🌑 Remind Me to Love

it's a new moon in sagittarius 🌑

Image Description: "Remind Me to Love" – a horizontal collage with a background of light blue tiles on the left and a verdant green landscape on the right over which various colorful images span the page including from left to right/ top to bottom: an illustration of a female body with blue skin and red hair with a white lion depicted on the belly, a photo of a light skinned woman with blond hair and black dress and boots laying on the edge of an empty blue-tiled pool, a photo of two medium brown toned bare-chested male bodies close together, one holding a large format camera (therefore possibly an image in a mirror), a blurry light skinned young child standing in front of a cake with 8 candles, an illustration of a dark skinned person dressed as the Statue of Liberty holding a dark skinned naked baby, two dark skinned adults with long dread locs, an illustration of a labyrinth, a photo of an older indigenous meso-American woman and a cutout of a figure from a Kehinde Wiley painting of a dark skinned male presenting person in a long white t-shirt and baggy jeans standing jauntily with  left hand on hip – an oversized lotus flower seems to sprout form his right hand which holds a cane; letters from Amharic fidäl from a small strip along the bottom border of the collage.

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Listen to me read this essay:

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Hi friends

How are you feeling? Especially you in the northern hemisphere? Entering the season when nature naturally rests while dumdum humans human can impact our well-being. Amidst all the messages to shop and socialize, I hope you resist the pull toward revving up and instead embrace slowing, stilling, sleeping, wintering…

I am talking to myself (I am always talking to myself). 🙄 My laptop died while I was away this weekend. Yesterday, I had to do thanksgiving shopping, get a new laptop, visit a dear friend in town from Costa Rica, welcome my sister, and also get started on this newsletter and launching my first workshop in a long while👇🏾. Also, my apartment is in a state of intense flux as furniture and objects get divided. None of these present as ideal circumstances for writing. I like everything tidied and ordered before I write (except my clothes, my clothes are always a mess). Right now, VERY little in my life is tidied and ordered. I'm here with you, for better or worse. 

I created my first website almost twelve years ago. That was my initial foray into sharing my writing (i.e. talking to myself publicly). Because I am a nerd, I signed up for a coding class at a now-defunct Bushwick artist collective. Once a week, I took a long bus ride and walked the few but lengthy frigid blocks towards Newtown Creek. The old warehouse was a bustling building that welcomed creators of all kinds. On the second floor, I joined a ragtag group determined to grasp HTML and CSS. While in other classrooms people learned woodworking or photography, in one month, I built my own site from scratch. The url was remindmetolove.com and I sent my first posts to friends and community listservs. I remember feeling very excited and extremely nervous to put myself out “there.”

I chose the name remind me to love because after a particularly powerful experience on a meditation retreat, I came to viscerally understand that mindfulness and love are intrinsically linked. The word mindfulness emphasizes the attentional (and cognitive) aspect of awareness – a skill needed in our contemporary culture of constant distraction (again, talking to myself). AND, in my experience, true presence involves more than paying attention – with my mind; it feels like remembering – with all my senses. On that long ago retreat, simply breathing in and out, I recognized a powerful and transformative quality inherent within: the capacity for an embodied awareness thoroughly imbued with care and kindness for myself and all around me. The state itself did not last more than a few minutes, but the insight impacted me permanently. My website’s name was me to talking to myself in order not to forget: remember love, remember love, remember love…

This past weekend, I attended the Miami Book Fair (one of – if not the – biggest book fairs in the country)… as an invited author. I was probably the only “self help” book on the roster, and all my insecurities about not being a “real” writer were definitely kicked up. Yes, even though I’ve been sharing my writing for a dozen years, even though I’ve published a book with a big 5 publisher, even though – despite ridiculously challenging health and personal experiences – I faithfully send this newsletter… I still diminish myself.

The day before I arrived in Miami was my mom’s sixth year death anniversary. Since her passing, I better recognize the trauma patterns in which we were enmeshed, how these prevented healing within and between us while she was alive, and that my many insecurities and limitations are rooted there. I name the patterns. I examine them. I bring them into various processes for healing. This recognition extends to dynamics within all my relationships (especially the one with myself) so that I am more able to remember to love (and to remember to remember to love… it’s a process y’all! 😜). This allows me to appreciate that I am and have always been more than my patterns.

A passage from Brandon Taylor's sweater weather (reviewing a new translation of Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Children) speaks to the need to remember the love that existed/exists within families, even brutal ones. 

Image description: Image of text reading:“'Arkasha! Arkasha!' cried Kirsanov, breaking into a run and waving his arms. Moments later his lips were pressed to the dusty, sunburned, beardless cheek of the young graduate." Perhaps I am sentimental, but I found this really moving. I feel like I’ve spent the last several years writing about difficult, brutal families. Also reading about difficult, brutal families. And it was nice to be reminded that people do sometimes love each other. I think in the 19th Century and into the early bit of the 20th Century, it was still possible to believe that people could love each other. That they could express this love. That one could depict this expression in art without fear. Indeed, that one must depict this expression of love in art if one is to be a real artist. That to express love in art is not the enemy of complexity or thought. I don’t know, I found it really affecting, but perhaps that is because I am so poisoned by the late capitalist alienation that has become the default aesthetic and emotional framework of contemporary life. Also because no one hugged me as a child.

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Yelp. “Also, no one hugged me as a child.” 🥺

I will continue to explore and share what was broken and brutal within my mom (and my dad… hello!) and how that impacted our family. I know that when I write courageously, it benefits me and others. I do write about clan & culture, but, for many reasons, I have been (overly?) careful with what I publish. Especially as an Ethiopian-Eritrean daughter, I am conditioned to obscure truths as pretenses and protect stories as secrets. Still, I aspire to write more openly about family dynamics & dysfunction while honoring the cultural differences within which I exist. I continue to investigate the balance – also, be bold & brave.*

That morning, before I prepared and packed for my trip, I lit a candle in front of my mom's photo and sat down at my desk to write in my journal. I spoke to my mother with a deep sense of gratitude – maybe more than ever before. I apologized for my ignorances and incapacities. I asked for her guidance and support.

The next day, when I arrived at the fair, I checked into my hotel and went to pick up my per diem (a per diem means I'm a real writer, am I right?). Thrilled to have shed my winter clothes and grateful for a bit of sun peeking through the clouds, I exited the building and walked toward the book fair's streets, which feature hundreds of booths by booksellers and other exhibitors. The very first booth I saw was this one.

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Image description: Photo of a street fair tent at the Miami Book Fair selling t-shirts; the sign identifying the tent reads KOKI.

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My mom’s name is Koki.  ✨😯🔮✨

This moved me. The fair moved me. To listen to brilliant authors all weekend – young and old, novice and expert; to see crowds of people – especially families – exploring the offerings; to connect with other first time authors my age who also feel like imposters 🫠; to witness the many devoted readers braving flooding rains on Sunday; to hear Sandra Cisneros (periodt) say that all of us should write poetry to cleanse ourselves, that we should send poets to disaster areas (#PoetsNotFEMA), that it's by repeatedly breaking that our hearts stay open (and then to run into her in an elevator and experience her magnificent brightness and beauty up close 😵). 

To be a writer among writers and understand that this, this jumbled, beautiful collection of words right here, is one way I remember to love.

I continue learning about love every day, every moment. Sometimes because of its lack or distortion inside me. Often because of the exquisite ways I experience it through and around me. At the moment, especially because I am continually reminding myself to recognize and feel it inside me. 

Thank you mommy.

May we all remember to love.

💗

Sebene

* One of the best things about the fair was finally meeting the lovely and brilliant Maud Newton in person! I’m thrilled to take her upcoming writing class for “acknowledging troubled family histories honestly, open-heartedly, and with imagination.” Please read her book, Ancestor Trouble (you can thank me later).

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