“I pledge to go the distance for my mom or loved one in the month of May by walking 52.4 miles in her honour.”
This June, if my mum was still alive she’s be 81 years young. She was put on this earth to mother. If she could, she would have had a house full of kids. She lived her life through the kids she birthed, fostered and adopted and the grand babies she got the chance to hold before she was taken from us far too soon.
Even though she died at the ripe young age of 57, in her life time she’d already gone twice the distance, twice as hard and given twice as much love, care and time.
This May, GirlTrek, the largest national health movement for Black women and girls, is hosting Mamathon 2023, a walking challenge, where women pledge to walk 52.4 miles (about 2.5 miles a day) during the month of May to honor their mother or a caregiver in their lives.
“Walk in honor of a woman in your life. Walk because you are a mom and want to honor your motherhood by doing something healthy for yourself. Invite your friends and family to participate with you. This is how we grow the movement and spread joy and healing to the Black women we love.” said T. Morgan Dixon, GirlTrek cofounder.
With this in mind and as my mission for May, I walked out today with my daughter. We covered nearly 2 miles, most of which was full of chit-chat and memories of my mum and childhood. We’ll walk again tomorrow.
My mum
Rain or shine, my mum would get ready each day and walk out to the village store or post office. Running errands, but she knew the value of moving her body. Even while overweight and arthritic, she managed to walk down and up the steep bank and steps, from and to home. She put in the effort to walk the mile or so and didn’t complain in the process.
Sometimes, I forget the lessons and wisdom she passed on to me through her practices rather than her tellings. I’m doing this challenge to honour my mum and involve my daughter also.
I’m doing this challenge because it’s healing through the bloodline. Because it’s a healthy tradition. Because it’s impossible to not be transformed by the end.
I’m not sure when my love affair with cherry blossom came into being. I’m not sure where I was when my heart began to swell at the mere beginning buds of cherry blossom on the trees. Bradford, where I was born and stayed until I was 10? Or Newcastle, where I enjoyed my formative years before escaping to London for my degree?
I’m not really sure when or where my deep appreciation and joy at seeing these puff balls of pinks or white or cerise came to be part of my being. I just know that I experience a child-like delight when I come across a tree in full cherry blossom bloom. My heart skips a beat and I’m jumping with glee, inside and outside, when cherry blossom comes into view. And the blossom is never here long enough for my liking.
Using the delicate pinks of cherry blossom, collaging with the images of cherry blossom in my visual journal, is my way of keeping the blooms alive, in my eyes and in my heart. Not just the sight of cherry blossom in my journal keeps these fragile blooms alive, but the feelings of joy and delight that they bring to my heart is kept alive too.
I created a special spread of cherry blossom for the BALTIC commission last year, that ended up being blown up from an A3 spread in a journal to an A0 poster size on a gallery space wall. In the middle of that spread is a Black woman smiling, almost dancing between the blossom, exuberating lush joy. This is me sharing my jubilation and love of cherry blossom with others.
This is my love letter to cherry blossom as well as giving thanks for the beauty of nature and how we are connected. How we are one.
From time to time, I’ve tried to keep a gratitude journal. I’ve read the research and heard the stories about expressing gratitude for your life and what is part of it, here and now. This is a great practice in order to be more present in your life as well as be happier.
I saw expressing gratitude and writing it down as just another thing to add to my to-do list mostly. I resented the time spent on it as as well as beating myself up for the times I missed a day or two. I felt like this was just another indication of me failing.
I think as part of my intentional healing journey of 2023 ( have I talked here about it?) I brought gratitude back into my day, or I’m trying to. Offering myself grace and compassion when there are times I forget to complete it some days, I allowed myself to start small.
Today, I am grateful for …
This is how I start each entry and I allow myself to just mark one thing I’m grateful for. One thing. One sentence. Most days it’s doable. Most days I remember. Some days there’s more than one think, more than one thing to be grateful for. But there are still some days I forget and the days run away from me. But I do not sweat it. I pick it back up when I remember.
I keep this little notebook with the image of Frida Kahlo on my bedside table. I love this little notebook. I love Frida Kahlo but I also love how I feel when I write in this book. I feel better. I feel present. I feel grateful for what I have, how I feel, what I experience. Fostering positive energy for the here and now rather than energy wasted on what I don’t have or want instead.
The research is right. Practicing gratitude does foster appreciation and happiness for the things and people in your life. Now. Simples.
Here are a few gratitude moments captured in this little book of gratitudes from the beginning of the year so far:
Today I am grateful for the reminder that I am loving, loved and loveable.
Today I am grateful for the time and space to create a vision board for the year ahead.
Today I am grateful for my body to be able to walk and get into the sea.
Today I am grateful for my lie in. For rest and sleep.
Today I am grateful for the opportunity to put things right .
Today I am grateful for the connections I am making, with myself and others.
Expect to see more posts about gratitude as I delve deeper into the practice and the effects it is having on my life. What contributions it is making to my healing journey?
Every year for the past 5 I’d say I’d spend time at the end of/beginning of the year to create a vision board of intentions and dreams.
I say this, for the past 5 years, except the last one. 2022 was the year I never set out my intentions, my dreams. I missed the window of magic, I felt, and just couldn’t muster the mojo to set things down.
I missed this road map, this visioning throughout the year. There were times during 2022, that I was questioning what I was doing and where I was going. But I realise now that I needed that low, down energy to heal and recover after the last two years of Covid. And it’s not over even now, but I know I have better coping and managing skills today.
So thinking about 2022, and my lack of motivation and direction, I knew when 2023 came around, my vision board practice was coming back. Not to get all productive on my arse but because I love to have this beauty pinned to my bedroom wall at the bottom of my bed and see it every day.
Vision Board, 2023
Having my vision board in plain sight, everyday, the first thing I see in the morn and the last thing at night, is a gift and blessing. I get to see and feel what I want to manifest within the present moment, each day. It’s not a bind in anyways, but it is a reminder and commitment to myself to love. Myself and others.
It brings me joy to see my vision board because it is a thing of beauty. I know everything on it has been placed with intention and love for self. With joy. And it’s not used as a to-do list of productivity and perfection. It is a beacon or siren to make sure I’m {being} in my life how my soul wants to be showing up in life for me first and foremost.
Vision Board, 2023
That’s why I call it a quiet Revolution. I’m revolting against the system, this White Supremacy Culture, from the inside out. I’m rejecting all those beliefs and practices and ways of being that have been implanted within me since being born into a system which indoctrinates us into being machines to the system. Where we repress our true selves to fit in and be accepted. Where we do not question or reject the system but uphold it and perpetuate it through our actions and attitudes towards others and ourselves.
Vision Board, 2023
So here I am sharing my vision board of 2023. Not as a ‘look at me, aren’t I clever’ kind of vibe. But to inspire. I’m always about sharing my practice to inspire. Last year I gave up early, without creating a vision board. Along with using excuse and excuse afterwards for not trying to create one.
I share with you mine so you might feel inspired to create one or not even a physical one but a space in your heart and mind for your intentions and dreams and ways of being. It’s never too late is my motto. Something I could have used last year, but some how couldn’t muster the energy to. But I think this might have been a demonstration of my lack of commitment to myself and my dreams last year and being content enough to just get by. I know I needed this time of rest in place to move onto 2023 with renewed energy and a massive intention to heal.
Swings and roundabouts. I just know everything sits better with me when I know I’m on a mission to heal from the inside out through this quiet revolution of a slow, listening, restful practice.
Where is this year going? It is moving fast. The time that is. I’m still knee deep in my SLOW practice and I’m loving it.
I know it’s getting to the point of going back out; of shifting my energies as I’m feeling a stirring. In my gut mostly. And an excitement fluttering in my chest. For what I do not know. But I’m happy to sit in/ with the feeling for now. Appreciating the joy it brings.
I know I’ve got certain privileges. To be able to turn my back on the world, on work commitments for the first three months of 2023 is a privilege. But I also want to make clear, that I worked my arse off at the back end of 2022 to be able to do this. I’m living frugally in order to reap the benefits of rest and self-care.
I’m so grateful for the time and space to rest and breathe deeply. As well as the capacity to dream and envision a future. I have much faith and trust in what the future will bring. I know I will have to fashion some happenings myself, work out some details and projects. But at the same time, I know that the Universe has a plan also. She’s got my back and I trust she will deliver what is best for me. It might not seem so at the time, and there may be challenges ahead. But I trust her, and I’m allowing my tender heart to mend.
I’ve mentioned before how I’m intentionally leaning into my healing journey. With social episodes each month released with The Earth Sea Love Podcast.
I’m just editing the next two instalments to drop next week and I created a quote for myself which I will share here to end.
My tender heart has been broken many times but, at the same time, I know my healing lives and breathes in the openness of my tender heart.
When I was teaching, I used to experience ‘Monday Morning Blues’. That dreaded feeling of going back to the grind after the weekend off. Going back to the bells and the timetables and the disruptive kids. One of the many reasons to leave the profession without a safety net in place, without anything lined up, was that I knew if I didn’t go then, I’d never get out. I was getting too comfortable, too used to the regular pay check at the end of each month, justifying the slog, the staying put within an environment that was slowly eating away at my soul.
I used to see cows outside my classroom window and I vowed not to become one of them; a cow put out to pasture, giving up on life and life giving up on them. I knew there was more to life that the 9-5 job, or as it was when teaching 7-7 job. I put my whole life, heart and soul into that job to the point of probably neglecting my child at the time. But I was after perfectionism, acceptance and recognition. I was defining my whole self -worth by how good or bad I was at teaching. And teaching shite I may add. Shite filled up with the words and opinions of mostly white dead men who probably didn’t think much of me being a Black woman.
I was duped into the belief that work was meant to be hard and difficult and long and mostly unrewarding. It was what we were put on the earth to do, to be. To work for most of of our lives for others, propping up the system and if we worked hard enough, we’d get time off at the end with a pension that would be taxed again. This is what I bought into and what was fed to me through family, education and society. To step out of this construction to pursue creativity, to do my own things and be my own boss was seen as weird, a risk, stupidity and misguided to say the least.
I knew how I felt. And I know how I feel. And even then I put a lot of store by how I felt. How I was uncomfortable in my own skin. How I felt a fraud. How I felt unbelonging and always striving for something that would never be mine. Acceptance. Whiteness. The Norm.
Now I don’t have ‘Monday Morning Blues’, because I don’t put that kind of pressure on my days, on my weekends, on my time. I pick and choose when to work or not. I try to have a 3 day week. Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday being the work days and the Monday and Friday flow into a long weekend.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not idle. I’ll always be practicing my creativity ( I prefer using practice to work). I don’t think I’ll ever retire because being creative is who I am. And when I reserve certain days of the week for outside commitments, ‘work’ the other days are mine to create, to rest, to dream, to plot, to {BE}. And I’m grateful for the circumstance to be able to {BE} this way. I’m also grateful to my younger self who wasn’t afraid to jump and believe and trust that a net would appear to catch her fall. Again and again.
I don’t remember when I gave up on myself being enough, being worthy.
I don’t remember when I gave myself away to others at the expense of not keeping any goodness for me.
I don’t remember when I started to hate on myself and wishing myself away, wishing myself into something or someone else. Anything else but this. Anything other than who I really am.
I don’t remember when I started to hide myself away became secretive and dishonest as a means of protection and advancement.
I don’t remember when I stopped being my own best friend and started to seek this relationship, this love and attention elsewhere.
I don’t remember when I betrayed myself by thinking that I was someone who didn’t deserve to be here, as someone worthy of love and happiness and joy.
I don’t remember when I started to listen to others, the outside world and stopped listening to my heart, to my own wisdom.
I don’t remember when I stopped just {being} instead of doing. When {being} was enough.
I don’t remember when I stoped paying attention to what lights me up, my wants and needs, what makes me smile.
I don’t remember when I stopped being a child and took the burdens of the world on to my little shoulders like they belonged there.
I don’t remember when I stopped being in love with myself and gave this love to others who were not deserving of my love, who could not see me as me.
I don’t remember when I began to think I needed other people to love me instead of me just loving on me.
I don’t remember when or how or why all this happened, I just feel it. And now, here I am trying to get back to me, to me loving on me, the most important treasure, lost.
This year, I’m being brave by saying ‘yes’ to the things that light me up from the inside out. This will help with gaining clarity around what I’m doing. The things that are worth doing are the things that bring me pure joy.
I’m being brave by putting my trust in myself. To get rid of the doubt and questioning of self and to trust that I’ve always got my best interests at heart.
I bravely offer myself grace instead of judgements, making peace with myself as I’m tired of the battle. Instead of fighting myself, my instincts and my best interests, I’m gonna be loving on myself at every opportunity.
What does this look like in practice? I don’t know. But I’ll know what it feels like because I’ll be glowing and full of joy.
What will support me on this brave journey is my creativity. And offering myself creative solutions to problems and issues. Sobriety will help. Along with water inside and outside of my body. And rest and journaling and healing slowly and deeply.
Deciding to love oneself unconditionally is bravery especially when one lives in a world, a dominating system which doesn’t recognise one’s worth beyond oppression and exploitation.
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