What We Bring Home
This is not a travel blog with suggestions of where to stay, where to eat, or an itinerary for how to spend your days.
Instead, I have been thinking: what do we discover about ourselves when we travel?
Being in Cartagena, Colombia was one of the most still and present experiences I have had in a long time. Sometimes, a change in environment gives us the distance to see ourselves differently.
From the eyes of someone who sees me.
I took so many pictures of doors.
It was really because they were beautiful. The colours, architecture, and details! But looking through my pictures, I kept thinking about how a door is an entrance; it separates where you are from where you haven't entered yet.
“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” — Philippians 4:13
Travel calls us to notice.
At home, familiarity can make us move quickly. But when we are somewhere unfamiliar, suddenly we are looking up at balconies, walls, people. At how food tastes, and how the air feels.
At ourselves.
The colours of Cartagena were striking. Bold and impossible not to notice.
I also came home thinking about connection. A friendship that has long grown into sisterhood was deepened in ways I will always value.
Experiencing somewhere new together changes the rhythm of a relationship. You learn each other differently. You laugh at things that will never be as funny when retold. You create references nobody else will completely understand.
Motherhood can make relationships difficult to care for. Not because the interest disappears, but because time changes. Our availability changes. We change!
A photograph I encountered that held the familiarity of motherhood. This original image taken in Palenque is not my own.
I chose to share some of the pictures we took because sometimes words aren't enough to explain what our eyes saw, what our hearts felt, or what an experience shifted inside us. And… what we brought home.
Palenque opened my heart in more ways than I expected, connecting me more closely to the part of my identity that has never changed: my Blackness.