Color of Calm
I noticed my thumb cramping up at the same moment my mind began to wander. I had been scrolling for hours. (But hadn’t we all?) I had been stuck inside my shoebox apartment for months—call it quarantine, call it “self-care”—I was caught between the idealism of anywhere else and the strong facade I built of being empowered by city life. It was a dilemma. Everything was changing, and as I prepared for the next few months of recap articles, retrospectives of what ‘life was like,’ and hastily published short story collections about the over boiled hot dog that is 2020, claustrophobia kicked in. The walls of being a perfectly put together single Black woman, presenting as mentally healthy, stable, and calm, while looking at the same graffiti outside my window every day, were closing in quickly.
After years of inner turmoil regarding the reconciliation of my Blackness, all that time inside and with myself showed me that heading back to my roots was the way to rerebuild my foundation. Perhaps we all dug into a self-indulgent pursuit, thinking that the only thing between us and the best version of ourselves was time and our previous propensity to waste it. I filled myself with books, researched articles, and even traced my family lineage. I tried to settle my own mind and convince myself that the labor of learning was something I could do singularly.
After The Warmth of Other Suns, Widow Basquiat, the collected works of Keeanga Yahmatta-Taylor, and convincing myself that learning dressmaking would connect me to my grandparents, I looked up from my empty bobbin to see a steady stream of golden liquid coming from a stout man outside my window. We made eye contact and he gave me a toothy smile. This was New York City, after all. To expect that my identity cup would be filled by my pursuits was futile; I was sitting in the greatest city in the world, with mounds of shoes, holiday candles, and unplayed vinyls to show for it, with an annual salary double what my mother made as a social worker in the deep South—yet the image outside my window was the same. With this realization came the longing for home, and, for many of us, somewhere else.
Somewhere open, fresh, and natural.
Somewhere like where we came from.
With rural landscape comes the fear and hesitancy of bondage. We look out at a field of crops and think of the sun beating on our necks while our babies are strapped to our backs. We look at the curves and paths through the mountains and valleys that existed before us and envision chapped, pale skin, and granola-filled mason jars slung around a backpack. Before 1900, almost 90% of Blacks lived in the rural south, trapped by slavery and then by the exploitive nature and necessity of sharecropping.
It’s no wonder that by 1970 almost half of us had relocated to the dream-towns sprouting up in the North and West, connected by rail lines that led out of the communities that held us down. We have spent generations embracing the urban landscape that came with a promise of opportunity, equity, and not feeling so ‘othered.’ The young people who dream of landing in roommate-ridden Bushwick apartments come for the same reason our grandparents did: the burning hope of a future different than the one we were prescribed. We believed that to associate ‘urban,’ ‘city,’ and ‘concrete’ with our communities was a resistance to the ‘rural’ and ‘country’ identifiers that marked Black people as uneducated, poor, and without prospects. The media embraces this, excluding our faces from their athletic spandex marketing campaigns and the stock images that accompany hiking guides. We’ve been complicit, believing that we are more resilient by crashing into the difficulties of city life and resisting nature as a symbol of the way we used to live.
That urban environment can be full of melancholy: wet, concrete sidewalks riddled with years of speckled dirt after rain; the surface feeling of family as you wave to the florist, the bodega guy, and your fruit lady; the beads of sweat on your neck as the sun beats down on the metal of the buildings around you. This melancholy, taken in small doses over the months or years of living in urban spaces will take a toll. For some that toll is gradual, resulting in the eventual ‘big move’ to an ‘easier’ place, like Los Angeles or Atlanta, and for others, the shock of the city’s emotional toll hits swiftly, bathing them in loneliness after their first few months.
We don't often recognize the power embedded in the transference and daily absorption of the energy around us, or how this energy guides our connection to our environment. How often do we willingly step into the sunshine as an essential part of the day’s nourishment? We suppress the need for nature’s effects on our well being, thinking that since we’ve placed ourselves at the center of it, we control our world. Think not what you can do for your environment, think what your environment can do for you—a radical challenge.
We should always invite ourselves into the labyrinth that leads to changes in our thinking and the transformation of how we see our circumstances. Reclaiming our stories and taking up the space we need to heal, grow, and expand is essential to wellness. What if we could reclaim as many external spaces as internal ones? As much as we can trace our culture as rooted to the land we cultivated, we should also recognize our stake in experiencing, and enriching the land as a way to enliven our future.
Embracing the empowerment and refreshment nature gives us, and leaning into the renewing quality of fresh air would turn natural spaces, experiences, and publications from notoriously void of culture to full technicolor. We owe it to ourselves to recognize the value of taking back the walkabout in America, and no longer should we yearn for transformation and think solely of Cheryl Strayed.
When we examine some of the written accounts of Black natural experiences, we can see the grasping, questioning, and wonderment that comes with the adjustment of accepting what’s ours. In Nikki Giovanni’s “The Yellow Jacket,” we witness the complicated intertwining of quotidian necessities with the reflection of the “self-possessed” beauty of an insect. She struggles with the chains of modern worry, asking: “Will you sting me? Will you stop annoying me at some point?” while demonstrating an inclination to reflect on how the beauty of nature is effortless. If all we do is expel effort into creating our personal brands and maintaining our Telfar-flecked facade, embracing effortlessness is a literal vacation. Own your vacation.
Embracing the empowerment and refreshment nature gives us, and leaning into the renewing quality of fresh air would turn natural spaces, experiences, and publications from notoriously void of culture to full technicolor. We owe it to ourselves to recognize the value of taking back the walkabout in America, and no longer should we yearn for transformation and think solely of Cheryl Strayed.
When we examine some of the written accounts of Black natural experiences, we can see the grasping, questioning, and wonderment that comes with the adjustment of accepting what’s ours. In Nikki Giovanni’s “The Yellow Jacket,” we witness the complicated intertwining of quotidian necessities with the reflection of the “self-possessed” beauty of an insect. She struggles with the chains of modern worry, asking: “Will you sting me? Will you stop annoying me at some point?” while demonstrating an inclination to reflect on how the beauty of nature is effortless. If all we do is expel effort into creating our personal brands and maintaining our Telfar-flecked facade, embracing effortlessness is a literal vacation. Own your vacation.
