On Hearing Home: More than a Retreat

As I sat entirely alone on Kvalvika beach during the wee hours of a softly lit May night, writing, healing myself from a deep heartbreak and finding out who I was again, 

I first dreamed of a gathering.

What a gift it would be to bring Black women+ here, to this place that instantly gave me peace, and rooted me deeply into this planet through its breathtakingly wondrous nature and the extremes of its being: so light, so dark.

Place and homespace has always felt tenuous for me, often associated closely—too closely—with people and not closely enough with the land beneath my feet.

Growing up in Treaty 6 territory on Turtle Island, what most now know as north/central Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada, was my first taste of this rooted rootlessness. When I grew up and knowledgeable enough to understand the implications of the settler side of my family farming on Indigenous land, any feeling of home I once felt there vanished, necessarily. And yet, what to do as part of the African diaspora, descended from roots I can’t trace. How to find a home?

Perhaps it’s about listening to something deeper. Some kind of call. Some kind of resonance between your body and the land beneath it. It’s hard to listen for this over the din of life, over all the messages we receive about what we are supposed to like and gravitate toward.

While travelling to see a friend in Northern Norway/Sápmi five years ago, I felt this resonance for the first time. I’ve always been drawn to cold, northern places, always felt comfort somehow in the volatility and extremity of weather, temperature, light. Yes, I know, this affinity is a bit weird, a bit strange. And yet, I embrace it, and here, somehow, I felt and heard what it was like to belong someplace. It is no less complex a feeling than that I felt on Turtle Island when it comes to indigeneity, and it is a true feeling. I hold space for the troubled and indeterminate nature of what moving about this planet and finding home can mean in a body with the history mine holds.

I listened to this resonance, this feeling of home, and pointed myself in its direction, some years later finding myself living here and learning what life here is like in this body. It has not always been easy, but the resonance hasn’t left me. Now approaching my fourth full summer here, and finishing my second cycle of the full turn of seasons, I am feeling the resonance even more. Becoming accustomed to the literally polar shifts of this place has been somehow calming.

As I continue to engage in the anti-oppressive work I do, and weathering the toll of it on my mind and body, I am constantly searching for space and time and community with which I can let my hair down, relax, be. Not matter how we, as Black women+, engage in the struggle against white supremacy, we deserve and are owed rest. Whether we engage in the streets, in the office, in our homes, in our joy, in the parenting of our children, in the creation of our art, in the survival of our bodies and our minds, we deserve and are owed spaces to love and be loved by people who know what it is to move through the world as we do.

Those years ago as I sat under the lit night in late May on Kvalvika Beach, Moskenesøya, I wondered: what if I could gather Black women+ here, to feel what this place feels like? What if we could bask in the energy this place creates, what if we could find some time and space to rest easy, to experience nature, to move and breathe and create art in community?

After all…

Finding and revelling in our joy is a radical act.

Relaxing is a radical act.

Being in community with one another is a radical act.

Creating in community with one another is a radical act.

To echo bell hooks, “renewal is an act of self-love,” and Audre Lorde, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

To renewal, and to war, then.

Shall we?

For more information on the Hearing Home retreat from July 23 - August 6, CLICK HERE.

Non-Black folx interested in financially supporting this opportunity for Black women+ to find joy and rejuvenation in community, CLICK HERE.

Our rest, rejuvenation, and restoration is * vital * and non-negotiable. 

And, as Black women+, we belong. Wherever we are.

In my ongoing process of learning Norwegian, one of the phrases that I felt deeply immediately was "Jeg hører hjemme her."

Directly translated to English: "I hear home here." More precisely: I belong, here.

And so, Hearing Home Retreat is born.

I hope you'll join me as I endeavour to provide the kind of space that I myself crave and need, to belong in community, in this stilling, rousing place I hear, and call, home.