Loaded Beauty
I buried a tiny note to my ancestors in the gooey, black plough mud of South Carolina a few weeks ago. I said a little prayer, sandwiched the piece of paper between a folded, cancelled credit card and smooshed them both into the mud. Rituals, clearly, are new to me. As I knelt into the salt marsh at low tide, listening to the familiar clanging of the Port of Charleston less than a mile away, I almost impaled my right eyeball with a knife-y tipped blade of cordgrass. Typical, sneered my inner cynic, try to bury a bit of capitalism and honor the ol’ ancestors and end up blinded by nature.
“This place is expensive, but oh so beautiful,” Mom had gushed a year earlier when she moved into I’On, a “new urbanism” planned community in Mt. Pleasant, SC built in 1995. I’On sits at the edge of a peninsula, looking out over the bright green, spartina grass waterways of Hobcaw Creek. Large white egrets slowly ungulate on the docks each morning hunting the crackling crabs at low tide. Giant elder oak trees with heavy, sometimes threatening limbs, help sell the “old southern charm” owners pay millions for. Mom lived in what is called a FROG — Furnished Room Over Garage. She, like me, has a penchant for beauty she can’t quite afford. She paid $2800/mo. in rent for a studio apartment and I spent a few months living in her loft. It seems creepily ironic that Following the Regenerative Rabbit led to me to live in what felt like New Gilead with my mother, over a garage, burying notes and credit cards in the mud, as we awaited our residency visas to Portugal.
Each morning I walked the leaf blown sidewalks in I’On, uncomfortable with how beautiful it was. When I entered white supremacy rehab, it became impossible to ignore how it designs, builds, segregates, populates, and affords beautiful places like this. Beauty passed down from European architecture, doric columns and temple facades, evolved into Georgian steps and wrap-around screened-in porches. I cringed at how much I loved the gas lit lanterns framing a large, oak doorway adorned with a perfect oversized, fall wreath. It was almost idyllic save the labor and bones of enslaved humans making up the dna of manicured gardens, the knifey cordgrass poking me in the eyeball, and the incessant banging, whirring, racket of billions of dollars in global trade at the Port of Charleston just across the creek.
“The Wando Welch Terminal (WWT) in the Port of Charleston is your premier connection to global markets…[and]…is South Carolina Port’s largest container terminal at more than 400 total acres and moves approximately 78% of the port’s annual container volume. WWT handles container vessels of all sizes, but it's cranes and wharf are specialized to handle three neo-Pamanax ships at one time with a maximum capability of handling vessels up to 20,000 TEU.”
One of the largest drive-thrus in the world, the Port of Charleston brings in $63.4 billion in “economic impact” and is currently being deepended “to achieve a 52-foot depth in 2022 — yielding the deepest harbor on the East Coast. The 52-foot depth enables mega container ships to call on the Port of Charleston any time, any tide.”
Any time, any tide.
Any time, any tide, the metal banging grows louder through my double-paned window. Giant robots slamming containers, one after the other, moving stuff from football field sized ships to trucks to me and everyone in the world. I google search for documentary films about the port and find nothing. Nothing about the current state of the former center of the slave trade where 40 percent of enslaved Africans forced into North America passed through. Nothing about the sounds of ever-widening, channel dredging, billions. I know what it is and yet I still feel like a journalist breaking a story we must not know.
After a 500 year stay, I am taking my DNA and leaving America. I feel priced out actually. Like most expats, ahem, immigrants, I seek a place to live where I can afford a home, feel some semblance of safety, have access to clean food and healthcare, and a place my Mother (and eventually me) can afford to retire in peace. It is confusing to leave given it is the only home I have ever known and it appears I am (maybe) related to everyone (DNA matches per Ancestry.com below).
I have spent the last few years wrestling with my ancestry. Mostly the misunderstanding that my worth came from hard work, thanks to the West Virginia coal miners, and that being responsible for the world will make me “good”, and being good will make me “free” thanks to the Lutheran ministers. I was pretty righteously sure I came from poor, smart people and at least one badass witch burned in Salem. I do come from them but I come from the bastards too. One horrifying sounding bounty hunter of the Cherokee in West Virginia and at least one slave owning farmer from Northern Virginia. These are “my people” too.
It has taken years to move through the shame spiral and recognize the real payoff of white supremacy; when I inhabit a manufactured narrative where I get to be the hero and savior, I become the arbiter of “good” and “free”. Like a God. It gave me a sense of purpose and worth, a pedestal to place myself high above the bastards in my own lineage (and by extension, everyone else). In that perceived separation grew a sense of responsibility and power, a twisted wannabe superhero ignoring the cause, to be the solution.
I am now writing from a tea house on an Azorean island deep in the Atlantic. I am drinking a black tea grown on the island first cultivated by Chinese tea masters from Macau in 1878, at a table built from an “invasive” Japanese tree, writing on a laptop made with materials from all over the world, and listening to Nat King Cole sing Christmas.
There is no one solution or hero for the moment we are in. I’m called to build sanctuary for all kinds of humans and (non-humans) and midwife creative expression for myself and others. The “how” is revealing itself one move at a time but so far it appears post-activist, seasonal, emergent, and non-linear.
They say not to move too much when you are stuck more than a foot-deep in plough mud. Try to disperse your weight, using yourself or nearby objects, to keep from sinking. Whatever you do, don’t yank. You want to loosen the mud. Instead, wiggle.
I work with executives, entrepreneurs and storytellers to connect to their confidence, passion, and purpose, in private 1:1 leadership coaching sessions. Want to discover what makes you come alive, and and how to lean into it? Sign up for coaching sessions, designed to meet you where you are in your journey. Online or in-person intensives in the Azores, Portugal.
