Steward’s Story
The Respite was built in 1987 by a pair of horse lovers, mary ellen kinney johnson and her late husband whose motto was ‘dare to be different.’ This, magical Occaneechi Saponi land was farmed by four generations of her ‘Dean’ family.
Needing to mourn a career I had devoted my life’s work to, I took a three week solo venture to Morocco in Spring 2017. Dreaming of true solidarity economies, mutual reciprocity with Emergent Strategies in tow, I manifested vision - a place for humans, animals and plants to cojoin : lay heads, sift solace from rushing water, eat root-fed greens, find stillness in a chaotic world.
It was the community development credit union movement for which I moved back to the South - Durham, NC - in 2011 thinking it would navigate us around a corporatized capitalist financial system.
The most profound lesson i learned while working in the socially responsible, community investing sector was that land is an asset class - an important invesment, rare, depleting, meant to be protected, yet also at the heart and soul of racial disruption, power and wealth inequality in this country.
Dig down a few layers and i will tell you it was an ancestral vision, an astrological calling that actually got me back to the South, where i grew up. About twelve years ago, while still living in Chicago, I experienced a strong premonition during a bodywork session : stickfigure me standing in the Midwest with a tent stake anchored to the South.
Fast-forward to after my solo venture returning home to Durham, I started researching MLS properties with the keyword ‘water.’ Rivers are like me: constant discovery, always moving, never stagnant. I knew there had to be moving water; I’m a Cancer. I had forgotten, too, about an astrological reading I received in July 2016 predicting I would do something very risky - involving family resources; integrating my full self and skills; and challenging the status quo. I am a creative visionary and doer. Uranus moving into the second house had set the stage for my finding the Respite, my soul’s work.
I am of farming DNA. I access my grandmother ‘C’ when i plant tomatoes, carrots, grow ocra and clean grit underneath my fingernails. I have found source, love, sustenance and a sense of place through land. While I connect to, and benefit from ‘owning’ indigenous, Kentucky farmland and the assets passed down to me from my deceased maternal family’s tobacco and community banking wealth, these resources are meant to be shared. Thanks to the Common Good and being politicized by Resource Generation, I am in practice. I have chosen to invest the majority of stocks I inherited into this magical place.
Come, stay, scheme, exchange, collaborate, ground, be.
Adopting an entrepreneurial, experimental, and reparational frame, I will live in the Steward’s cabin and work to host you here. The Respite is a sole proprietor business that will depend on you paying or trading - on a solidarity scale - to stay at the Respite. I will grow and mow and continue to build intentional inter-relationships, re-calibrating, re-defining radical hospitality ‘to be of use’ for our shared liberation.
Handèwa Farms and Respite co-habitate on R.O.S.A. (Rare Occaneechi Saponi Alluvial) Land together now co-owned 50:50 by Mama Kisha of Afro-Indigenous farm partners, Handewa Farms, and myself. The property and roundhouse will be rematriated to Mama Jeffries and her family, who are of Occaneechi Saponi descent, after I transition from this earth.
In the meantime, I am honored to be the Respite’s steward. To all and for whom the land speaks, I say, “Welcome! Come get messy-in-liberatory eco-revolutionary practice with us.”
“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
