It’s April 2026.

A ceasefire is in place between the US and Iran while they negotiate what will ultimately be the best case scenario for the former. A ceasefire is not in place in Lebanon where 10 bombs went off simultaneously within 10 minutes all across the country last week. A ceasefire is not in place in our hearts. Those are very much on fire.

I’ve never lived in Lebanon, but I feel with my country like I’ve always been there. Like I’ve known nothing else, although I’ve always known something else. I’m drawn to it in ways I can’t quite explain.

I owe that feeling entirely to my dad. It all comes back to him and his love for his land, especially that little piece of it he owns in the village he’s from in the North of Lebanon. He designed it to be 20% house, 80% garden, intentionally. When you first walk in, you couldn’t tell there’s a house in there. The land takes supremacy. We live with the land; the land doesn’t live with us.

On that eighty percent lies acres as far as the eye can see and about 150 shades of green. Every corner was conceived to tell a story. The lemon garden for seasonal lunches celebrating the land’s most versatile fruit. The surrounding farmland, home to a switching roster of tenants depending on the season: chilis, pomegranates, wild za’atar, potatoes, leef, oranges, aubergines, pomelos.

The cedar forest to remind you of what the land symbolizes: rootedness, majesty, longevity. The olive grove. Kilometers of it. Producing the finest olives, soaps and a perfect shade of liquid gold.

Every time we visited, whether a month had passed or 12, my dad would give us the grand tour. Hands behind his back, head held high, he would tell us those stories over and over again. You would think it would get repetitive, but when you realize the source of it is profound pride, you take it in as many times as necessary. Every single tour was my dad’s attempt at passing something down: a sense of self, place, identity and belonging; a sense that: this land is very much yours too.

Thirty years later, I ask myself can you really inherit a homeland?

For the diaspora, it’s a question that reigns supreme. For the millions of us living outside the motherland, we know the land only from what our parents have told us about it – their memory of it – and the rituals they pass down.

For Chef Khalid Walid, as for many of us, those memories and rituals start and end in the kitchen. As a kid, he would linger in the kitchen doorway watching his mother and grandmother at work with absolute fascination. Mloukhiyyeh leaves stirred into a pot of chicken stock that had been simmering on the stove for hours. A maqloubeh flipped effortlessly, revealing layers of tender eggplant, spiced rice, golden chicken and steam rising in fragrant curls. Dozens of wara’ enab leaves rolled one by one, each packed with lemony rice, stacked in neat rows, waiting their turn in the pot.

He sat there as a spectator, listening to the stories they told as they waited for the stock to simmer. The story of msakhan, for instance. A Palestinian dish widely misunderstood to be about chicken, when the real protagonist is invisible, happening quietly in the background, making up a third of the dish: the olive oil. How the farmers would celebrate the first press of the season by soaking taboon bread in that fresh, unfiltered, peppery oil, layering it with wild sumac and slow-cooked onions, the chicken almost incidental on top.

He learned the geography of his motherland through knowing where ingredients come from. Olives from Jenin and Nablus. Za’atar and sumac from the wild hillsides. Oranges from Jaffa. Watermelons from Jenin to Gaza. Soap and knafeh from Nablus. Fish from Gaza. Grapes and raisins from Hebron. Every ingredient is a coordinate and every dish a map of a place that exists vividly in Khalid’s mind.

The thing about inheriting a homeland you’ve never experienced is that it exists in your imagination. Detached from reality, it becomes, in many ways, a curse. The more our minds resort to simulated versions of the world, the more dissatisfied we become with the real one. For those of us in the diaspora, think about how many times reality has collided with the imaginary version of our homelands, and how hard those collisions have been. Our entire lives have been a series of disappointments.

Our parents carry a different version of the same curse. Their memory is physical; they’ve touched, smelled, seen, lived the land. Their nostalgia has edges. They knew it whole and are watching it break over and over again, with the fear that it may never go back to what it used to be, and that their children will never experience it the way they have. That grief is its own kind of unbearable.

Memory can only get us so far before it becomes a miserable nostalgia. Sweet but static. A longing that loops in on itself. It’s when we act on it that it can become productive, transforming into something that roots you and brings into sharp focus everything you value and everything you want to bring to the world. Therein lies the true power of nostalgia.

I do believe our generation has the antidote. Carrying our curse is one thing, carrying our parents’ too is another. We owe them the debt of preservation or reassurance that what they handed us won’t die with the distance–that the homeland will outlast them, and us, because we refused to let it become only memory.

For Chef Khalid, that takes many forms. His supper club, Come with to Falasteen, is a tribute to his mother, grandmother and Palestinian food. I’ve had the privilege of attending one and witnessing the level of detail and care that goes into every single thing, from the rotation of the forks all the way to the richness of his cooking. It is obvious this is personal.

If love is in the details, Chef Khalid is infatuated.

Khalid is doing more than honoring Palestine’s rich culinary past. He is writing its future. His maqloubeh arrives with slow-cooked lamb necks, sweet fried eggplants and toasted nuts. He sprinkles Gazan dugga and Palestinian olive oil over his version of a caprese: Uzbek tomatoes, Maldon salt, buffalo stracciatella. His wara’ enab swims in a tamarind and raspberry-infused pomegranate molasses. And the star of the table, my personal favorite: his signature msakhan rolls, for which no words are adequate.

In a world that keeps trying to relegate Palestine to the past tense, Khalid insists on its future.

Watching him cook, my wonder becomes wander.

You can inherit a homeland. Not the way you inherit land or money as something handed to you whole with a title deed and a signature, but the way you inherit a language, or a way of moving through the world or the pride in a man’s eyes as he walks his olive grove with his hands behind his back. You inherit it through the stories told over a simmering pot, through knowing where ingredients come from and especially, through the act of carrying it forward.

My father gave me Lebanon the same way Khalid’s mother and teta gave him Palestine: as a place to embody, carry and insist on.

It’s May 2nd 1973 in Beirut.

One of those signature afternoons in the Lebanese capital: blue skies mirrored in blue waters, the sound of waves crashing the rocks, warm rays of that infamous Mediterranean sun, an animated spread of people across the shore, smoking shisha, playing tawle, swimming, with nothing but time on their hands.

Among them was Kamal Helou’s mother, 9-months pregnant, and his 3-year-old brother. Just as they were settling into the afternoon, bullets pierced through that quintessential Beirut afternoon. She grabbed her things, her three-year-old and made a run for it. When she reached safety, her second son, Kamal, decided it was time to come into the world.

Lebanon has a way of making its good times feel like the promise, and its bad times feel like a betrayal of that promise. For a while, the Helous absorbed both… until they couldn’t anymore.

It’s 1984. Beirut has become a city of shifting frontlines, militia checkpoints and a hollowed-out government. Foreign powers had long been playing their hand in the background, and ordinary Lebanese life had learned to navigate around it all, like water finding its way around stone. Kamal is eleven, walking fifty meters from a swimming pool, easy and unhurried, when the ground around him erupts from the impact of missiles. Someone pulls him to safety. He goes, shaking off the chlorine from his swim, but not the shock of what had happened.

The civil war had grown darker, and what felt like something happening in the background suddenly arrived to the Helou’s door. Kamal’s father was victim of a failed kidnapping attempt.

There it was, the breaking point.

His father looked at his family, the city he loved and the life he had tried to build inside a country that kept betraying its promise and made the difficult decision to leave. Destination: the United States.

It was there, in the strange peace of a country that wasn’t his, that Kamal finally heard the question his childhood had been asking all along: what possesses people to choose violence? And can peace, genuinely, be learned?

He found his way toward the answer the way most seekers do, through a series of doors that kept opening onto larger rooms. Philosophy first, in university, where he discovered that his question had been asked by others before him, across centuries and continents.

It was his older brother who first put karate in front of him, just as something to try. Kamal, however, had a way of going all the way into things, and karate had its own way of revealing itself differently the deeper you went. What looked from the outside like controlled violence was, on the inside, something else entirely: a philosophy lived through the body; a way of meeting force without becoming it. The more he practiced, the more he felt the question he had carried in his suitcase from Beirut gaining weight.

The tipping point came in 2000. Masao Kagawa, a Japanese Karate master, came to give a workshop at Kyle’s dojo in the United States. He watched him move, and saw more than a performance of martial arts. He saw a way of being - precise, grounded, wholly present - that felt like the closest thing to an answer Kyle had ever seen with his own eyes.

He had to go to the source.

Japan was everything he had hoped for and simultaneously, nothing he was prepared for.

The Instructor Training Program at the Japan Karate Shoto Federation (JKS) in Tokyo was infamous for a reason: days that started before dawn and ended when the body couldn’t handle any more; a culture of mastery so uncompromising it left little room for doubt. Kamal was the only non-Japanese to have ever entered the program, and the only one, to this day, to have completed it. It took him 3 years, one more than the standard, and included a failed graduation exam, then a second attempt, then a third, with the possibility of another 6 months of training hanging over him each time. He passed on the third try.

Karate answered his query in the daily, grinding, unromantic work of choosing discipline over impulse, presence over reaction, mastery over force. Every morning before dawn, every failed exam, every extra day of training was, in its own way, an answer: peace is not the absence of conflict. It is something you build, deliberately, within yourself, one day at a time.

What kept him going, he says, was a habit he had developed of looking himself in the mirror and imagining the man he would be 5 years from now. The training was the price to pay to become that man.

But there was something else. The shakuhachi.1

They first met on TV; its evocative sound standing out in his favorite show from his childhood: Grendizer. They met again years later in a music shop where he lived in the US State of Philadelphia. The bamboo flute sat in his hands making no sound at all for months, until he slowly began to understand how to find sound inside it. When he packed his bag for Japan, he took it with him and it was there, in the gaps between the intensity of training, that the instrument revealed its true purpose: meditation.

If karate taught him that peace was something you built through discipline, the shakuhachi taught him that peace was also something you surrendered to; that there was a kind of stillness available to those willing to let go and simply breathe.

On the days when the training had taken everything, when Kyle’s body ached, his will thinned and Japan felt very far from Beirut and Beirut felt very far from any kind of answer, he would pick up the Shakuhachi and play. And let me tell you, he plays like someone who’s played nothing else, like it’s his right hand, totally synced to the rhythm of his breath and his heart.

It would take him 22 years to complete his shakuhachi training. Two decades of practice and studies, eventually learning to make the instrument itself from raw bamboo, which he does in his apartment in Dubai. In 2019, he received his master’s license and with it, a name given to him by his Japanese master. Cho Mei. Cho meaning to seek, and Mei meaning friendship. The friendly seeker; the seeker of friendship. A Lebanese boy born under the bullets who spent fifty years seeking harmony honorarily named after the thesis of his life.

He came to Dubai in 2022 the same way his father had once come to America, carrying everything that mattered and leaving behind a country that had, once again, betrayed its promise. Lebanon’s economic collapse made it impossible to sustain his dojos2 there. So he packed his karate, his flutes, and started over.

He teaches children at his academy, Harmony Shotokan3 Karate. Harmony; Cho Wa. The same root as his name. What he teaches them has very little to do with fighting and everything to do with what fighting taught him: perseverance, humility, empathy, self-control, tolerance, respect. The principles of nonviolent conflict resolution, delivered through the most disciplined physical practice he knows. A generation of children in Dubai learning, through their bodies, that there is another way.

His life’s answer to his life’s question.

—

I think about all of this as I sit in his apartment, surrounded by a universe of shakuhachis, and then… he plays. The sound of the flute is difficult to describe. It’s not something you hear, but something you feel settling deep within you. If peace had a soundtrack, the shakuhachi was its lead instrument.

I don’t know if peace can be learned, but I know that I am sitting across from a man who learned it. A man who carried a question born in the noise of Beirut all the way to the silence of Japan and back, and who is now passing the answer on—one child, one breath, one note at a time.