Most of my cousins here now have become parents. As I watch them dance with the stressful, tiring, beautiful and humbling movements that are parenthood, I feel both appreciation, privilege and awe. Motherhood is something I’ve begun to deeply crave within the past 5 years, and I hold that longing in my prayers for the next few years. In order to be a mother, I want to root myself and seed an intention. I want to recognize the legacies I come from and nourish my own body before I create new legacies, and nourish new spirits who will one day do the same.
I think now of the gift that this earth constantly gives us. An offering to sustain our every need, to nourish us, hold us, and transform us. The earth offers the ultimate motherhood to our physical bodies. She also helps us maintain a relationship with the divine, upholding many sacred mysteries.
I continue to sit with the heavy question of where I want to live, where I want to root, and how that will play into the bigger picture of my lineages… what I am being asked to continue, transform, or create that I inherited from my ancestors. How can I learn from their stories in order to discover and deepen into my own purpose? My dear friend Brontë posed to me in my birthday voice note…the land is wondering where you will choose to care for them this year. Your care is so special and so lovely, and they are wondering where you will choose to do so. A reframe that brought me to tears, a reminder that we are always in mutual relationship, in co-creation with these other divine entities. There is always internal and external balance at work, and we are always playing with them both.
My personal definition of motherhood has become increasingly porous. To me, motherhood isn’t just the act of being able to create life in your body, though that certainly can be apart of it. Motherhood is the nurturance and spiritual commitment to feeding, nourishing, and caring for life beyond our own. We have so much still to learn about motherhood and matriarchy in a world that values and pushes forth the opposite. How have each of our individual capacities for motherhood been limited by the need to survive within partriarchy and a world of rigidity, violence, and survival? To be a matriarch means to create and hold both life and death within your body and spirit. To bear witness to what is difficult, and to help transform it. Doing so requires immense presence, patience, care, and courage.
As I enter my Saturn return I have been flooded by the sudden desire to sit down and root my own legacy here on earth. Knowing that I will inevitably leave this planet and this body, what am I creating for my descendants that is longer lasting than this physical body? James Baldwin said it best: that one day, inevitably we are all going to die—so it’s important that we live in such a way that creates more life, that makes the possibility of living well a reality for future generations.
What seeds can I plant now so that future generations will have something to nourish them—a foundation upon which to continue building and growing? What has bloomed in me from seeds planted in past generations?
I am coming to see the connection between “lineage” and “motherhood”—both asking us to think beyond the self, beyond this particular moment and individual body. Motherhood is to tie another’s destiny to your own, to nourish life from your own body. Lineage is to see the existing ties that connect us, and consider what might come from them.
When I think of lineage, I imagine a thread of work happening across generations because it is just that large, that complex, and important. I appreciate this image and this reminder of connectivity because I (and I assume many others as well) can get so lost sometimes in the individuality of it all that I forget my own destiny is tied to that of so many others. I arrived here because of all that others did for me to be here—and my actions are paving the way for those to come. This asks me to see beyond my own ego, and allows me to feel connected to something much bigger than this one body. What were my ancestors and elders up to—what were they able to accomplish and what remained challenging? How did my parents pick up where they could not? How do I and my siblings/generations do the same?
My vovó tells me she didn’t want to get married because she knew that if she did she wouldn’t be able to travel the world. She says it with a laugh, the joke being that she did get married, and she did settle down, and through her son (my dad), eventually she was able to travel to the United States. My dad grew up to be one of the most well-traveled people I know, having visited nearly every continent for Capoeira.
I think about myself as an extension of that lineage. I have been so blessed to travel, and have spent time in many countries, languages, and cultures. As kids, my brother and I traveled with our parents’ Afro-Brazilian folkloric dance company, and to visit family that we have around the world. Since then, I’ve been privileged to feed this longing to see and know the world through my own creative work. My vovó’s life and dream, and my father’s life and dream set up the possibility for my own life and dream. This is one of the lineages that I come from, a legacy that I earned that I get to continue and reshape in the ways that feel aligned with my values.
In my perception of the US, we live with such hyper-individualism… choosing to center the ego in everything, even health, wellness and creativity. Creatively, we pit ourselves against one another. We don’t care for our elders, because we don’t have time or energy to do so. We have inherited this workaholic boot strap mentality. As a child of an immigrant, I have received so many privileges as a result of my citizenship and I do not take that for granted. At the same time I long for the cultural values that were sacrificed in order for me to have increased safety, stability and opportunity. I say this to say that I understand and have endless appreciation for the work that my dad has done in his lifetime in order to better his own life, my life, and even his family’s lives back home in Bahia. I inherit those gifts, and feel tasked to integrate them somehow with new lessons and learnings that exist beyond the imagination of the “American dream”. I’m picking up the threads of this legacy (and so many others), a dream for something of value, importance, meaning, and purpose. I am carrying it forward, and weaving it with my own dreams as best as I know how.
I feel that in modern life we have come to worship all of the wrong gods. We value money and success over life. We value comfort over integrity. So much of how we move is in disconnection—whether that be from the source of our goods, dissociation through social media or work, or otherwise. I read all of this as a deep fear of living because of how raw and intense it might feel to actually be as connected as we are capable of being. If we wanted to truly experience aliveness, we would be prepared to feel discomfort, face our deepest emotions, and disrupt or dismantle any system that was oppressive to the livelihood of any body, any being, or any ecosystem. Many of our governments invest more in mass incarceration, war, and destruction of the planet, than our own health and livelihoods. It makes me wonder about this particular lineage of pain and dissociation, and about the lineage that continues to seek freedom through power and control.
What would it take to disrupt this? What would it mean to lean into an ethic of motherhood—to reach beyond our own bodies in the ways that we think about our purposes and destinies here on earth?
I continue to sit with this prayer. A prayer to nurture mutual care. A prayer to receive care from my mothers, and to offer care, respect, and reverence in return. A prayer to receive lessons from my mothers, and offer newness, perspective, and transformation where it’s necessary, and continuation where I can. I pray to internalize their wisdom, and sink into a deeper sense of faith. I pray to better understand what it means for me to be connected to all of this beauty and all this ugly, all of the sweet and the complicated that I come from.
The other night as I meditated I felt an ancestor speaking to me—vocé tem que seguir o seu propio caminho. You have to follow your own path. At first it made me wonder what it even means to have an individual path when connected to so many lineages and so much history. I guess what I am learning is that by better understanding our histories, we can deepen a sense of connection, and better integrate the lessons we need in order to move forward. My personal path is inherently connected, and still there is a gem here that only I possess, and one that only you possess. That gem is special and sacred and unique. So to follow my own path I must make sure to honor and nurture that individual light. Doing so is essential to the collective, because we are all threaded together through time, mothers, and lineage.
I have treasured this time for sitting, resting, and asking. I am coming to understand how important it is to do so as an act of disruption and resistance. Without pause I would never have come to understand what I am now integrating. As a result of this time and this nurturance, I feel more aligned and prepared to move forward on my own path.