A taste of the future
Today, New Year’s Day, my family will eat a meal I divined from my ancestors. I am Jamaican on my daddy’s side, and Southern on my mom’s—this meal is a mash-up of both. It’s a meal I created to nourish us as we move into a new year. Like all wise folk, I insist upon black-eyed peas and collard greens on New Year’s Day. But our black-eyed peas are mixed into Jamaican rice and peas, and our collards are cooked with cabbage and a hint of scotch bonnet. It’s all served alongside the oxtail my Auntie Pat told me how to make.
The whole process starts on December 30th when I review last year’s meal plan so I can make a new one. The feeling of grounded familiarity that ritual evokes begins to surface. The comfort of connection to lineage makes me feel a little stronger, a little clearer, and a little safer. That feeling warms and expands through the shopping, the cooking, and the eating. I change it a little every year, allowing the tradition to continue to take shape.
This meal is about integration. Not some melting pot, assimilation nonsense, but finding the connection points between the past and present. It’s a casting back to the tradition, wisdom, and strength of the past to reconfigure it for the present. It is a healing and a dreaming; it is an honoring and a celebration. It’s forged by the throughline of our need to be nourished and our desire for connection and belonging.
To chart our way forward, we don’t drag the past into the future. We don’t rigidly cleave to outdated, old-timey practices and thinking just because they are our heritage. We evolve and re-shape. We stretch our imagination to envision something beyond what our ancestors pictured for us. We root around in our lineage to pick up what’s needed and leave behind what isn’t.
This conversation with multiple lineages of the past that allows for the creation of something new for the present, which can be passed on to the future, is a process of evolution. It’s a conversation that is at the heart of Next River. The liberated, joyful future we are working toward cannot emerge through the context of the reality we inherited. To move forward, we have to evolve. We have to be guided by both our ancestors and our descendants. It means making space to practice the future we want so our descendents have the best of us to pull from as they continue the evolution.
Our abolitionist ancestors didn’t get to see the future they dreamed of. And the emancipation we are living in is not exactly as they imagined it. But in order for us to be here, they had to vision beyond the limitations of their present moment. We have to tap into a sense of trust and radical belief that the possibilities of the future are real beyond our wildest dreams.
People are already practicing a liberated joyful future. Next River is here to learn from them and to amplify what they are doing so we can bring the future closer to where we are.
I hope this year brings us more healing and dreaming, more noticing and evolving, and less of what we need to leave behind. Happy New Year.
Warmly, Mia
Juicy January
You may be familiar with Dry January, where you abstain from drinking alcohol for the month of January. I’ve done it a couple of times, but in 2020, I realized that the framing didn’t align with my spirit.
Dry January focuses on abstaining. It sounds like deprivation to me and that’s not really my style. If I’m going to release something, I’m also going to claim something. I’m going to focus on what I’m moving toward and receiving.
Also, “Dry January” sounds hella ashy. I don’t want to be dry. I want to be well moisturized and hydrated. My friend Tammy uses the word “juicy” to describe things that are good and nourishing and deep—like relationships, conversations, or processes that make you think and feel, and leave you better off. So for the third year, I’ll be doing Juicy January—a January focused on physical, emotional, and spiritual hydration. Feel free to join me. If you want more guidance, I’ve got some here.