About

My name is Natalie; I live in New York City. I work as a researcher and financial analyst in the finance industry, although was formally trained as a writer and fine artist. I became muslim through a marriage, created tethers in separate cultures, and have spent the balance of my adult life between two very disparate worlds, often traveling as an obligation towards my profession; self-mandated to be culturally fluid and as religiously observant as possible.

I trust in an overriding sense behind the universe. I’ve learned from experience to look for grace and for truths that reveal themselves between the cracks in my ability to see and hear what is important. Faith as a whole encompasses and blesses human vulnerability: it took time, even after I had apprehended this idea intellectually, before I thoroughly internalized its implications in my own life.

The perfectionist in me is strong, and at first I approached spiritual challenge as I had approached, say, negative mathematics. But gradually, I have been able to understand life, like faith, as paradoxical, most effective when it incorporates what is broken rather than denying or curing it. 

Quiet and submission born of intellectual fatigue have been the beginnings of wisdom for me; here I only try to capture my developing vocabularies of sense and wonder.