Just before COVID I was on sick leave from my job in education. I had been on the go before that, running marathons, raising four young children on my own after my husband passed, and returning to a career in education I was hoping to revive in a more meaningful way. I did not realize that all that I had been doing in the ten years prior to COVID was going to force me to come to a full stop. Not slow down — stop. My naturopath gave me strict instructions to rest for ten to fifteen minutes every day and to do something for twenty minutes each day that brought me pure pleasure. It could not require any labour at all. So no working out, no cooking or baking, no fixing of anything or anyone no matter how much I enjoyed doing it. For the first few days I struggled to figure out what to do.
A few days into my new life I reached for some watercolour paints I had bought for my son. It had been over fifteen years since I had last picked up a paintbrush. Every afternoon or evening from then on I found myself in the comfy part of the couch painting. Lines and patches of colour became shapes and shapes became images. That is when I came across a saying by Jaiya John that said, “I am my ancestors' forest”. Something about that spoke to me in such a powerful way. I found myself moving towards images of Black folk in fields and forests as if their feet too belonged in the earth below them. I began to wonder what does it mean to be the forest of my ancestors.
I had began the journey of writing these stories during this time when I became ill. The stories seemed to have been waiting for a door to open. When that door opened the awareness of my ancestors, particularly my great grandmother Ma Bessie, the storyteller, grew within me like a forest waking with the rise of the sun. At this time of rest and pleasure I began learning about the importance of gold in the West African context, as an element that represented purity, the sun, and life. Painting nourished me and brought me back to life — to livingness in the same way the sun brings everything living around us to life. The life force that I was able to access through the art and the cover was representative of the life force that came from my ancestors in the form of ancestral knowledge, wisdom, and love.