medicine bundle archive: winter 2025

♢ Theme: Collective Reckoning & Ancestral Resilience ♢

A reflection on fear as protection in Black life, boundaries that preserve peace, and remembering the ancestral tools coded in our genetic memory for navigating state-sanctioned violence.

I send this medicine bundle to you in hopes that you are cultivating your own, that you are noticing and responding to the needs that surface this winter, that you are tending to the joy that will not quiet, and making space for the rage, grief, and sorrow that simply wants to be seen.

remembering

observations

✧ An audio version of this post is available below.

I sit here in my studio, the sky white, pregnant with unfallen snow. Lee Morgan’s Search for New Land fills the room, a fitting soundtrack for the whirlwind of these past 19 days. February feels as short as January feels long.

Folks seem to be landing—post-election, post-transfer of power and in the midst of ongoing political and social tyranny. Many have landed in rage, disbelief, and, most relevant to me, fear.

I am in the business of fear. I walk with my community through its muddy, mucky terrain. This Black History Month, I wrote about Fear as Protection —a reflection on how fear has shaped and safeguarded Black life. I have spent years wrestling with, running from, and finally accepting fear as a part of life. It is heartbreaking to live in fear. And those who uphold systems of violence rely on that heartbreak to shut us down.

The trauma of racialized fear is disabling—neurologically, genetically, and ancestrally. The aim is to make it harder to resist and reclaim our power.

But we are not new to state-sanctioned violence.