How @jeffberwick Helped Me With A Water Burial In Africa

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Some people don't want to know where they came from. They feel content with where they are now, and feel no need to look back, or dig up.

I get that.

But maybe it's because I voluntarily displaced myself outside of my birth country (The United States), that I've been thinking about origins so much.

Whenever I've crossed paths with a dark-skinned, curly-haired Mexican (it isn't often), two things happen: (1) I confirm that they are from the coast; and (2) we seem to feel a mutual kinship based on nothing more than similar physical features.

When you've gone two years hardly ever seeing others who look like you, it has a weird effect over time. It's increasingly gnawing -- like termites, nibbling nibbling away...

(And no, White expats -- whether from the US, Canada or Europe -- do not know what I'm talking about, because they are reinforced by each other in a way that's very different from my long-term expat experience, as a Black American. That is not at all intended to be a divisive, or poor-me, statement. It is simply an experiential fact.)

So, for some blended variety of reasons described above... when I learned that Jeff was going to Africa, I immediately asked him:

"Would you please bury a pair of earrings for me, there?"

HE DID.

And he sent me this video as better-than-I-asked-for proof. (In addition to asking him to bury them for me, I also requested a selfie of him doing it.)

These earrings traveled with him to Kenya, then Somalia, and finally Zimbabwe, where this water burial happened.

I cry when I watch it because:

(1) a friend took the time to do such a thoughtful thing;

(2) he never called me weird or crazy for asking this favor; and

(3) LAND MATTERS to me... I'm the granddaughter of a small farmer, and grew up eating the well-flavored vegetables and fruits he grew... as a young adult, my table-tops held the flowers he grew, and I drank wine from his grape arbor, all grown on his land in Gary, Indiana... as an only child of a single parent, I bonded with acorns and frogs, I studied leaves and stones, the way normal people study faces... I became (and still am) ENTHRALLED with the idea and function of seeds. Fruit seeds. Idea seed. Love seeds. And SEEDS EMBODY ORIGIN.

So whether or not Jeff grokked all that when he agreed to bury my earrings in my land of Origin that I have yet to physically walk on, he planted a part of me there.

On any given day, there's plenty of things to make us feel separate. Heck, I just called-out one myself in this very post. And that's also why Jeff's gesture means that much more to me. I thought it was a very cool thing of him to do, and wanted to share (after getting his blessing first, of course).

Thanks for taking this rather sentimental journey with me. :-)

I am shamelessly bringing softness back. <3

Background Song Credit: "Pulse," by Maxim Kornyshev.

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