Welcome to the first post of The Raft Project’s On Board series. In these selections, I am pleased to introduce different voices into this project’s ongoing conversation on wholeness. May these perspectives and mediums add continued inspiration, insight, and meaningful reflection.
Any words in italics are my own, in the interest of centering the voice of the featured author. An introduction is available at the end of the post.
Break Again
After your home’s gone there remains a stamp in the ground where your soul once stood.
What do you pick up from the rubble of the ruined house? What do you lift to your chest like a precious piece of what was? And how, if possible, do you make of it what will be?
There is room for praising war. For how it levels us into the ground of our common humanity, from which we might wake stunned, remembering again who we are; one lonely species traversing the endless dark sky, suspended by the light between grief and despair. What else is there to say?
Everything worth loving breaks. Everything worthy of praise supplicates our tired knees to the dirt, our tongue to the sound of its arising quiver. How all things dance. How all things dance their way towards restoration. The brokenness of this world is cause for celebration. How else will we realize that we are each other if not for that tenderness which joins our suffering? How else does love come into view if not for the ruptured spaces between things?
You’ve been broken, and so have I. It doesn’t matter how, only that we have. Let the story of your breaking wash with history. Pay attention here, instead. Sure all things die, but tell me what brought you alive again. Tell me what revived your bereaved heart? Tell me how water lifted again to your lips from your mother’s cupped hands, and what it felt like to admit your needs. Redemption doesn’t have to be violent, just kind. Anyway, I cannot redeem my pain so long as yours stands exposed. I cannot fully restore so long as you still seek. And though we’ll continue like this – breaking, mending, and breaking again – we can at last find solace in each other.
So when you break I’ll spill a river from my tongue into your eyes, and when I break you’ll wrap your heart around my wounds, and when the earth breaks we’ll sing and dance her back into wholeness.
This is the narrative, the story, the pulse; we fall, then stand. We forget, then wake. We break, then mend, and then we break again.
Moudi’s words feel like an exhale to me-a reminder that the journey towards being whole is more spacious than perfection, more flexible than being upright. We do not have to be put together in order to seek fullness in our lives. We are all carrying hurts, worries, insecurities-there is relief to be found in placing them in each other’s open hands.
True courage to live in this world comes from vulnerability. When we acknowledge that our lives depend on each other, that our wholeness includes the wellbeing of all, we step out of isolation and into the heart of life itself. This heart will break and heal a thousand times over-but it’s a heart that beats truly. There’s enough space here for us to acknowledge what hurts, to love between that hurting-and commit to that love with even greater resolve.
Our Passing Existence
everything passes, everything changes - Bob Dylan
What I find precious is what I know to be brief. The seconds of breath that compose a cycle, the purple lilies climbing up the trellis outside the front door of my rented home, the curry I cooked and shared with my Buddhist Turkish neighbor. They say that in five billion years, the sun, in the center of this solar system, will run out of hydrogen. The Earth will grow cold by then, its geography unrecognizable, languaged by its slow separation. Everything passes, everything changes. Not just our sprouting lives which gasp for maybe a hundred years across canyons of dying stars, but also the taken for granted memories we assume will outlive us, by a lineage of seconds; the lover I greet daily arriving into my arms, the seemingly long stretch of war’s elegy, this obedient heart I claim as mine. To love you must already grieve. I keep praying that we may wake to the dirge of our passing existence. So possible and sad, so beautiful and real, so abundant with greed, so forgivable, so green. The glistening sun still singing. Determined to step into the eternal here.
About
Hi everyone. My name is Moudi Sbeity. I am a Lebanese-American author, poet, and transpersonal psychotherapist. I was born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, but moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, I founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by the New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” I was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. I am also a person who stutters, and feel passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. Growing up stuttering helped cultivate my fascination with the creationary power of speech and language, and the importance of being honest and intentional with words. My writing focuses on themes of language, war, belonging, queer identities, and narrative, all pointing towards the possibility of justice and liberation through a spiritual framework of compassion, forgiveness, and awe. Central to my work is the question of what it means to be alive together in an impermanent world, and so gratitude, and the necessity of beauty. I have two books coming out next year; A poetry collection titled Want A World (Fernwood Press, 2026), and a memoir, Habibi Means Beloved (University of Utah Press), that touches on themes of sufism, queerness, and belonging.
More of Moudi:
On Substack: Habibi Means Beloved
Instagram: @moudi.sbeity for poetry and updates regarding future publications
A recent interview with Moudi on his experience of the intersections between grief and poetry: