calming the tantrum of existence

Hi friend,

I write to you between audio messages and lockets, delayed texts and hastily wrapped gifts.

I’m writing because I trust you asked, because I want to tell you more.

I want to tell you about the forest. About the land here and how it’s receiving me. I want to tell you about the woman I met in the trees, Stella, and how we met each other in our arrivals.

I want to tell you about arrival, the many I have had in the last month. The ones I am still working on, still unpacking into. I want to tell you I am okay. That my heart is weeping and my spirit cartwheeling through fields all while I adorn my body in black skirts and silver loops. I want to tell you I am mourning, I am accepting, I am no longer afraid to be seen.

I want to tell you so this can be true.

I want to tell you so I can be true.

I want to tell you because I miss you and I want you to know.

This week I arrived into my first week as a creator in residence at sanctuary. Which is a fancy way to say my friends steward this resonant space in the forest of Stone Mountain, Georgia and I get to live here for the next two months with community and land and spirit all encouraging me along in my creation.

I arrived here feeling encouraged. Feeling hopeful. Feeling all was conspiring for me. Even my heartache. All of it was directing me deeper towards myself and the loved ones I orbit.

And so I have been settling deeper into Raya. Into this arrival. Into acceptance.

 “Yeah, I don’t know. I felt really nervous about leaving New York because I felt so loved there and I felt so with my people there. And, even if I feel less of that same energy here, I am being so received by this land and I think that it is... Atlanta really so much is for me about the maternal and I feel in it, feel in that womb of the forest. And, it’s such a blessing.”

 “Im on a walk. I hope you can hear the birds.... oh, that one’s really beautiful. I really hope you heard it. Um, and just, oh, I wanna cry. This land is so beautiful. It’s so beautiful.”

NOTES APP: MAY 02, 2025 9:31 PM BST - Copacabana Beach

Settling into the crowd, I am accepting that this is the world I live in, this is the life, this is the body.

I think I’d like to spend less energy and brain space processing that and reacting to (the very startling) sensation of being a body in this life in this world. [Read: reaction is different than response] If I spent less time in that purgatory between denial and acceptance, I can spend more energy actually making and shaping my life and this world. The body maybe needs less shaping — again accepting that in this life I have been dealt these legs, these eyes, this hair, these lips. And actually, my energy is best spend past acceptance: in that work of moving in more deeply to this shape, learning what colors and textures I like to adorn it with. How it moves in certain rhythms and stretches to others.

And in this life and this world, if I sit more deeply into my experience of it — really be present with the fact that I am in Rio sitting on the beach in a crowd of over 2 million people on MDMA waiting to hear Shakira. That is me. Right now. In this life where this is what queer little mixed American girls do. They fly away to Brazil to soak in the sea and ponder diaspora and recreate a career. In a world where hot girls posting travel photos and bikini ass shots is directly linked to monetizing a war that drops bombs on starving children. This is the world I am in, that I participate in. And this life and this body is the one I experience it through —and the more I accept it, both my surroundings and my location in them, the best I can actually be an active player, can be taking action to reshape the environment and the choreography of its infrastructures.

And that I think is what ‘calma’ is about. It’s about calming the tantrum of realizing my existence, of realizing I am married to myself and that in the experience I will always be this character. The more I accept this role, the better I can play it.

I will no longer fear myself.

May 6, Leme Beach

“Yesterday in conversation with Joshua, Diana, Zi and Ayana, the repeated theme seemed to be my need for self acceptance. For trusting in who I am and that the people I love trust in that too. The prompts and the work I am excited to do are asking me to be public. To share what I’m imagining, what I’m doing, how I’m practicing. The friends I invite into conversation and witnessing tell me all the time how they are changed, motivated, encouraged by me and my existence. Why wouldn’t I share this? So much of this as Ayana pointed out is a fear of grieving in public, extremely ironic given that collective grief is core component of mournful design. As she has said and reminds me: we often need our own medicine.”

Arriving home in LA, in New York, in Atlanta, everyone says I have a glow, that I am glowing. I’m not sure if it’s the lingering Brazilian tan, the afterglow of making a hard but true decision, or the shine of a deep arrival into self, but somehow, there is a light in me.

I am shy to receive this witnessing and shyer to recount it.

But more, I am curious about my light, and about my relation to it. I’m curious what in me is shinning so bright that everyone can see. And how silly then that each time it’s witnessed my reaction is, to blush, to curve my shoulders in, put a hand to my chest, as if to cover — hide — the light and say ‘wait really, me?”

You silly girl! You forget yourself.

Why don’t I see my own light if I feel it? Why don’t I accept that to be light and to offer it to others will require this kind of witnessing?

Lately I have been learning to name my fear of being in public. Of publicity. It’s why I struggle to share my writing, to smile for a camera, or let my voice sway the flow of plans. It’s cringe to be me, to be on display, because I have seen all my contradictions.

Trust me, I have studied them, but still I fear you seeing them too, pointing them out, reflecting them back to me. Because in that I assume a judgement, a punishing god, a tone of well, why didn’t you fix this part first? Why don’t you edit that part out?

As I practice loving another with acceptance and non-judgement, I realize how unpracticed I am at offering that to myself, at forgiving myself before anyone else has to.

I feel a real desire for this. Want for that forgiveness and permission.

I remember when I was 22, newly arrived in LA and still aspiring to make it as an artist in the fine arts world. On the phone with a curator, I asked her if I was allowed. She told me she, nor anyone else, could give me the permission I was seeking. That permission to make. And do so out loud. I had to give that to myself.

Five years and many homes later, I still seek that permission. Still evade this responsibility to myself and search the globe for some other entity to grant to me what I self deny. I still want for that permission to make — probably why I seek out containers like residencies — but more than permission, I want forgiveness. Forgiveness for and permission to be me. To contain all this contradiction of nationality, class, gender, sex, race, time, presence and being. Cause that’s all I can find this all to be: a deep deep contradiction. A brewing contrast.

I feel so at my surface in the work I am doing now I find my self shy in public. Shy that if anyone looks to closer they’ll see right thought to it all, right through inside to me. I am so full of my soul and spirit, the energy is pushing right to my edges, making my skin a thin translucence veil, a soft film wrapped around the flesh of a glowing star.

You say I have a glow because you see how I burn in side. You see the combustion of past selves rendered new. A star in constant self consumption and becoming. A fiery mourning. I no longer want to shay away from sharing my light, so dear one, will you let me grieve with you?

I felt my character-defining yearning for home so strong before I left — some of y’all know I was fully in the process of buying land and a house! — and now, returning, and returning through all of my home cities, LA, New York, Atlanta, I feel less of it. And I don’t necessarily even feel arrived more in one place than another. Not even back ‘at home’ finally. Each one felt like a stage of arrival. Departing Brazil, I yearned to return to my friends, my communities, the forest and my family, all scattered across the three places. Arriving in them all now I feel no different and completely changed. I feel returned.

I think I used to go to sleep every day wondering if I would wake up a new person. And so I decided, if the opportunity came, I would be prepared. With all the   micro-analyses of life, self, society, I would be able to make the correct calculation of who I would become in that new morning.

And I am remade each day, each new mourning.

And also I always remain.

I am this, is she, is we.

I know I will become in iteration, in many lifetimes in different instances, but in this case, in this instance, I am Raya. Even as I shape shift and toggle through surnames and usernames, I will still be this character, with her many contradictions, her many pasts, presents and futures.

There is an inescapable truth of me.

So I might as well get on board! Embrace the shapes and flavors. Play with this material. This voice and this body. I might as well make magic.

I might as well make magic!

Maybe a non judgmental accepting love showed me how to love myself. I definitely have a lot to thank her for. Maybe separation from work and that exchange for a glorified part of myself allowed for a deeper release and detachment from ego. Maybe I just need to breathe. Needed to write it all down to see it outside myself. Maybe I needed to bake on the beach and get comfortable with the shape of my body. Maybe Brazil taught me about contrast and contradiction. About intimacy and the vibrancy of connection without fear or promise.

Maybe this is the answer we all knew was coming. That the home was the self.

And I did, did know this was the answer the whole time. I cringed whenever a witness to my yearning for home would return with the answer, well you know that home only exists in yourself. You are the home you crave, the home you have wherever you go.

Like yesssss, I know.

But I also want a door and a room and a bed and a kitchen and a garden and place to call my own, a place to invite you over for dinner. I want a people and a place and a land to give thanks to, a land to come from, a land to belong to and store memory in. I want rites and rituals and a culture not borrowed or imagined or forgotten. One passed on and known and retold. I want the home that was stolen, the home erased, forgotten and drowned.

And I’ll always want for that. And that desire for home and this gift for homemaking in the interim will always pull me closer and closer to self (in all her iterations, spirals, and quantum truths).

“For once I don’t want the question of home to distract me from the visions I can realize now and from soaking in the home of right here.”

And so lately I have been facing my ego, seeing how it challenges me with narratives towards shapeshifting fear: comparison, punishment and self silencing. Scribbling through journals, as I write out and release the inner dialogue, I come to find home beyond the mind, beyond the body — maybe thats the self home I thought they were talking about — and find it somewhere deeper in myself,

in this iteration called Raya.