hello, dear readers.
today’s post is cut and stitch of separate posts that were hanging out in my drafts. In the spirit of summer vacation (and also because I am most definitely one who is outside.) I decided to join them together in an essayette quilt. enjoy ❤️
February 2024 / Joshua Tree
Back in 2022 I discovered that I am a continual victim of the Black Girl Boredom. I am its constant victim and its continual failure (or maybe success story?) because I never commit. Seeking a new degree? Stop after a google search. Thinking of changing my career? Stop after sending my resume to 7-10 jobs and receiving 7-10 rejections. The cycle continues until a new situation of spaciousness occurred in my life.
I confess that my spaciousness isn’t random and my boredom is somewhat mislabeled. I am bored because I am heartbroken and too scared to traverse the vast landscape of healing. Instead, I simply wade in the waters where self-loathing and wonder intermingle like the ways freshwater greets the seascape. I’ve had my fill of loathing and heartache in these early months 2024. I am wise enough to not name what was lost and shattered enough to tell you there is a fate worse than loneliness. It’s the work of confronting the demons that got us here. Confronting our inner-demons can lead us to we recognize how they’re journeying through their own road to heaven.1
you are the thing i am most grateful for all bodies know how to heal themselves given enough time all demons carry a map of heaven and their scars beneath the skin of every history2
It was back in 2023 when I listened to an episode of Balanced Black Girl about how having hobbies is an important part of our healing journeys. Hobbies?! I thought, that topic seems so basic!
Reader, I was wrong.
Within the first 10 minutes Les read me up and down. She had me reconsidering my life, memories, and outcomes. There are times when we sit in the church pews and feel the proverbial burn of conviction which is usually a hot plate of judgement dramatically spilled on your resolve without any permission granted. Add a biscuit and call it a meal for the soul. What got me good was how she made plain what I couldn’t grasp: achievement doesn’t cure your discomfort with spaciousness. It only steels your resolve. Being both foolish and stubborn I made the decision to not be the thief who steels from myself in the dark nights of my soul. I’ll have hobbies, damnit. Because I’m a woman of color who deserves to enjoy time with herself without the demands or expectations of a society who loves to exploit our physical, emotional, and spiritual labor.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F46b44957-c901-4d1f-a442-e6086fe646d6_4032x3024.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6d2779b1-b25a-4a7e-95da-924dedfba894_4032x3024.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9418a939-51a1-41b0-a50e-c9f70a9f8cd7_4032x3024.jpeg)
Fast forward to now (February 2024) and our family taking our fourth camping trip since I made the resolution to have hobbies. I’ve tried a lot, spent money on some of them, spent too much money on a few, and realized that my hobby is being outside. Give me a tent, a fire, the stars, and some fancy-yet-very-reasonable camping things — I will be in my joy.
I walked over to the fire after putting our kids to bed and watched the stars. Joshua Tree National Park is my favorite place to go stargazing. The sky is blue-black and the nights are (usually) clear. You will find yourself communing with the terrible giant-God-hybrid Orion who faces the Ethiopian Queen Cassiopeia and hides from the scorpion assassin hired by Gaia to protect the safety of the planet (there’s a lot of relevancy to today’s culture found in the relationships of these three constellations). But on this night I stared at a ring surrounding the moon. It was the type of beauty that made your eyes think it could hear an angels song. I took a picture of it then went to sleep. in the morning, I realized this halo around the moon was moonbow. (also known as a moon halo.) It’s a rare rainbow that happens at nighttime.
How lucky was I that I got to see a rarity who shone in the loneliness of the night, accessorizing herself in a staggering darkness. She was able to do what I could not do in the frightful spaciousness within my boredom. She existed, not for the sake of accomplishment, but for herself. A glowing miracle embraced by the blue-black skin of the deepest night.
March 2024 / Aptos
I spent a week in a tree house immersed in the endless forest fogginess. Did you know the most amazing thing about being in a cloud is that we don’t know we’re in it? We simply look around and get discourages because if we simply moved 50 yards ahead we’d be surrounded by fluff and mystery. The discouragement is false, because you never know that you’re in a cloud. To know, you must breathe in the thick watery air and let your soul settle into what is unseen. My treehouse was in a cloud. It was the place where the dreams of my inner child met with the trusting wonder my adult self needed to receive. A place of rest. Every tired woman who existed within me was gently embraced by the loving rhythms of nature and held up by the deeply loving indigenous ways of my ancestors.
It was so magical that I can barely believe I actually lived through this experience. We woke up joining the birds for morning prayers and journaling to the light of dawn. During the day we felt our little home sway gently alongside the trees. We went on sunset walks through the trails and listened to the wind tell their stories. Deep in the evening we lay in the hammock taking turns moonbathing to calm our bodies and opens our hearts to rest. For one short week I was given space to detox from life and learned to live to the rhythm of nature. It was… wild.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F06c9bc73-a0cb-4852-bf7b-440adf921413_4032x3024.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F77f72ae3-610a-46f5-8b9a-236c579ac7d5_922x740.png)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7c850d4a-d5e5-42a4-8608-59f939557aaa_4032x3024.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa2be796-82fc-450e-a0c6-502d07407c70_4032x3024.jpeg)
I’m hesitant to use the term “wild” because I think I was taught to use it incorrectly. I used to believe that being wild meant that I was reckless, impulsive, selfish, and inattentive to the needs of myself and others. It was tied to manic pixie dream girls and their weird one dimensional “damsel in distress” and “save her from herself” characteristics made to perpetuate the cisgender hetero male fantasy of being the “real man” who is “in control” of everything around him. I’ve heard people use the saying, “stay wild” as an encouragement to trust my instincts and live as openly as capitalism would allow for a woman of color like me. When people encourage me to “stay wild” it felt like an admonition to be disconnected from myself in unsafe ways. This week reframed my relationship with wild. What if being wild isn’t about being a careless daredevil with one dimension?
encouraging me to “stay wild” felt like an admonition to be disconnected from myself in unsafe ways.
During this week in a tree house hidden in clouds, I decided to shift my relationship with the word “wild.” There is no recklessness in wild. Being wild is about living in connection with nature. There’s no loneliness here. How can you be lonely when the earth, your first grandmother, is always holding you? Being attune to the rhythm and flow of our siblings in creation. Wild is a dignity crafted from the unearthed traditions our ancestors left behind and pray for us to remember. To be wild is to be deeply affixed to the ways we live in ongoing reciprocal relationships with the past, present, and future of creation. There is no selfishness in being wild because it is a doorway to indigenous love which (I am learning) is the purest form of connection for it transcends every violence of colonization and allows us to partake in the miracle of remaining.
I desire to stay wild. I invite you into this lifestyle, too.
July 2024 / Big Sur
I was big mad before 9 am. Multiple buttons were pushed in one conversation and I might as well have had steam shooting forth from my head. My children never experienced their mommy in this way and I possessed the ability to be two people at once: I was seething in my anger and sad because it scared my kids. I knew I wasn’t okay to stay in the house with all this anger and these irrational thoughts surrounding me. I didn’t want my kids to have this model to become their core memory. I was duplicity at odds with herself. Do I stay mad? Do I release it in this house through screaming in pillows, doing push ups, having a pout that rivals a thizz face? What will my mothering look like if I walk around feeling like a hairline trigger? Or do I ignore the anger to nurture my children? Can I nurture my children with this reactionary offense festering inside me? I had no clear answer. So I prayed and did somatic practices to release my anger. Rage still held me so did the desire to nurture. Duplicity was my name, and this existence drew more energy from me. I was in this cycle of rage, worry, exhaustion, and shame. Rage gave energy to my exhaustion, worry used up my energy, and shame drained my life force. What a tangled cycle it was.
I decided the best thing to do was to go on an adventure. We’re 300 miles away from home and mommy is feeling triggered in a city that is new to us. The best choice I could reach to was to get us out of the house and return to the land.
I drove the kids to Big Sur where we could hike the bluffs, smell the flowers, and watch the waves crash. I let the older kids direct the hike while I held tightly to my three-year-old’s hand. (Hiking bluffs with a toddler is not for the faint of heart.) There were fields of flowers surrounding us and the lovely smell of coastal sage entered our noses, penetrating the blood brain barrier. This indigenous medicinal plant was freely offering itself to repair the rifts and tears that damaged my spirit. When I die, burry me under the coastal sage and let my body give nutrients back to the land who healed me.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa93112ac-2ecb-45b7-8c68-95accc2add89_3024x4032.heic)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa0230c8c-93f8-4724-b94f-afec32b69d2d_3024x4032.heic)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa0dd913f-318e-46a8-bff7-5378456973eb_3024x4032.heic)
After an hour of hiking the bluffs we climbed down to a clearing between two cliffs. It was lush with a spring of freshwater traveling to the ocean. As my children played amongst the plants and butterflies I realized that places like this are why people believe in fairies and why ancestors like Nick Gabaldón paddled an insane 12-miles to claim the liberation waves freely give us without the unnecessary confrontations of discrimination and racism. The land gives herself freely to heal and nurture us.
We followed my three-year-old who was following the path of the freshwater stream. As he climbed the rocks that were larger than him, I realized we were surrounded by greenery reaching heaven. The lush walls closed in on us and at their peak were blooming white calla lilies. Without realizing it, we found ourselves in calla lily valley.
More happened on this adventure. I’ll tell you about it another time. For now let us settle in on how the genius of my youngest child’s desire to explore further and our ability to trust in him that led us to this site of wonder. I wish I could tell you that my anger melted away, but it didn’t. I was still angry about the events that occurred earlier that morning… the anger wasn’t as important as being with my children in the morning mist and ocean spray surrounded by the these giant blooms facing the sun without hesitation. Anger can’t sustain me, but the land will.
Tell me something good.
- wrote this about hobbies: “You need that thing that you can do while your internal systems regulate and recover from the near constant state of panic and attack that these external systems want to keep us in. This is not escapism, this is crucial to our survival.” What are your hobbies? Which hobbies are holding you right now? Does it feel like escapism or survival?
What is your relationship with the word “wild”? Are you someone who wants to “stay wild” or do you find the statement taboo?
Tell me about a spontaneous adventure that healed and held you.
Write with me.
Check out my July First Fragments for writing prompts, classes, and opportunities for us to write together!
First Fragments
It’s unclear whether the demons want to reside in heaven or destroy it. All I know is that they carry a map as I do.
Thom, Kai Cheng. 2017. A Place Called No Homeland. “trauma is not sacred.” A Place Called No Homeland.
This looked and sounded so beautiful and peaceful. I'm full of envy but oh so happy you got to experience this!
"I’ll have hobbies, damnit." This is so me, determined to figure out how to have fun. Still trying to figure it out. Thanks for being a nature girl and writing about it so beautifully. You inspire me.