Weathering, Deeply
New Moon Variations
Beloved, the snow on Hunter Mountain was barely visible this morning as my friend H and I rolled through the back roads to The Mae House. The trees hung heavy, whiting out everything below, behind, and above us. The salt barely lasted a few hours before the fluff packed again. By the time I reached the house, I was enamored by the anxiousness that did not arrive, nor by the instant peace (which may be a result of anxiousness). Things felt imperfectly normal in their own capable dysfunction. I have been dealing with a series of things that bear no burden worth mentioning. Besides, the last few days we spent celebrating R’s birthday with her old friends. More than celebrating, it was nearly 24 hours of surprise, and I am thankful for the teenage spirit, as I wailed and jubilated at being around them. It was about her, but putting it together and being there, and even reaching out to their moms/my friends to make it happen prior, allowed me earned joy I could not have counted. I fear I have done something right.
I digress, the kids aren’t with me upstate, but it felt good to be in the mental and emotional arms of a friend. Maybe it’s the new moon, but as I unwind this evening, I see how necessary these days—Friday, Saturday, Sunday—have been. On Friday a friend said, “teaching lights you up!” they are accurate.
The goal for a New Moon is to get “clearer about your long-term plan.” As I sit here and write to you, I am thinking about that potency—the thing that is hard to describe—but I am moving towards anyway. I hope the same for you.
There are just two spots left in the Deep Winter virtual storytelling course, and we begin next Saturday, January 24th. You do not have to be a writer to join us. Just someone who can put words down, meditate, and wants to connect to craft, memory, and space to shape both meaning and healing.
Ready? Claim your spot here (or email me a question)- we begin January 24.
P.S If you aren’t that familiar with the workshop (or mine that covers the above) I curated a newsletter issue for Dossier Magazine that came out today exploring Jamaica, land, memory, and diaspora as a love letter to Jamaica. It includes notable stays, charities that are providing support, lesser known landscapes and a cassava farm. Plus works by various photographers who I admire. A snippet of my essay that opens the letter below and subscribe here.
With Love,
L
I have only visited Jamaica in my dreams. It is a place with a name so familiar that visiting it seems almost inconceivable. But I travel the world in search of places that remind me of a place I have never been: vegan Jamaican spots in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood or Jah Jah By Le Tricycle, a restaurant in Paris. And in the wee hours of the morning, I move my body to the songs of The Wailers and Sister Nancy in some Brooklyn club. “You do not know Jamaica until you’ve been,” I’ve heard. But I feel it as if I’ve always felt it.
In the summer of 2023, a DNA test traced my origins to West Africa and, surprisingly, Jamaica. Growing up with a father who migrated to the U.S. from Panama, I held fragments of his story, as writers often do, especially in the wake of his death, when memory blends with lore — that was until a trip to Panama this past spring, where, amid the blaring sounds of reggaeton and frying plátanos, I was invited to better understand the threads of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora:
In the last decades of the 19th century, tens of thousands of migrants from British Caribbean islands, like Jamaica and Barbados, poured into Panama to work on the American-controlled canal project. In the aftermath of British emancipation in the Caribbean, the adult children of the formerly enslaved often faced low wages and scarce farmland. Drawn to job opportunities around the Caribbean and Central America, they departed their island homes in waves. Many hopped from one country to another. By the time the Americans took control of the canal project in 1904, Afro-Caribbean migrants made up the bulk of the workforce.
As I get older, this story unfurls layer by layer, generations from where it started.