Migration to a simpler life with sun-kissed foods

When we began in 2012, our daughters’ assertions and resistance led us to this huge, vast forest.

I walked in there. My family walked in with me.

We left something behind (school as we knew it).

We held hands and ventured into the forest.

We set up a camp close to the entrance of the forest. Same school energy and principles, just at home, but nicer, slower.

Spent about a year there and slooooowly became more trusting of the learning process. Shed some ideas about children and education and questioned our ideas about when human rights actually started (what age?).

Those questions and observations led us to move camp. We moved further and further from the entrance of the forest, further and further away from what we had trusted for decades as former students, and as parents.

We went further in. We studied the different trees and the areas and then we decided where we were going to be. We lived there for a while, shed more misconceptions, learned more about privilege and power in our own homes.

Then we expanded our travels outside of our comfort zones of Jamaica and the U.S. Those experiences moved us from having something on land in that forest, to something in the trees where we had even more space, and even better vantage points to see the forest and all it offered.

The last four years of this eight-year journey were almost the opposite of the first four years. Struggle, doubt, stress, money worries seasoned the first four years. Then a series of support energies poured in, all people who came to me as a result of their own unschooling journeys.

One was my bookkeeper who changed my life and helped me get business loans that shored us up while we continued to let our old lives unravel, so we could design with power and partnership in real perspective.

Another was a patron turned friend turned sister-friend who invested her time, her love energies, and her money in my healing.

She brought me to shamans in Ecuador and healers here in the U.S. and helped clear a path that led to a strong small group of sisterfriends who have, through who they are and how they see me, helped clear my path for the healing of my physical body. This was all done through

• much-needed surgeries
• paid projects that honor my particular way of seeing things
• and my need to make some consistent coin ‘cause full-time entrepreneur life can be a beast.
• help with my mental health needs, mine and my family’s, which meant getting the type of support we needed to navigate the things that the pandemic ushered in for us in particular.

All that healing, and all that relief from years of not enoughness in particular areas, just washed over my whole life and it was like I was out of the forest altogether now.

• With a body that was no longer riddled with giant fibroids and years of scar tissue,
• With a body that was no longer bleeding for most of the month
• With a body that was no longer malnourished from the fibroids taking everything including nutrients
• With income that didn’t require me to build a thing, find an audience, and sell enough of the thing to them…

With reprieve from the daily life of all of that…

I was beyond the vantage point of the highest trees. I wasn’t in the forest, I was and am now part of the ecology of it. The air, the mycelium, the trees, the bugs, the birds…

I got SPACE. I got to PAUSE. To REST. To acknowledge harm and healing, to detangle and deschool myself from my pain in various forms, and to make or notice connections I hadn’t made or noticed before.

Now I'm realizing that one of the things I have the space to name is this:

The process of unschooling was us savoring our lives, slowing down in order to savor who and what we were, and were becoming, and already were in some instances, so that we could nurture that.

And so that we could do this process of acknowledging what is harmful from my current vantage point, not just in my past. What's not working? Sometimes the acknowledging of the harm is just one step. Like for us the way that we really acknowledged harm with our daughters was to take them out of school.

The acknowledgement is not just about seeing/understanding what’s happening. It's about saying We acknowledge harm, something needs to change. We listened to them. They've been pushing for this exit from school. What do we do? We're gonna take them out of school.

And then the next step was to deschool or detangle ourselves from it. So we started out doing school at home, and then moved from that over to oh shit like learning is happening even when we’re not teaching, soooo maybe we need to catch up to what learning is outside of what we’ve been told!

And through that detangling, we were in positions to notice and make important new connections between learning and life, between autonomy and authoritarianism, between power-over and power-with.

And so that process that I am (in hindsight) naming, is the thing that I want to be in practice with even deeper.

I've been going through what that means and the emotions around it and the logistics around that, and really looking at a ritual for slowing into that three-part, acknowledge-detangle-connect process in any moment, even over the course of just like 10 minutes or a day. And that's when I came up with a ritual that uses our five senses to tap into that three-part process. It was good and useful, but it felt somehow incomplete.

I studied, I trusted the process, I meandered in my research and meditation, and I cam across the term interoception online. This was it. It came in, and it blended what I had been self-studying all this time with somatics.

My interoception, meaning my awareness, is one things, so then what do I do with that awareness? What do I do to get to make it even easier for me to be in a relationship where my body doesn't have to try to do a bunch of translating to me, I hear it, I understand it, we speak the same language?

So then now it led me to questioning a time in my life when I did feel a sense of connection to this level of vantage point. I know there are milestones in my life where I knew that I was looking at myself and my life and making decisions from a really wonderful vantage point.

That happened in 1996 when I decided I was going to college in Georgia instead of where I was in Florida. That wisdom was something I was tapping into from a higher vantage point, somehow. I zoned in, di ting dem line up, and it all made perfect sense to me. I did it and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, even though it didn’t make financial sense.

Then there were even more recent milestones like the 31-day raw food party of one that I did in 2014.

I knew what needed to happen. I talked about in the video how I found the 80-10-10 way of eating and got into it. And how much it changed me. The following year, I even created an ebook and a Whatsapp group to support folks in moving to more plant-inclusive eating as a personal leadership skill-builder. I’m still feeling the convo I bring in the video, lol. Let me know if you are too.

NOTE: The program and links in this video do not work anymore ‘cause this was years ago)

This year, as I was back in exploration mode around raw veganism, I found a dope woman named Kamaria Dominique, watched a few of those videos and got transported back to my time of raw food partyin back in 2013!

Watching her story and those of some of her guests gave me that last nudge. I said yep, this is the last nudge I’m gon’ need, because I’ve had 50-11 nudges already.

And now I’m here, beginning again. I start today, March 10th, and I’m going through April 3rd. I have a trip in April and I want to have had a couple of weeks of transitioning back to cooked foods before getting on a plane and spending a week in a new-to-me place with less control over my own foods.

I shot the above video in the wee hours of the AM today. You can follow along in that way, and you can join me. Do your research, check your medicals an ting, and do it with me if you’ve been getting nudged up too. Comment on the video to cheer me on; I’d love that!