A Changing Season

It has been a changing season for me.

Over the last year and some change, I have experienced transformations, deaths and closed doors. I ended a pivotal relationship. Moved out of the home we shared and the city I had lived in for the previous 4 years, I released friendships that had lasted for decades. I was diagnosed with Graves’ disease.

My mother moved to Panama. My aunt, my uncle, a friend and my brother died within six weeks of one another.

I will not pretend those experiences were anything other than devastating in their own ways. There were moments that ripped me to the core. I cried in ways I did not know my body could cry.

But that is not the whole story.

I have also laughed harder than I knew I could. I have leaned into faith in ways I did not know I was capable of. I have spent precious time with my family, loving them, caring for them, seeing them clearly and allowing myself to be loved by them.

I give thanks for the lessons I have learned, the doors I have closed, the expectations I have released and the surprises I have found waiting for me on the other side.

Somehow, in the midst of it all, this has also been one of the most beautiful times of my life.

And it feels like it is just beginning.

I have been trying to figure out where home is now while building a global network through The F.U.N. Manifesto, a journey that has taken me all over.

I give thanks for my dear friend Erwin Thomas, who introduced me to this beautiful place called Sacred Land. This is where I will be based as I prepare for tour and comb through all the pieces of creation I have made over the last eighteen months.

Sacred Land was dreamed into existence by Omi King as a place where people of color, creatives, healers and thinkers could rest, create, grow and nourish one another.

People arrive here carrying different callings, gifts and dreams. Each person contributes something to the land and the community while continuing to build a life of their own.

You can feel the true meaning of interdependence here.

I feel honored to be at this particular school for the gifted at this time. And yes, that is absolutely what I am calling it.

I already feel deeply blessed.

I look out across the field and watch friends put their hands into the earth, tending food that will nourish all of us in the months to come. I am already eating from the land. I have people helping me become stronger and healthier for tour. I am surrounded by people manifesting a shared dream while making room for one another’s individual dreams to grow alongside it.

And just beyond the field is Mount Rainier, clear and powerful.

From the window of Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where my brother made his transition, I could see that same mountain.

Now I see it from here.

I cannot help but feel that my brother is with me. Somehow, the mountain has become a bridge between that room, this land and the life I am continuing to build.