3 years is a long time, 8 years before that was a long time...

[Silla]

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here (or anywhere)

I didn’t disappear randomly—I stepped away to work on myself. While I’ve been on a journey of reconnection since I was about 14, it's been one of quiet learning, great conflicts (who can forget the challenging times many of us had on Tumblr and Facebook with community disruptors- notice once they stopped, so many communities have now florished and I think this year's Taino Awards is such a wonderful example of community across yukayekes and finanlly being allowed to engage without needing to fight being shouted down), and working on the growth that comes from it all. And the truth is, I couldn’t fully commit to myself, my identity, while I was in a long-term abusive relationship.

It’s been about a year and a half since that chapter of my life ended. I’m now in a relationship with someone who truly cares about me—someone who has encouraged me to find community, not shrink away from it despite my past experiences. Because of that support, I finally took a step I had been sitting on for a long time: I enrolled in a yucayeke. I am now an enrolled member of The Arawak Taíno Tribe of Puerto Rico.

This isn’t the only space I disappeared from. I’ve been a ghost across pretty much all social media—Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, everything. But I think I’m finally ready to re-emerge and engage again, intentionally.

In that time away, I’ve been focusing on personal growth, learning, and creative work. I’ve been developing my painting, writing more, and deepening my spirituality. One of the projects I’ve been working on is creating a small zemí garden. I hesitate to even call it a “garden” because it’s not traditional—it’s more like a small, contained space, similar to a Japanese Zen garden, something manageable within my home.

What I’m building is a representation of relationships—starting from my closest connections, Spirits, and extending outward in degrees. I think a lot of people get stuck on zemís as only representations of spiritual entities, but at their core, they are about relationships. Your relationship to Atabey. Your relationship to your family. If you look at areítos, many of the stones around the edges didn’t just represent beings—they represented families and the relationships within the yucayeke.

So I’ve been working on building my own interpretation of that. I’m also playing with the idea of creating a smaller section off to the side, centered around a tree (a small artificial one, realistically), to represent relationships with those who have passed in my life.

I’m still learning. Still building. Still living authentically.

But I’m here again—and this time, I’m ready to be present.