Tuesday🧵: silencing cultural noise
Finding & honoring your voice
Hello, beautiful, chosen family,
I apologize for being M.I.A. last week. School’s out for Summer, and now I’m in that post-school phase, dreaming about teaching hundreds of teenagers naked.
There’s a French expression, “qui s'excuse s'accuse,” which means “he who excuses himself accuses himself.” But Ben Franklin said it best: “Honesty is the best policy.”
So, in the spirit of transparency, here’s the tea: I’ve had my twelve-year-old son with me full-time. To keep him off of Fortnite, we’ve been doing Mommy Camp, and my body is frickin’ sore.
Hendry David Thoreau once wrote, “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
Never mind that Thoreau had his mother do his laundry so he could stand up to live and sit down to write (sorry, couldn’t help myself), I also stopped sitting once I realized at age 12 I wanted to be a writer. Trying to gather writing material and reconcile my cultural cognitive dissonance, I spent the next three decades not writing, one of which I spent in Latin America and the Caribbean. At this time I discovered that Anglo-American culture is not truth nor in humanity’s best interest, which I wrote about in this post.
Flash forward to the present—derriere in a chair, fingers on computer keys—I can no longer escape culture by traveling or living abroad due to economic and logistical constraints. However, the wilderness, a supreme teacher, lies just beyond my doorstep.
Last week, I escaped the noise and checked in with spirit/truth by escaping on a tiny boat that looks like a cocaine deal gone bad straight out of Miami Vice—riddled with holes, fabric mutilated, no windshield, most parts not working, but hey, it floats!—and went camping on an island with the hubs and kiddos (pics below).
Reuniting with spirit/truth and rewilding requires departure. Bayo Akomolafe writes, “Without the going away, we may not be able to meet ourselves as if for the first time.”
But not everyone can live in another country or venture into the wilderness. Then how? How can we become feral in our own backyard? What are some micro or macro ways to tap into our own truth?
How do you escape the cultural noise? How do we honor our spirit and learn to love ourselves in all our weirdness, despite external systems telling us we’re all sorts of wrong?
Tell me in the comments!
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