During this time where I took two and a half months to take a break from work, several reflections arose. The first is that you can never take vacations from yourself; your existential processes go with you wherever you go, but it is very important to take a break from your daily life and immerse yourself in a different reality to be able to expand the perspective of the narratives you create. These pauses open portals of understanding and knowledge that allow you to address learning and healing processes. I am very grateful for the opportunity to take that pause and give myself the time to reflect, slow down the pace of production, and dedicate myself to being in conversation with myself, my environment, nature, my son, and my friends.
Since I was very young I’ve had it embedded in my heart that to move forward you have to work very hard. My grandmother worked non-stop until the day she died, so the idea of receiving a grant to rest gave me an overwhelming joy at first, but at the same time, a terrifying shame, a sense of guilt that I had to work before and during my break as if accepting to be financially supported during my break was something to which I had no right. Taking a break and taking a long vacation from work has been an act of rebellion and resistance to those values imposed since my childhood. I would have liked my grandmother or my mother to have been able to take that break, but now it is my turn to change that narrative both for myself, my environment, and the spaces where I have a reach. From now on I want to take on the challenge of resizing the way we relate to time and work at MÁS, where constant and hard work is not what defines the way of working, but intentional, connected, and slow-paced work is what guides the way you take on the job. I invite you to reflect on: how you can approach your work by allowing rest, pause, and fun, and to implement doing less to achieve more in each of the spaces you participate in. Taking time to pause is as important as the work we do to continue creating spaces of liberation for our communities.
Let’s do less to achieve MÁS!
Puerto Rico:
One of the places where I spent the most time during my sabbatical was Puerto Rico. The initial dream was to go to Venezuela, but the international political differences between Venezuela and the USA at the moment made it impossible to have a valid passport to travel to the territory where I was born. So the closest I could come to contact with Venezuela was Puerto Rico, standing on a beach facing the Caribbean Sea knowing that on the other side of the ocean was the shore of the Venezuelan coast that I so longed to touch.
My experience on that island:
Pause, proximity to the territory where I was born, opportunity to feel the warm embrace of the waves of the Caribbean Sea, the embrace of Yemaya.
It was important for me to reconnect with the sensoriality of the Caribbean. Bathing in its sea, eating banana, avocado, mofongo, codfish, drinking fresh coconut water that tickled my stomach, and drinking passion fruit juice that opened up the memories of my childhood in a burst of flavor; being able to hear Spanish on every corner, in every nook, and experience again being in a place where English was the foreign, secondary language. Where the feeling of being the other disappeared for a while. It was also important to catch the colors of the houses of old San Juan with my eyes, those colonial houses that we see in droves reproduced in the small souvenir paintings that we bring home to remind us of the colors of the place we left. Listen to the chords of the stray cats and the orchestral song of the coquis. Feel the humid heat on the skin, in the joints, and in the heart. Dancing Bomba in the community Batey in the Plaza del Negro de la Perla; dance Bomba at the Iman in Piñones. Visit the studio of the painter Samuel Lind, visit the Ancon de Loiza, dance Salsa live with the Gran Combo de Puerto Rico in the plaza, and witness the procession of the Vejigantes in the traditional festivals of the town of Loiza in commemoration of Santiago Apóstol.
Everything, absolutely everything, was a healing and joyful journey experienced by this woman who identifies as Black and Afro-descendant.
Thanks to “Black joy grant” for providing the resources so that this pause would happen.
