On Ending 2025
new creations + end of year reflections
It’s been four years since I’ve released any music out into the world, and coincidentally— 4 years since I first did the interviews with my grandmothers that would become the foundation for my film Matriarch.
That was 2021. We were deep in pandemic mode— the silence of which brought the clarity of a project one morning, which I knew would tie several important themes together that had been seeding in the back of my mind.
A single image of my Vovo’s hands, shot on my medium format camera in 2019 when I first went to Brazil to archive my family, flashed in my memory. I woke up that morning in 2021, feeling an immense longing to be near her. To tell her that despite the language barriers and the lifelong, long distance relationship, I love her dearly, and that she means more to me than she ever may know.
“So I decided to interview my grandmothers” this would become the opening line to my proof of concept film for matriarch. In 2021, I began a series of interviews with my own matriarchs- only loosely knowing what it would lead to. During the 3rd day of my Vovó’s interviews, she shared her thoughts and questions about death.
A vida é passageira. A Morte não tem exceção.
Life is fleeting. Death has no exception.
She is a woman who experienced much loss in her life, but she never questioned any of it. How can I question what god takes away? Her faith and curiosity are some of the moments in the editing bay that I’ve watched most on repeat. They rang true in my head as we finished up the video for death song. In January of this year, she had a stroke that robbed her of her speech and mobility. Being able to watch back her words means that much more to me now. I’m glad that I had the foresight to listen when spirit told me to let this project pull focus for a while.
As I began this project, music remained a center weight on my heart. It was a deep passion that I feared I had unlocked too late, but something that had kept me emotionally afloat since 15. So I negotiated with spirit. Okay I said, I will prioritize this film, but I need to be able to weave music into this because I know it’s what feeds me.
In between my Vovó Damiana and my Grandma Bruria’s interviews I went to Costa Rica with two of my friends on a spiritual journey that my intuition had sent to me through a dream vision of a waterfall. I found the waterfall and spent time with it, wrote songs beside it. I didn’t know it then, but those were the first sonic whispers of matriarch’s spirit. These songs speak of birth, transformation, death, and rebirth. They became the guiding force for the film without me knowing it.
This is the longest trust fall I’ve ever taken. Or maybe life itself is a trust fall. We lean in, and we continue moving, practicing our patience rituals, praying that things will be remembered, fall apart, and take form in a larger cosmic dance that feels beautiful when you can zoom out enough to see it.
This song, death song, emerged in 2023 possibly as a premonition, but definitely as a prayer. It’s one of the songs that will be woven into Matriarch.
In the past few years I have shed so much. Friendships, personas, belief systems… There are friendships that no longer had space to grow, and I had to let go of them. Those people still mean the world to me. There are dreams and belief systems that I still struggle to let go of. Sometimes we let go when we are ready, and sometimes life pushes us forward before we know how to.
death song pays homage to death as a necessary, unavoidable aspect of life. We cannot hold on to everything, and it doesn’t serve us to. Even the things we wish we could hold onto forever. One day we will also have to let go of them. But that energy doesn’t disappear, it just transfers. Those endings make room for more life. They are the soil from which any new dreams, ideas, or potentials, will grow.
Still, I sniff my beloved’s neck a few extra times each morning just because I know one day I won’t be able to. I hug my grandmothers each time a little tighter, just in case it’s the last time I get to. We should love this way. And we should let go with just as much love.
These are the negotiations we have with death, and with time. The negotiations with fear as we try to understand how to let go and move forward. Will you remember me if I let go? But then spirit responds:
Trust me. I cannot show you what I have to show you until you surrender your arms, your walls, your armor. Meet me in your most vulnerable state so that I can show you…
May we live in a way where we are constantly removing our armor. May we live in a way where we are able to hold gratitude even for the things that were forever unresolved, for the things that made no sense, for the things that were unjust and unfair, for the ways all of life impacted us, even in its weight. May we allow ourselves to truly be shaped by life. To feel its impact fully. To be moved enough to change, to change things, to mold the world around us into what we imagine it can be.
Please won’t you lay down your arms.
There are so many systems we are working to dismantle. There are so many systems holding us apart from one another. And at the end of the day, the prayer I have held and continue to hold is one that allows us to see one another’s joy and pain and hold it alongside our own as something sacred that deserves to be tended to with the care that the matriarch offers.
At the end of 2025, (in this way that the “modern” world counts it, which is most certainly not the only way), I am finally releasing a new song. It was a gift to me, and I’m passing it on to you now. At the end of 2025, I have a rough cut of my first feature length documentary complete. One that honors my matriarchs, the strength in the lineages I come from, and so many others beyond my own. Ifa tells me to be patient, and I feel it with a renewed sense of hope because finally I have something tangible I can look at to describe something that has felt elusive and difficult to explain for so many years.
To everything that has had to end in order to make way for this life to take form, I thank you and I love you. To everything that is yet to come, I know that I have so many more things to do here, and I pray that I have the opportunity to do them. It’s a gift I pray I never take for granted.
🍃 Happy New Year 🍃