Where are you being called?

Journeying where our roots and routes take us.

This February marks the 100th anniversary of Black History Month. One hundred years of insisting that our stories matter, our contributions be seen, and our humanity never be erased. I am asking myself what this moment is calling forth in me in the last days of this month.

This week, I reflected on Congressman John Lewis, whose birthday we honored yesterday. His call to make "good trouble” has never felt more necessary as I attempt to navigate these times mindfully.

I have also been deeply moved by hearing from readers who are discovering their way to Make Good Trouble, in this urgent moment, feeling Rep. Lewis’s memory ignite something in them, too. The story takes new forms and the work continues.

It’s also what led me to share my family story in Rebecca Carroll’s feature for The Meteor, My Personal Black History, alongside Black women visionaries, creatives, and activists rooted in purpose nationwide. Rebecca’s invitation reaffirmed a notion I often revisit: memory is much more than just sentiment. It can serve as a compass.

That compass brought me back to my mother, Dr. Willa Alfreda Campbell Wilson. She traveled from Jim Crow-era South Carolina to Idaho as a young girl, one of the only Black girls at a national Girl Scout roundup in the sixties.

Mom moved through Europe and Africa as a teen, received a fellowship to India as a scholar and speech pathologist, and lived and worked across the Middle East for decades, leaving something of leadership, love, and brilliant spirit everywhere she went. She moved through this world with loving curiosity, courage, and a steadfast sense of sovereignty, and she made sure I knew that expansiveness was my inheritance too.

My mother (pictured with the gorgeous afro in the middle) and her college and high school friends radiating fierce power and joy!

A year before she transitioned, my family returned to Orangeburg, South Carolina, where I was born, and stood at the memorial honoring those lost in the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre. She bore witness aloud, speaking of friends she had lost, what her body had endured, and the years she dedicated to a movement that demanded everything. She did not soften it. She wanted my father, my husband, and me to know. I now realize she wanted me to also carry the story and be able to tell it to those coming up now and in the future.

That pilgrimage brought to mind sankofa, the Twi word rooted in the wisdom of Ghana's Akan people, shown as a bird turning its head backward to retrieve an egg. We must look back to reclaim what is lost to move forward. Every journey offers that invitation. To let the past speak. To bring its lessons into the present. To build something lasting from what we have lived, survived, inherited, and give it a chance to flourish.

In addition to my activism, creative practices, and movement rituals, journeying is one of the ways I stay alive to possibility. For me, journeying doesn’t always mean leaving home. But stepping into a new environment, breathing different air, and being held by a community you haven’t yet met cracks open your perspective and reminds you what’s possible.

When divisive forces work to constrict our imaginations, rewrite our histories, and limit our futures, I choose to journey — inward and outward — as an act of defiance and devotion.

Creating spaces where we can come together, breathe, and belong is sacred work to me. So when the world feels like it is closing in, we do the opposite. We gather. We move. We journey wider to defy the narrowing and choose presence with kindreds over resignation.

This year, my beloved co-creators and I are building just that: intimate, soulful gatherings in Rhinebeck, NY, Greece, and Mexico, rooted in storytelling, creativity, restoration, and the knowledge that our lives are worth savoring fully, out loud, together.

If you feel the call, say yes. If you have questions about accessibility or how to make it work, reach out.

👉🏾 Come journey with us.

With love,

Jamia