10 Jan 2023 4 min read The Savor Complex

These Knees and Needs...Pt 2 of Funeral Day in the South

2019 and 2020 Chapter 1. Part 2.

It surprised me how involved my knees were in this experience. They wobbled, they fake-hurt like somehow my body was suddenly too heavy for them. They pleaded with me to bend them deep and run away from the awkwardness and indescribability of my current situation. I was a nervous novice, talking out loud about something that felt so private and unfamiliar, but still required their witnessing because I needed to be held accountable for letting this woman’s ways die off with her. The three people watching were perhaps the most qualified to nudge or yank me back to the ways of being that I committed to then and moving forward, not the woman who was running the show because she had been put in charge years ago.

The words I spoke were my confessions of what that old version of me was doing. I told them how she used control as her form of courage, and what it was costing her, quietly. I confessed feelings of resentment I had towards them because I was making myself responsible for more than my fair share, and I told them how I got to that place. I also kept plenty of things to myself, but I shared enough to give them containers for the accountability I was asking them to carry with me. They agreed, and I’m grateful ‘cause I was counting on them for that.

I found myself gripping the edges of my notebook to remind myself that I was in a body. I was not floating off somewhere unknown and alone. I was just standing in front of my loves, archiving a part of me that has needed to be respected and released for a long, long time.

In hindsight, I needed more time than I took in 2019 to grieve the loss and to gather myself that September.

But life pulled me ahead and I went with it. By the end of that month, I was finishing up Raising Free People Book, a project for which I had gotten an indie book publishing deal a few weeks before that funeral. Our clothes were still in our travel bags and we were still moving about like the digital nomads we had become over the last six years. We were recently back in the U.S. after living mostly in between Jamaica and South Africa, and were renting short-term spots until we could settle into a year-long rental.

I was getting plenty of much-needed rest; my body took the space it needed. And yet I needed more time.

But the rest of 2019 closed rapidly as I refined my book draft and worked with Kris to secure our next few months’ housing. Then, by the end of January of 2020, talk of COVID-19 was brewing. May of that year, George Floyd was brutally murdered and people were fed up out loud. In June of that year, I started working with the editor assigned to my book, and the rest of 2020, as you might recall, was a massive portal of unraveling and revelation and rapid change.

I needed time to process the loss and the spaciousness I had gained.

But the pace of the world and my communities called for me to lay that woman in me to rest, hunch my body over her gravesite for a short mourning period, then stand up, brush off my knees and shins, reapply my purple lip courage, and answer the calling that had sounded. The calling of communities in pain and shock who now suddenly needed an alternative to sending their kids to school. They were reaching out to people like me who had made that transition long before the pandemic to speak to that journey, and to offer language, practices, and possibilities for a revisiting of child education at home. I talked to reporters, I shared my children’s perspectives, and I called out rush-jobs on Self-Directed Education.

In hindsight, I needed more time than I took in 2019 to grieve and to gather who I was now, and who I was not, especially after what I saw in the jungle that summer.

Next up... Language and the Amazon Jungle