Happy New Year!
What’s opening up for you with this fresh start to choosing love over fear?
I’ll go first.
If you recall from a few newsletters ago, or from following me on the gram, you know this year comes with two big births for me. One baby’s been gestating for the past 10+ years and another for just 9 months 👀😆…how the heck does baking a human take such a tiny fraction of time vs. creative projects?
Real Talk? Motherhood scares the living daylights out of my fine black ass 👀
Apart from the freakonomic factor of pregnancy itself (just sign here and here as you hand over your body)—there’s also the irrevocable sea change of surrendering your life as you know it. I wonder if there’s a parent alive who cannot mark time by who they were before popping babies vs. after. That level of existential shift is seismic.
Meaning, gear up for grief over who you were And make room for the gains of who you’re becoming.
And then consider the liminal space you’re living in now, as you figure out how to become. And how easily fear can rush into that in between space. You know how feminists say the personal is political? Yeah, well I see a similar Becoming Project hovering over America’s current liminal identity.
This country is at a seismic + liminal crossroad. A brave new America is asking to be born.
An America that’s never existed. There’s so much comfort in going with what we already know by refusing to grow. Some even prolong the grief over a bygone identity—when white supremacy was king and no one dared to call out the emperor’s flabby bare ass, mooning everyone with his ghastly buttcrack.
You witnessed that grief and pain on January 6 and the four year rhetoric beforehand; you witnessed it in how the midterms were covered last year: Crime (i.e. black ppl) coming to get you. Transgender folks are poisoning for your kids. Inflation is throttling your neck. And you damn well see it today in how much you’re asked to hedge your vision for this year and the beautiful hope of who you’re becoming, with being “pragmatic.” Or realistic. Or whatever new phrase is invented to snuff out the tender thing inside you asking to be born.
Here’s what I know: The fear is real. Acknowledge it. And still Choose Love.
The vision for what you’re becoming—the tender hopeful thing whose wings you feel fluttering inside you—comes from Love. Just like this brave new, yet to be born America. It’s scary choosing love. Seems silly and immature to hedge hope with even more muscular hope.
And yet.
Choose anything but Love only prolongs your pain. And who the heck wants to be in labor pains past the first 24hrs? That shit aint right…
This year. I wanna be brave enough to do shit that scares me when the gain of those things is a wider heart space. Parenting will help me check that box all day 😝.
I hope you’ll also help me check another box. In how you show up to create Radical Love as a kind of cure for an ailing country. In how you choose courage over comfort. And in how you help America birth a brave new tender-hearted country.
Let’s Become This Wild, Winged Thing in 2024!
❤️
Magogodi
