own joy, sadness, struggles and dreams into the pattern. Strands of life. That’s how we make this beautiful and resilient carpet. This is how Nowruz has survived all these years.
Not because the world has ever been peaceful.
But because people, even in their darkest moments, kept weaving. It’s an act of continuity. So perhaps the question is not what Nowruz is. But what we choose to do with it.
So, what kind of pattern do we want to continue weaving together this year and the years after?
Thread by thread.