voyage

noun: a long journey involving travel by sea or in space, verb: go on a long journey, typically by sea or in space

Today is my last day at my corporate tech job.

Technically, it’s a holiday in India where our parent company is based, so there’s not much to do. I send off a few goodbye emails. Close Outlook. Scroll through Teams one last time, then delete both apps from my phone.

That’s it.

No more late night meetings with the engineering team.
No more anxiety-fueled, sleepless nights.
No more elaborate daydreams about quitting and running away.
No more negotiating with procrastination just to finish a short list of tasks.

It’s over.

I sit there staring at my phone screen where those apps used to be. It all feels....uneventful. Quite ordinary actually. I don’t feel a surge of joy or sadness. I keep waiting on fear to show up. I just walked away from a six-figure, senior-level remote job with health insurance and a 401k in tech. I could work from any corner of the world and I controlled my schedule, for the most part. A few months ago, just the idea of quitting was enough to send me spiraling. Now that I’m on the other side I realize how large of an illusion fear can cast.

My Journal
12/16/2025 7:10am

I woke at 4:59am saddled with anxiety. i just needed to pee but I knew my mind was awake and she was not going to let me go back to sleep. I thought about what I need to tell my boss today. I thought about this flight to DC. I thought about the emails and messages I need to catch up on and as always I daydreamed about quitting. I love rehearsing my resignation letter. I wrote it months ago and I’ve been tweaking it almost weekly. It’s short and sweet now. I do not like this place.

I’m no stranger to quitting. I’ve quit more jobs, relationships, hobbies, and projects than I can count with both hands. I don’t feel guilty about quitting in fact I’m proud of knowing when to leave. It’s a skill I’ve mastered through relationship with Spirit and the ancestors. I can face my fears and do the hard thing or they will orchestrate a tower moment to redirect my path.

Personally, I prefer the feeling of jumping over randomly being pushed.

the tower card: sudden change, upheaval, destruction, chaos, transformation, resistance to change, delaying the inevitable, unexpected endings. credit: Maria Rischiotto & Rider Waite.

dreams deferred

I come from a family of chefs. Food has always been how we show love, how we gather, how we survive. I love cooking. I love the ritual of feeding people. Before quitting, I’d spend most of my workday in the kitchen, testing recipes, tapping my keyboard periodically to ensure I still showed online in Teams.

My family hadn’t owned land since my great-grandmother’s generation. For years, one of my elders, Aunt Joyce, would share a vision she had of our family gathering on our own land again. When she passed, that vision stuck with me. I wanted to bring my ancestors back to the land. I wanted to honor what she saw.

But the questions haunted me: What would I do out there? What would I grow? How would I entertain myself in some rural world away from everything I love? And how would my people even get to me? I wanted land, but not if it meant being hours from everyone I cared about.

Back to the Pinterest board.

Last spring, my girlfriend and I planted our first garden. Marigolds, basil, mint, eucalyptus, lavender, some wildflowers. The backyard was wild then. The raised beds and rose garden the previous owners started were now tangled with weeds. Our dog Zora loved it. She’d tear through it chasing cats, raccoons and whatever else was hiding back there.

We were both tied up with work and traveling, so not much from that garden made it to fall. But it was a start.

When I moved to Columbia full-time, clearing the backyard was my first order of business. Mostly because I wanted us to have a place to enjoy our morning coffee and commune with the trees. We spent weeks out there pulling weeds, rebuilding raised beds, laying mulch and sketching potential layouts.

While I was doing that, I started to realize the potential of this space. We could grow a lot. It may not feed a whole city. But it could feed our family. Our neighbors. The people right here.

I started researching backyard farms. Watching YouTube videos. Reading about people growing hundreds of pounds of food in tiny urban lots. Not as some abstract concept, but as the actual answer to all those questions I’d been stuck on.

I didn’t need acres in the countryside. I just needed to work with what I had: 500 square feet in the middle of Columbia, South Carolina.

We started with an altar, in the center of our space. It runs along the fence that separates us from the pine trees towering behind us. What I love most is the way red cardinals bounce between their branches just above.

I spent weeks tracking the sun and studying how the shadows bounced off the walls of our home. Before we planted a single seed, I placed a High John the Conquerer Root on the altar and prayed for fertile grounds.

Then we got to work building what would become Voyage Farms.

I had 20 cubic yards of mulch dumped onto our front yard. A literal mountain blocking the driveway. Our friends showed up. They helped us move it, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, encouraged us as we slowly cleared the pile. One of our neighbors gave us our first greenhouse and a rain barrel. We added another rain barrel, a second greenhouse and two composting bins.

It’s almost poetic how my last day of corporate aligned with the start of my first growing season. I’ve spent my final hours so immersed in my to-do list for Voyage that I’ve hardly checked in with my team. One day you’re dreaming and then you’re in the dream.

The child in each of us
Knows paradise.
Paradise is home.
Home as it was
Or home as it should have been.

Paradise is one’s own place,
One’s own people,
One’s own world,
Knowing and known,
Perhaps even
Loving and loved.

— Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Months ago my sister asked me, “What will we do after we win the war?”

I think about this question all the time. My answer? We’ll eat. We’ll gather around the kitchen table and tell stories. We’ll light fires to keep ourselves warm. We’ll plant seeds for the next season.

I believe we will win this war.

I believe there are Black people in the future. Black dreamers in the future. Black farmers in the future. And when we get there, we’ll need a place to gather. One’s own place, one’s own people, one’s own world. Paradise as it should have been.

Voyage Farms is one place. This backyard in Columbia is where I’m learning to grow mushrooms, vegetables, herbs, flowers. Proving to myself that I don’t need acres to feed my family and our community.

Aunt Joyce dreamed of us gathering on our own land. This is how I honor what she saw.