Here, we are. Still.
Fieldnotes on Juneteenth, Solstice & Becoming
Before this reaches you, know that this summer has already been moving me.
My daughters and I have been living inside intentional geographies—letting place become teacher. They spent time in Boston at camp with their aunt (my sister), making their own memories, stretching toward themselves in ways only children can. I slipped away into another kind of camp entirely: days in the mountains of Connecticut at a solo residency for artists and writers—quiet mornings, pages, long walks, conversations with strangers, and the strange gift of hearing my own thoughts again. Since then, there has been movement westward too—time with soul friends in Vegas, gathering joy and witness as I cross the threshold into another year of life and prepare to welcome my solar return.
This piece arrives from inside all of that.
From movement. From stillness. From Juneteenth. From the edge of the Summer Solstice. From gratitude. From being a Black woman alive in a world that feels uncertain and choosing—again and again—to remain available to beauty, pleasure, agency, intimacy, and possibility anyway.
I don’t want you to leave this essay inspired. I want you to leave remembering.
Remembering that freedom is not always dramatic. Sometimes it looks like deciding your own rhythm. Sometimes it sounds like laughter in the middle of grief. Sometimes it is a calendar you chose. A body you returned to. A meal eaten slowly. A boundary held. A city left. A page written. A child watching you live honestly.
If this leaves you with anything, I hope it leaves you with permission: to notice your life while you are inside of it—and to trust that becoming alive is still possible, even here.
I have been thinking about timing.
How some freedoms arrive all at once and others arrive years after they were already ours.How there are announcements. And then there is embodiment. Today is Juneteenth. Tomorrow I turn another year older and the Summer Solstice stands at the door. And somewhere between Boston, writing residency days, airport terminals, long walks, book-chapter drafts, conversations, grief, delight, and the ordinary holiness of making my own sweet potato & greek yogurt breakfast—I realized something today:
I am less interested in freedom as a declaration; But, I am interested in freedom as a practice.
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I believe Juneteenth asks something difficult of us. Not celebration alone, but study. Because history tells us that emancipation and arrival are not the same event. Freedom can exist before it is recognized. Truth can exist before it is announced. Life can exist before systems figure out how to manipulate it.
There is something in that for me. For us. For Black women. For queer people. For artists. For mothers. For anyone who has ever felt themselves become visible to themselves before the world caught up.
I keep thinking about the body.
How many years it takes to teach the body: You are safe now. You can rest now. You do not have to perform your humanity. That may be the ceremony of adulthood. Not accumulation, but permission. Connecticut gave me something unexpected. Distance. Enough distance to watch myself living. Enough distance to realize how many versions of me survived long enough for this version to arrive.
The younger me who thought love meant proving. The healer in me who thought usefulness guaranteed belonging. The woman in me who tends to linger too long in what isn’t hers to hold. The other woman in me who is known for feeling too early, but is always right. The other one who mistook endurance for devotion.
I am grateful to all of them. None of them wasted my life. They were - and continue to- build a language for this one. The one writing this. The one becoming, still.
This season I have been thinking about autonomy.
Not the internet - hyper-independence dressed as liberation- version.
I mean agency.
The sacred ability to decide: What enters. What remains. What receives my attention. What receives my body. What receives my grief. What receives my pleasure. Agency is deciding the terms of exchange. Agency is understanding that access is not intimacy. Agency is realizing your joy does not need to earn permission to exist. Agency is saying:
I belong to myself first.
And because I belong to myself, I can love better. I can grieve honestly. I can choose with tenderness instead of urgency.
Because the land feels uncertain- politically, economically, ecologically; I understand there will always be grief. Even on this day of cultural veneration and ancestral celebration, there are people surviving things they should never have had to survive. There are wars- internal and external. There are systems collapsing (as we speak) under their own contradictions.
And still, today— someone is making tea. Someone is planting tomatoes. Someone is braiding their daughter’s hair. Someone is writing a novel. Someone is kissing someone they waited years to meet. Someone is laughing too loud in public. Someone is resting. Someone is learning to receive. Someone is becoming free.
I want to be apart of the archives that remember this too. Not just what broke, but what bloomed.
This year for my birthday, I am not asking life to become certain; I am asking for greater intimacy with being alive. More beauty. More nerve. More softness. More right timing. More astonishment. More refusal. More trust in what my body already knows. More pleasure that does not apologize. More grief that is allowed to move. More freedom that reaches the tissues.
To my ancestors:
Thank you for surviving enough to imagine me.
To my fellow descendants:
May we inherit less fear and more language.
To my own life:
Thank you for continuing to reveal yourself.
Happy Juneteenth. Happy Solstice. Happy almost-birthday to me.
I am here. We are here. Still. And for today—
that feels miraculous enough.
Pay it forward.
I am a mother who writes and teaches for a living&loving; and I’d like to continue this path with ease. Your support means the world and each exchange gives this mamma more space and time to create. Consider leaving something in the gratitude jar HERE - giving a birthday gift HERE - or gifting a PAID subscription to someone that could use my words as medicine.
Hey Kira, love your thoughts on becoming visible to myself and agency to decide what enters and what remains. Looking for what blooms in my life. Definitely want more softness and more nerve. And finally, more trust in what my body already knows. Sometimes I think my body doesn't know who she is. Thank you so much for sharing and for your wisdom.