Dear friend,

It’s been too long since my last letter. To be honest, it was hard to feel connected to my voice over the last few months. Without going into too much detail, it’s been a year of limbo for me, of false landings and winding paths, of circling back to the things that I thought had been buried or banished. It’s been a year of in-betweens, of structure and stability falling away, of my body failing (or signaling what needs attention), a year of hard-held beliefs softening like the inside of a pink magnolia.

I am a poet without all the words right now, swimming in raw truth and feeling, which is to say I am more poet than I have ever been.

On Weddings, Thresholds & Keeping People Close

I am writing to you, dear friend, from one small corner of the San Francisco airport. The sun has receded to its hiding place and smoke lingers in the sky. I hear the hum of planes coming and going behind me. My last few days in California have centered around a wedding, a truly special wedding of two beloved friends. 

The weddings that have marked my late 20s and now early 30s have sometimes dredged up old ghosts. I mean, that’s what happens when all of a sudden, like magic, you find yourself in a single room, surrounded by the vestiges of old intimacies — friends who mean (and meant) a great deal to you, your joy, and your survival. And some of these friends are also the ones who somehow slipped away, through all of life’s distances, shifts, and challenges. And maybe that’s why I felt myself constricted by the usual line of questioning at these gatherings:

What are you doing these days? What do you do for work? Do you like where you live?

And slowly how they start to feel like these questions:

Are you happy? Was it worth it? Do you regret any of your choices? Would you change them if you could?

That’s all to say, some weddings feel like a dizzying mirror, a reflection of old hopes and sharp, quiet fears that can cut like glass. 

As I conversed with old friends over the weekend, I felt a glittering ray of insecurity shine back at me. Not insecurity as a lack of confidence in self, but more like an unstable story. I felt the frustration, judgement, and grief of not being able to pin down the story about myself I wanted to tell. 

But, there were also big moments of grace at this wedding. Like the young man I had once known in college who locked eyes with me immediately upon seeing each other for the first time in eight years. As he walked towards me, he broke open the largest smile across his face and gestured to hug me. Here we were, almost a decade after the single year we spent in a shared college co-op, baking bread into the early morning, watching anime, hiking Yosemite, laughing so hard that our insides hurt.

Here we were, as our old friendship unfolded in front of us, adding warmth to the in-between – that old distance melting away.

The wedding, like the airport, is a place of transition. A threshold to be crossed. I have carried my own thresholds over the last few years like a heavy bag that can’t be put down until I get to the end of my intended destination. I have made the weight of the bag mean I am without a worthy story (though I know that’s not true). I have made the weight of the bag mean I am not worthy of grace.

I am now reminded of the great poet, Staceyann Chin, who once said in a documentary about her own life that she is a “keeper of people”. No matter the cruelties or disagreements she faced in her many intimate relationships, she said it is very seldom that she lets go of people. Maybe that’s in part because she dedicated a lot of her life to finding (and re-finding) a mother who had abandoned her as a child, and who throughout Ms. Chin’s adulthood thwarted her advances to develop a substantive relationship (though there were moments of grace and love).

Ms. Chin is in the practice of keeping people close. 

Weddings, like airports, are a closing in. And in that closeness, witnesses can be born. And through witness, the fears at the foot of our thresholds can soften, falling away like the buds on my grandmother’s big-hearted magnolia tree.

💡 i just had an epiphany (creative breakthrough)

It has also been a year of new rituals and creative adventures. Back in February, I enrolled in artist Kening Zhu’s Labyrinth Library, a seasonal, 3-month container for anyone who wants to experiment with their own creative process in (virtual) community.

Artists and creatives across disciplines, ages, geographic location, and interests met online each week to discuss our relationships to a seasonal creative process (i.e. impulse, devotion, waiting, connection, etc.) and facilitate show and tells for each other about a project or a process we were working on. It was a beautifully organized experience, with each month corresponding to an astrological season, and thematic activities that connected to the season at hand.

We also created our own treks, which were smaller 2-week containers within the larger 3-month commitment in which we individually embarked on a personal creative project or process, documented our process in community through an asynchronous, online community log and digital journals where we could witness each other’s progress, share feedback, and cheer each other on.

I came out of the magical portal that was Labyrinth Library with renewed energy, and an important discovery about how I work. I spent so much of last year trying to pour into projects that I could never stick to, when all along, my projects don’t materialize until I have a series of rituals in place to hold them.

By the end of April, I began fleshing out new rituals, first in the form of an indigo blue, unlined notebook in which I now start each morning by listing (in bullet point format):

one thing I’m feeling

one thing I'm sensing

one thing I’m thinking

These prompts were taken directly from one of Kening’s journal rituals, which she shared with us one day during a show & tell about her creative journal ecosystem.

This morning journal ritual changes the texture of my days. First off, the list-making cuts through the noise of the ego and allows me to stay honest. And there’s been something grounding about starting my day with a physical object I can touch and mark, unlike the cold and sterile computer screen. I feel more connected to my interior world after fleshing out each prompt, which in turn makes me more generative.

Occasionally, when I’m feeling a long period of stuck-ness, I use my stunning, handmade, marbled journals (lined) from TheCasualBookBinder to do three-pages of longhand, reflective writing. This process is inspired by Julia Cameron’s morning pages in The Artist Way, but I don’t like doing them daily as she suggests because I’ve found that to be draining.

A now, some creative prompts for you:

• Is there a creative project you’ve been wanting to work on or return to? Name it.

• Make a non-exhaustive list (use bullet points!) that captures some of the reasons your project has been difficult to work on.

• Pick ONE of the reasons from your list above and write for 7 minutes about what the challenge is and one thing you can do this week to begin addressing it.

  • For example, if my creative project is working on my short story, I might write about breaking the short story project into smaller pieces: outlining, researching, drafting, etc.

• OR: Pick ONE of the reasons from your list above and write for 7 minutes about one creative PROCESS you’d like to experiment with this week to get your creative juices flowing. 

  • For example, if my creative project is redecorating my office, I might write about watching an interior design series on YouTube and taking notes in a digital or analog journal.

👁️ A New Blog Post on Sharing, Witness, & Letting It Out

Back in March, I wrote an essay about the difference – for me – between sharing, being witnessed, and creative release. You can read it below:

Sharing, Shearing, Seeing, Holding — SOJOURNER AHEBEE

 The relationship between sharing, witness, & release, and why I need all of them as an artist to feel creative momentum and connection.

☔ what’s pouring in (sojourner’s inspo)

• Read: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel by Junot Diaz. The book is a stunning account of a young boy’s journey to find love and a community’s journey to break old, colonial curses and put their story back together. I’m interested in this idea of putting a story together that has a lot of disparate pieces. So much of this novel is about how living under a violent dictatorship enacts silences over people’s memories, desires, freedoms. The result is the loss of a coherent story.

• Listened to: What AI Actually Costs: Transmuting Shame Into Erotic Self Respect, a podcast interview between Amelia Hruby of Off The Grid podcast and Ayana Zaire Cotton of Seeda School, a Black feminist worldbuilding school. This conversation, which followed Ayana’s substack essay on the same topic, emerged out of Ayana’s discovery about her own AI use, specifically the way AI separates us from our own sense of intuition and expands our capacity in a way that goes against our own desires, energy, and values. I appreciate Ayana’s call to return to Audre Lorde’s belief that the erotic is the space between “one’s sense of self and the chaos of our most unfiltered emotions”. As an artist and creative business owner, I care about protecting that erotic space and am concerned by the ways generative AI interrupts that sacred relation and process. To me, it would seem that when we extract that internal labor over to a machine, we rob ourselves of an erotic process (here I am using Lorde’s definition of “erotic” as our capacity for joy, a deep source of power and self-knowledge). Listen wherever you listen to podcasts.

  

🫴🏾 from me to you

I recently finished designing a website for a dear friend, poet, essayist, and creative collaborator – Kirwyn Sutherland. We embarked on a two-month journey, through many winding layers of conversation, mood boarding, listening, and play to create an online home that feels as vibrant, expansive, and grounded as Kirwyn is. Check it out below, and stay tuned for more offerings from Kirwyn’s web world.

Kirwyn Sutherland

poet | essayist | pop culture nerd

Interested in building your own online home with me? Let’s dream it up together.

🪄 a litany of spells

• creation spell (something I’m making): my next children’s book. I’ve been thinking about loss, and the ways that children uniquely grieve. And also the ways that the natural environment can be a particular kind of grief container for children. I’m excited to bring some of these themes together in this next story. More soon. Shout out to Cody Cook Parrott’s Creative Ideation Portal for helping me get clear about what my next project wants to be. If you’re looking for some (free) support to identify yours, I can’t recommend this resource enough. I return to it again and again. 

• desire spell (something I’m longing for): a trip to Brazil, specifically Bahia — one of the principal ports of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and now the beating heart of Black Brazil. 

• music spell (something I’m listening to): Raveena’s Lucid album (surrendering to the power of tenderness in the soundscape she creates here, opening up a new, softer home within myself with every listen. Night Drive from the Zero album by Alewya (moody, atmospheric, an invitation to move towards desire and lose control).

*

*

*

I’m holding tight to the last threads of summer, friend. Here’s a picture of a lake clearing in philly I love to visit when I can:

Wishing you a September that is filled with community, pleasure, and self-nourishment!

from the footsteps of my desires to yours,

🐛 Sojourner