Hey friends, I need your help

Let’s get ‘in kinship’ over the finish line!

Y’all were almost there. I’m blown away by how real this feels. How very real this is.

I need you to share this if you can, to donate if you have capacity, to continue to encourage and believe in me. I am asking you personally directly, and I hope that’s okay.

Every forward, share + donation makes a huge difference. Here’s the link again. If you even send this to 1 person in your network, you will have my eternal gratitude.

We are just under $3000 away from my goal and I can barely CONTAIN MYSELF. I never thought people like me could just write books. Y’all very clearly disagreed and uplifted me every step of the way.

It’s one thing to encourage someone’s potential, to value their mind and work. It’s quite another to do what you all of done. You’ve made my work feel wanted. You’ve communicated in no uncertain terms that not only does my vision matter but that it is needed. This validation has created such an incredible fidelity to this book and process for me. I carry you all with me, in every pen stroke, highlighted frenzied note taking moment that I work to bring this to life.

Right now I’m sitting on a ferry to a small island called Gavdos. I have nothing but a tent, some camping supplies, research materials, and my moleskine. The days I spend here will mark the official beginning of my life as a writer.

Like many other artists and writers, I felt a call for solitude. I felt this deep need to arrive in some way to a neutral space where I could have the stillness and clarity to begin. It’s an odd thing how we spend so much time in frenzied anticipation. Prepping and rehearsing when what is most needed, whether it’s for active listening, beginnings or emotional processing, is a void.

Negative space that is just inert, awaiting occupation without expectation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of the void. The vast emptiness that holds all things. I think about Shiva , the nothingness and how this deity is so often only related to destruction. There is a necessity to the undoing and unbeing of things.

My mind was also called to Jewish mourning period of shiva, and how a dedication to the shape of loss, the weight of absence allows us to grieve in a productive way. There is a necessity to moving through loss, of facilitating deep remembering, and being able to find your way back to community and care.

I’m sitting on this ferry on the verge of tears. Knowing I’m about to be alone, all alone. That it’s time for me to do this. I’m feeling so much processing through me. I’m thinking about pouring my rage and grief into the sea to let it smash and crash, offering up a piece of me in its unrelenting release upon the rocks.

I’m thinking about how only rocks grow softer after taking such incredible force, and about how as far as pressure goes, I’d rather be sand than a diamond.

I think this is the first time I’ve ever taken myself so seriously, while feeling so at ease and certain. I know that I will write a book because I have to, and I already am. It’s as simple as mud.

However it’s already personal and I wonder how much of me will spill into, and what that will ultimately come to mean. It already feels like I’m writing and speaking to you/me/us all at once and sometimes I feel very exposed by that.

I don’t get to know what’s on the other side of this experience yet. But I will tell you when I do.

I’m so grateful for this opportunity. I can’t believe the person who gets to do this is also me.

I’m so grateful to you for your support. Every like, share, kind word is gold to me. Please continue to share and support if you can, and as always keep in touch with me.

In the meantime, I plan to be off grid and, as ever—

in kinship,

Jamila