Here on Turtle Island, we are on the heels of Freedom's Eve/Watch Night, commonly known as New Year's Eve, and Heartbreak Day, also known as New Year's Day.
For the past two nights, I've hugged my children tightly in lingering embraces and held them without the looming fears of forced separation consuming me.
For the past two nights, I've soaked in hot baths, inhaling warm clouds of steam floating off the surface of waters fragranced with cedarwood, vetiver, and sandalwood notes.
In these waters, I've felt grief and hope and offered these feelings toward the co-regulation of collective ancestral nervous systems alongside my own. In these waters, I returned to the we that came before, the we that endures. In these waters, I held some of the last words my grandma Rita wrote me, turning them over in my mind like a spell, reciting them like a mantra.."slow down and take a breath."
I took a breath.
We took a breath.
I took several breaths.
We took several breaths and engaged in a chorus of breathing across generations.
This chorus of breathing felt far more generative than any resolution I could craft because, unlike my former resolutions, these breaths led me back to the self of my current reality. This breathing chorus led me back to an ecological self woven into vast ancestral ecosystems and lineages of love with a strong sense of belonging.
This friend has been my offering to greet the new year, engaging the ritual practice of remembering the histories of Freedom's Eves/Watch Nights and Heartbreak Days past. Creating space to honor the past and the partially healed version of reality, we exist and persist within. A version of reality where we can exercise greater agency over our bodies while avoiding the fates of the auction blocks we once knew, a version of reality where there is still so much more healing to do amid the deep suffering that is companioning the profound beauty of aliveness.
In lieu of setting resolutions toward a future version of me, we are doing what feels most generative in these holy days. We are pausing in the liminal space between endings and beginnings.
We are breathing, feeling, co-regulating, dreaming, and remembering that the me of the future is not made possible through resolutions I craft as an individual but through the collective and relational ecologies of my current reality, the larger we.
What feels most generative in these holy days for you? How are you meeting the liminal space between endings and beginnings?
In curiosity & hope,
Tamira
PS Many thanks to Alexis Pauline Gumbs for the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus and to Octavia Raheem for the medicine on the liminal space.
