Tribal Connections: What Do We Notice When We Return?

A little hello from the studio… 🎨🌿     

I've been thinking about colour today.

Not the colours we choose deliberately.

The ones we remember.

The green of a childhood front door.

The particular red of the bricks on the street where you grew up.

The yellow scarf someone always seemed to wear.

The way afternoon sunlight once landed across a familiar window.

You can leave a place for years...

and somehow those colours remain tucked away inside you.

Then one day you return.

And discover the place has been painting without you.

The Places We Think We Remember

Memory is strange.

It has a habit of preserving places exactly where we left them.

A street remains the same street.

A shop stays where we remember it.

Someone's voice still seems to belong to a particular room.

Even when we know logically that life has continued...

part of us expects the picture to remain untouched.

But communities don't work like paintings hanging in galleries.

People move in.

Children grow up.

Businesses open.

Languages change.

Walls are repainted.

Someone plants flowers where there used to be nothing.

A new family begins building memories in a place another family once called home.

Life keeps adding colour.

Whether we're there to see it or not.

When Familiar Becomes New Again

There is a peculiar feeling that comes with returning somewhere you once knew intimately.

You recognise things before you realise you're recognising them.

A road.

A corner.

The shape of a row of houses.

Your body remembers before your mind catches up.

And then something unfamiliar appears beside it.

A new mural.

A different shop.

Music you don't remember hearing there before.

Suddenly you're standing between two versions of the same place.

The one you carried with you...

and the one that continued living after you left.

I think that's where curiosity becomes important.

Because we have a choice.

We can search desperately for everything we remember.

Or...

we can begin noticing what has appeared since.

Every Community Creates Its Own Colours

Artists spend a lot of time mixing colour.

You can begin with the same two shades...

and still create something completely different depending on how much of each you use.

Communities are like that.

History matters.

Memory matters.

The people who came before us matter.

But the people living there now are adding something too.

Different generations.

Different migrations.

Different music.

Different ideas about what home should feel like.

None of those additions automatically erase what existed before.

Sometimes they reveal that the picture was never finished.

Perhaps that's why I don't believe another community can arrive and decide what colours belong on someone else's wall.

We can bring what we've learned.

We can share what worked for us.

We can offer another brush.

But eventually...

the people who live there have to decide what they want to paint.

Still Becoming

One of my favourite phrases in the studio is:

Still becoming.

People sometimes look at an unfinished canvas and immediately ask what is missing.

I rarely see it that way.

Empty space isn't always absence.

Sometimes it's possibility.

Sometimes the artist hasn't decided yet.

Sometimes the picture needs another voice.

And sometimes...

the most respectful thing you can do is resist the urge to fill the space yourself.

I think communities deserve that same patience.

Not every unanswered question needs an outsider's answer.

Not every gap needs someone rushing in to close it.

Sometimes we need to stay long enough to understand what people are already trying to create.

What Does The Journey Reveal?

Chapter Two of When the Village Carries Home begins with a journey.

But I don't think journeys only reveal destinations.

Sometimes they reveal what we've carried without noticing.

A memory.

A fear.

A habit.

A piece of home.

Sometimes they show us how much a place has changed.

And sometimes...

they show us the parts of ourselves that haven't.

That's the journey I'm taking this week.

And I have a feeling Birmingham still has a few colours left to show me.

Until Next Time...

Think about somewhere you once called home.

Perhaps you still live there.

Perhaps you haven't returned in years.

What do you remember first?

A colour?

A smell?

A sound?

A person?

And if you returned tomorrow...

what might be waiting there that wasn't part of the picture before?

Look carefully.

The story may have continued without you.

That doesn't mean you no longer belong inside it.

It simply means...

there may be more of the picture to discover.

Keep creating beauty in the people around you.

— Maya 🎨🌿✨ 

🎨 Continue The Crossing

I have accepted the invitation.

Now I have to make the journey.

Continue When the Village Carries Home with Chapter Two: The Crossing, where returning to Birmingham begins revealing more than I expected about the city I remember... and the woman who left it behind.

📖 Read Chapter Two (Tribe Membership required) 

Haven't started Book Two yet?

Begin with Chapter One inside the Tribe Library and follow my journey from the invitation.

👉🏾 Begin Book Two