I admire artists who can create beautiful images with their hands through the mind’s eye. I have since I was a kid.
I would skip school, take a bus to a train station, then a train to New York to go to shows on Broadway, or to sit inside the Museum of Natural History and daydream. No one told me to, and no one could tell me no. No one signed a permission slip. I just knew that whatever was waiting for me inside those rooms was where I needed to be. I understand now as an adult what I was doing. I was feeding something.
The world we live in tells Black women that daydreaming is a luxury we cannot afford. Be twice as good. Work twice as hard. Produce, produce, produce. There is no room in that math for a girl on a train, alone, staring at a diorama and imagining herself somewhere else. There is no line item for wonder.
But every beautiful thing I’ve ever loved began as somebody’s daydream.
I love Harmonia Rosales’ work. I have one of her signed prints, hopefully to be replaced one day by an original. LoL I’m daydreaming y’all. I think about how she looked at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a room built to teach the world what divinity looks like, and she saw that Black women had been left out of the picture. She didn’t wait for a curator to invite her in. She picked up a brush and she painted us into the sky. Exquisitely. She made God a Black woman. She made the thing she wanted to see exist.
That is the work. Not the painting. The daydream that came before the painting.
I have attended wellness retreats and slow gathering spaces, and I saw that we were missing. I saw curation offered to everyone but us. I saw rest positioned as a reward for people who were never asked to prove they deserved it. I saw women who did gather displayed on the internet for content. And I daydreamed a place where a Black woman walks in and does not have to explain her softness, or earn it, or perform anything at all. She just gets to be. Let the shoulders drop. Inhale. Exhale.
hava is the daydream I refused to file away.
I’m building it in real life because I couldn’t stop seeing it in my head. The linen. The honeysuckle. The candles that smell like a way back to serenity. The women in the room. Women sitting by a fire chatting, brainstorming, remembering.
None of it exists yet in the way I see it. All of it exists already, in me. Every move I make, every gathering I have, every article I write, or newsletter, book, or product is about bringing that daydream into existence. This is one cohesive thought displayed in many ways.
Sooo, this is the Unfridayed I’m sending out to you. Not a to-do list. Not a launch. Not a countdown. A reminder that the thing you can’t stop imagining is not a distraction from your work. It is your work.
Black women create.
We always have. We always will.
Let’s daydream.
Sahavit 💛