PREPARE THE ALTAR

An introduction to my Substack

The gleaming stars of Arizona’s Sedona hung, radiant yet solemn, over the chromatic design of the vortex city. A breathing gesture towards our most dangerous yet mundanely human desire—to be wholly connected in spirit, body, and mind—they shifted and blinked and hovered over the domesticated expanse and its inhabiters. Staring out through the window in the backseat of my Mitsubishi, I drank from a travel-size bottle of red Sutterhome wine and patiently waited for the planet to turn, the stars to align, and the wisdom to come.

***

When I was asked to leave my family in Escondido, California, last month—a post for another day—I felt the guilt of relief. For the past six months, I have been neglecting my writing, my editing, my teaching, my music, my art, and myself, in the hopes of helping to keep my niece and nephews from the nomadic and emotionally-abusive lifestyle that is all I’ve known. Just after my uncle, grandfather, and childhood friend died of COVID in 2020, my sister’s husband left her and the kids. She followed him from Arizona to California, but they never reconciled. For months, my sister, who is diagnosed with a mental health issue, and the kids lived in their car. None of us really knew where they were, save for a few hotel and motel stays, until the kids were taken from her.

Shortly afterwards, in summer 2021, their father died. In October 2021, my parents, who were now deciding if they should adopt their grandchildren, caught COVID and were hospitalized in the ICU. Suddenly, while I was supposed to be blissing out on my writing residency with Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, I was weighing the cost of adopting three children. Thankfully, my parents both recovered and came back home to continue the process of fostering but the toll of it all on us was already showing.

I went to California in January, after my fellowship, thinking that if I was present, I could step in where and when needed, be their relief. I thought I had healed to the point of being able to sacrifice what independence I had gained and could settle down and do this for everyone. But there are some things I could not change.

I had made up my mind about raising children a long time ago, when my own child was adopted by my friends. And I had already begun the work on my memoir, both an analysis of my experiences and an investigation into the legislative origins of this country. Already, the task of this memoir requires more of me than any other project I have ever manifested. I was the new editor of a journal dedicated to queer Black femmes and a new adjunct. I was in the middle of building the life I’d always wanted—and now it felt like it was all backsliding.

I was torn between what I felt I needed and what I thought my family needed from me. Attempting humility, I assumed that my purpose, something any eldest child of a BIPOC family might be familiar with, was to make the sacrifice, take the lead, and be the sturdy foundation in my family. Thankfully, both I and my family have acknowledged that this is not my purpose.

Packing up my tiny 10 x 10 space in the kitchen nook, I wrestled with the knowledge that I was selfish. Judgmental. Arrogant. I had thought it was my job to fix the family—and it wasn’t. I was not trying now, I was humbled. They could only do what they could do, same for me.

After a day of healing with my mother and a dinner table of awkward goodbyes, I drove with my sister out to Los Angeles on Saturday to spend the night with my recently widowed grandmother, a woman whom I’m only starting to get to know. We talked Will Smith’s slap, the power of gaudy jewelry, and the afterlife. And on Sunday morning, I grabbed some coffee, drove to the place where I was born, and closed the chapter.

***

After skipping my first Grammys in Las Vegas this past Sunday evening, I’d driven to Sedona, fixed on stealing away into one of the caverns for a few hours. After what has been the most tumultuous three years of my life, and six months of emotional chaos in my family, I felt like it was time for my true healing to begin. The pain in my inner right ear had become more consistent, the swelling in my throat a daily symptom, and the confusion about the true nature of my creative desires throwing me into crying fits every few hours. After my family’s COVID scare and before my move to California, I had been diagnosed with a set of new allergies ranging from gluten to shrimp. None of the symptoms had appeared until I moved in with my family in January and I spent a week bedridden by a ham and cheese sandwich.

The hoodoo in me knows it was more than the sandwich that put me down and caused my whole body to break out into welts that you can still see on parts of my face and chest. It was the jumping off course, the turn backwards into a life I had been pulled away from by spirit. I had followed my gut and become an artist when everyone else had told me to get a job—but now I was going against myself for, what I thought, was my family. I realize now, I had only gone to my family to feed some need for them to know that I was doing everything I could to help, not accepting that by fulfilling what I know to be my purpose—to write and create—I am doing everything I can.

We all have something to offer our loved ones. For some of us, that is time and presence. For others, that is food and a roof over their heads. For people like me, that is witnessing and reassurance. I am not their provider or their healer, I am their witness and their ear. That is all they need from me right now, someone who knows how difficult it is and who can listen without judgement. I can have my opinions, of course, but not to the detriment of the work they, or I, must do.

***

The city of Sedona served as a way-station, a bridge between the world I have always known and the world I must now go and manifest. For a moment, the city was a final destination, the place in which I could let that last bit of my old self die, lay it to rest and be reborn in the energetic field known world-wide. But driving down the untamed roads of a car-camping site just outside of the city’s limits, I could feel the scattering of wishes that had been previously sent up by the privileged few who found their way to the rich and welcoming reds of this oasis in the desert. We congregated, all of us, like a despot of meandering spirits in search of a truth we didn’t want to know: There is no beginning and there is no ending—just one wave of life after the other.

Since I was a child, I had longed for a return to the open sky. Prayed for a communion with a universe outside of my own small complicated and sweaty world. For most of my life, I have kept my concerns for the land’s spirit—and the spirits of its inhabiters—to myself. A child of a child of the Christian God, I was taught that only the few could question heaven and those few were long dead. All that was left for the rest of us to do was to follow, diligently, The Word of God—The Bible. But as an adult, someone swallowing whole skies as I drive through the Southwest, I know to commune with myself is to commune with what is larger than myself, as I am the stardust and the stardust is me. As much concern as I have for the fencing in of the lands, the snatching of it from the Indigenous people, this is as much concern as I should have for the fencing in of my life, and my work as a creative. The spirit, that which brings animation to the agriculture and animals of the land, is the same as that which brings animation to me and to the words I share with others.

I wish I could say different, but I have put a fence around my heart, my mind, my body, my spirit, and my creations. I have set myself into fine lines, glancing into the face of liberation without fully turning to see it whole. This is, in part, the outcome of an American life in the 21st century. I allowed myself to be categorized and hindered by social standards, some spoken and some unspoken. There will always be an argument for some of these standards to be upheld (note how I say some, not most), but before I move from this spot—a small but neat desk in Room 219 at the Econo Lodge in Flaggstaff, Arizona—I want to begin the work of cutting through the wire fences.

***

This Substack will be one of my many tools. I will share with you poems-in-construction, excerpts from unpublished essays, spiritual epiphanies from my travels as I am officially car-camping for an indeterminate amount of time, sporadic tarot or oracle readings, workshops, affirmations, notes about creative sustainability, spells, and my own wandering thoughts about the world.

It will serve as one of my digital altars, a place where I come regularly to meet with the creative spirit and speak to the moment. A space in which I’ll conjure all I know about all I know and reflect on the lessons there within. Nothing fancy, just me and my musings.

There is no schedule—I’m following my spirit on this one. No subject is off-limits, so expect some savory bits in the coming months. I curse, support progressive legislation, and have a weird thing for the scientific and spiritual principles of the cosmos, so lots of that. Your support of this Substack is appreciated, but not required. Just know that every paid subscription helps me do one of the following: Eat. Buy gas. Get medicine. Book a motel room. Have some coffee. Pay off the bills.

If you have questions or comments, please share them below and I will respond when the wi-fi of the countryside aligns with my Ipad. If I catch you slippin’ and saying something outta line, I will delete your post. I do not tolerate bigotry of any kind here and you will be noted. If you got the good vibes, bring em’.

If you’re feeling generous, you can always donate at one of the following:

CashApp: $FaylitaHicks

Venmo: @FaylitaHicks9

Paypal: ripdamicslam@gmail.com

May the light find you, always.