when the body calls you home

I recently rediscovered my love for outdoors. I hadn’t known that I could love like this until I was hitting some of the final moments of my dissertation. At this time, I was exhausted, burnt out, fed up, and downright feeling stuck and underwhelmed by how my doctoral program was taking shape. I had suddenly taken a risk, a chance…something I am hard-pressed ever to do. I booked a trip, a four-day, three-night camping and hiking trip with a community of Black women in North Georgia. I hadn’t known what to expect. The timing was both awful and impeccable. Awful because I needed to plan my final defense for my dissertation AND pack my apartment as my lease was ending two weeks out from the trip. Impeccable because my birthday was approaching, and my penultimate semester as doctoral candidate had ended.

It had slipped my mind that as a child, I used to gallivant through the woods in my childhood homes aimlessly and for hours, experiencing nature. It also escaped my mind that I would spend the entire day outside with my maternal grandmother as a toddler then as a child in the summers, planting and pruning vegetation—some for nourishment, others for beauty.

Last summer to quell (or attempt to) the stressors of moving/waiting to be moved to another state; an ostensibly delayed end to my doctoral program; and other messy goings-on, I took up hiking at a local nature preserve. I would spend hours maneuvering beaten trails, coming closer to nature, myself, and God’s intimacy. I learned so many lessons out there at a time that I didn’t think I could absorb another fact, theory, statistic, or academic text. Those hikes really got me through a challenging time, and, coupled with therapy, they helped me keep my sanity.

Fast forwarding to the present in a new state peppered with mountains and hills. For my final graduation, one of my best friends gifted a tent, headlamp, and tent lighting. I also replaced my water-wicking summer hiking shoes with leather and wool felt winter hiking boots. I purchased a hydration backpack and soft flask, along with a portable fan and a portable warmer to tuck away into my pack. I have since gone on a camping trip and a few hiking trips with my partner. I hiked my first ever mountain recently—a big accomplishment for a girl from flat plains. The feeling that I am filled with seeing the difference between the bottom and the peak of that 800-foot elevation, knowing that I somehow climbed it, swells my heart (as it swelled my knees over the next day or two).

Of the two of us, my partner and I, I am the most agile and willing with lawncare and vegetation planting. I’m not sure if I am prone to being a green thumb, maybe a green thumbnail. I take pride in trimming hedges, edging, weed-eating/weed-wacking/weed-whipping (I realized long ago that there is a regional difference with this term, lol), and raking. Oh, I forgot mowing. It is a rather cathartic practice and physically intense, but the yard needs cutting and I need the exercise. Since The Pandemic I took up a container garden, being that it was a difficult task to find produce at the market. Besides I wanted to avoid going to the store as much as possible to make sure I kept my family safe. Also, my parents had managed to yield many a fruit of the vine from their endeavors, and I yearned to detach my wallet strings from as many grocery stores as I could.

It’s a funny thing when the body calls you home, to the familiar. It’s unexpected but pleasantly welcomed…a time when you can stop dissociating and living a life pre-trauma response/s. My body has been calling me home. Back to the roots that I and my ancestors experienced. The Akan peoples call this Sankofa, to go back and get what was forgotten. I was reminded of this point that I had written about in my dissertation when I started reading Dionne Ford’s (2023) Go Back And Get It. Her search for her family prompted me to finally take the plunge and climb up my family tree as I had always wanted. I saw, unbeknownst to me, the generations of farmers and farm helpers that peppered my lineage. (No surprises here being a Black girl from the Deep South, emanating from a history of enslavement.) This might explain why I have been itching to get back to gardening and foraging and living off of the land. Or how I instinctually know an edible thing or a poisonous one during my hikes. Or why I sit and talk for hours with my maternal grandmother about foraging.

The concept of Sankofa is not lost on researchers and social sciences. It’s a concept that I am attempting to bring into my field. We Black women researchers and activists, from Afrofuturism and Africana studies to Black feminism, and other researchers of color have been using and citing ancestral knowledge for years. Cynthia B. Dillard, the theorist who engaged the academy with endarkened feminist epistemology, discusses in many of her works the importance of spirit and recollecting that of which your spirit has once engaged. This could be an ancestral spirit, but yours all the same. Continuing this tradition, S. R. Toliver, in her 2022 book Recovering Black Storytelling In Qualitative Research: Endarkened Storywork, writes how imagination and storytelling traditions are pertinent to living and acting out liberation and resistance that may be found in engaging with what the self knows. Referencing Cynthia B. Dillard, Toliver (2022) writes, “We must remember what we’ve been seduced into forgetting” (p. xxiii). And the artist Alecia Renece writes of remembering and acting on once forgotten truths from a distance past and an ancestral past in her manifesto, Black Girl Creative.

Now I am not sure from which ancestor, if any at all, that I got climbing mountains from, but I hope that my love for outdoors and exploration is something that I can pass through genetic memory to help free my future kin from the bondage of trauma. This idea of play and outdoors may just be the prescription many of us need to rewrite the code of our genetics so that the next generations can benefit as well from better health and coping tactics.