New Year's Traditions & Borderland Magic
Welcoming 2023 & Wishing You a Year of Brazen, Full Selfhood
✔️New Year’s Lentils
✔️Cleaned House & Mopped Floors
✔️Twilight Zone Marathon
I’m happily ringing in 2023 in a very Italian-American way.
Over my head today, two weather fronts are meeting, competing, & mixing along the SE-NW axis.
From the SE comes a heat wave blowing in from the Carib. Out of the other corner of this axis, a cold front is blasting its way in from the Pacific NW.
In my area of Florida, we are lifting out of 20-something degree overnight freezes into unseasonal afternoon highs in the low 80s. Then we will slam back down into daytime highs in the 60s.
We ride the waves as best we can. Twilight Zone marathons help.
This phenomena is one part traditional winter weather in Central Florida and one part climate change.
It’s also just one expression of La Florida’s borderland nature. A nature built into her land, waters, flora, fauna, Indigenous peoples, and waves of more recently arrived folks.
It is this borderland nature, La Florida’s in-between-ness, that has given my Italian-American self a deep sense of cultural peace.
Here, nothing abides by binaries; everything is half-something else.
Everything must abide by the wonderland logic of being part so-many-things, while also being wholly its own unique thing.
Just when you think you understand her nature, La Florida will defy you and express the “opposite” or some third thing you never saw coming.
Here, definitions too firmly held are a sort of boxing in, an attempt at taming, which borderland places like Madre Florida are far too wild to put up.
The worst thing you can do here in Florida is be timid about being yourself. It’s the fastest way to being looked down upon.
The second worst thing you can do is attempt to tame or teach her. (Tread humbly, fellow newcomers, tread humbly…)
This is why I talk about Florida regularly in this project. Because underneath the madness of (and constant potential possession by) the spirit of Florida Man, this place is brazen, borderland magic.
That’s good medicina for folks who, like a lot of us connected on this channel, have spent copious amounts of our lives being pushed and pulled into and out of other people’s worlds where we only partially fit in.
May your 2023 be filled with borderland places where you can feel your full brazen self. May they be places where you find yourself in the company of others who deeply get you and know how to vibe with wonderland logic.
Un Abbraccio
(an embrace),
R.G.
It's funny I feel the same way about Harlem. It helped me find my Italian Americanness.....