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 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.

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.

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

• book a session: one session. no tools. no theater.
• read the bloodline: six hundred years. documented.
• thinking about moving to brazil? let’s talk.