faafo: Sisi (in Brasil)

Category: ancestral roots

documented lineage, indigenous and african heritage, and what the bloodline actually means in practice.

  • one year. one ocean. one wild dream.

    one year. one ocean. one wild dream.

    PT: este post está em inglês — use o botão de tradução do seu navegador para ler em português.

    i open the curtains every morning.

    my mother used to fuss at me for that. every house we lived in, i was the one throwing back every curtain, every blind, flooding the room with light. she’d say — you want a house made of glass, don’t you.

    yes, mama. that’s exactly what i wanted.

    i’m writing this from a curved glass balcony in salvador, bahia, brazil. the atlantic ocean is straight ahead. not a postcard version of it — the real thing, wide and deep and ancient, sitting there like it has something to say. and it does. this water has carried everything. bodies. prayers. grief. memory. survival. and somehow, impossibly, it also carried me here.

    one year ago this week i became a resident of brazil.

    i didn’t arrive with a plan. i arrived the way i’ve arrived everywhere that mattered — with a knowing and a suitcase and enough nerve to fool myself into thinking i wasn’t terrified. brooklyn taught me strategy. detroit taught me that a house can be a statement. the oklahoma chapter taught me that what grows from inherited land will always surprise you. a church in florida taught me that sacred spaces find you, not the other way around.

    and then salvador said — sit down. you’re home.

    i am sitting in front of a wall of curved glass watching the same ocean my ancestors crossed. involuntarily. in the hold of a ship. and i am here, high above this city, warm and safe and free, with a nervous system that has finally, finally unclenched.

    security does something to the body that nothing else can replicate. i didn’t know how tightly i’d been holding until i stopped holding. this city gave me that. this view gave me that. this life that looks like everything i used to just imagine gave me that.

    i am a psychic who doesn’t use tools, a mystic before i am anything else, and i have been doing this work for over fifteen years. but right now, in this moment, i am just a woman who moved to the yoruba capital of the western hemisphere and is still processing how on time it all was.

    i am…

    i am my ancestors’ wildest dream. i used to say that. now i can see it from my balcony.

    how i became sisi

    you may know me as courtney. here in brazil i am Sisi — which happened because a starbucks barista who didn’t speak english heard me say my initials (CC) and said Sisi and it stuck and i have been called that ever since and honestly it fits perfectly and i wouldn’t change it.

    same person. more integrated. the archives are real and they made me. and now we’re in the current chapter.

    where i come from

    before anyone questions where i stand, they should read where i come from.

    bloodline

    chiefs. warriors. medicine women. chickasaw treaty negotiators who made the us government pay them before they moved. cherokee war chiefs who hugged the king of england and didn’t apologize. yoruba ancestors whose cousins were taken to the exact city i now call home. a great-grandmother who owned land in the jim crow south and made the men who ran the courts need her.

    this is documented. dna confirmed. i know who my people are.

    and 230 years after my yoruba ancestors were separated — one branch to mississippi, one to brazil — i moved to salvador, bahia. the yoruba capital of the western hemisphere. i didn’t plan it. the blood navigated. i followed.

    here’s what’s coming

    over the next several weeks i’m going to be sharing stories. real ones.

    the trip with leo. an island with a local family.

    leo took me to an island. i didn’t know it was a quilombola territory until we got there. i probably should have. the blood keeps finding its way home.”

    rainbows that stopped me in the street. a bathroom door that tried to take me out.

    double rainbow over the bay in Cachoeira, Bahia Brazil --- expat life and relocation to Salvador

    a short-term love affair that was funny until it wasn’t and then funny again. the time a judge told me my online business wasn’t legitimate because i rode a bike.

    and then — the book. because that’s what all of this has been building toward.

    if you want to go deeper into what all of this means energetically and cosmically, that’s what vanguard mystery school is for. coming (back) soon.

    we made it!

    CALLS TO ACTION

  • what grows from inherited land

    what grows from inherited land

    PT: este post está em inglês — use o botão de tradução do seu navegador para ler em português.

    the deed was handed to me.

    not metaphorically. literally. family land in rural oklahoma. my grandfather’s land. the kind of thing that gets passed down quietly, without ceremony, because the people doing the passing know exactly what it cost to hold onto it and they’re not interested in making a speech about it.

    i was burned out from tech. done with the corporate version of myself. i packed up and moved to that land with no real plan except that something in me knew it was time to go back to the ground.

    what i didn’t know was that the ground had been waiting.

    grandmother’s trees. grandfather’s tools.

    everything i made in oklahoma came from what was already there.

    peach trees my grandmother planted. apple trees. pecan. i harvested what fell and i put it around people’s necks as jewelry. i carved pipes from the wood using my grandfather’s tools — tools he built a whole design center around, by hand, before he died and left them for whoever would know what to do with them.

    i papered the walls with my grandmother’s magazines. i hung vintage album covers on the hallway ceiling. i built outdoor soaking tubs. i sold oklahoma red dirt in mason jars to women across the country and shipped it to their doors.

    i have literally sold dirt.

    and people paid for it. because they could feel what it carried.

    the women who came

    i didn’t build that chapter alone.

    women from across the US and canada sent money to sponsor rooms in that house. then they showed up. some of them had never met each other in person. they came to rest and to help. we called it OurCompound.

    there was no pitch deck. no program. no intake form. just a woman on inherited land saying — come. and they came.

    that is cooperative economics. not a theory. women wiring money so the roof gets fixed and then showing up with their hands.

    that is the porch before it had a name. that is vanguard mystery school before it had a curriculum. that is the philosophy that eventually carried me to salvador, bahia, brazil — where my yoruba ancestors’ cousins were taken on a different ship, and where i now live one year into calling it home.

    pluto in the 8th house — made literal

    astrologers will understand this immediately.

    pluto in the 8th house: you inherit the power and the wound simultaneously. you receive what the ancestors left. you also receive the responsibility that comes with it. destruction, creation, regeneration — in that order, every time.

    the deed handed over was not just land. it was a test. it was an activation. it was the universe saying — okay. you say you understand ancestral work. prove it.

    i proved it with my hands. with peach pits and red dirt and a grandfather’s drill press and women i’d never met before sleeping in rooms wallpapered with my grandmother’s better homes and gardens.

    that’s not a hobby history. that is a worldview made physical.

    what the oklahoma chapter actually was

    it was proof.

    proof that i am a psychic who doesn’t use tools — because the reading happens in the making. in the material. in what the hands know before the mind catches up.

    proof that chiefs. warriors. medicine women. — the bloodline doesn’t just live in a document. it lives in what you do when you’re on the land and there’s no audience and nothing to perform.

    proof that what grows from inherited land will always surprise you.

    and proof that when the ground is done with you — when you’ve taken what it had to give and given back what you could — it releases you for the next chapter.

    mine released me toward brazil. read about one year in salvador to see where the oklahoma chapter led.

    CALLS TO ACTION

    go deeper into what this means energetically: vanguard mystery school

    read the full bloodline: six hundred years. documented.

    book a session: one session. no tools. no theater.

    thinking about relocating to bahia? let’s talk.