north star
We are still searching for freedom.
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Friday, March 20, 2026
Dear Diary,
I’ve been writing this piece in my own mind over the past month or so. Little moments where I like to sit up at the sky and ponder, I save these little words in files on the right side of my brain. Just waiting for the moment when I’m ready to pick up the pencil again, feel the keyboard, look at an empty page. It feels daunting when you’re trying to search for the meaning in it all.
I guess the words finally came to me.
Our aunties never lied when they said, “Just keep living.”
This past year, I had to sit in discomfort and work through releasing and surrendering ctrl. These silent conversations, tears, convos with family and my sisters just brought me closer to the realization that great things take time. Finding joy in the present is a beautiful lesson, but more importantly, you won't be right; you're just being taken to the next step
I’ve always been in love with constellations. There is something holy about staring at the sky, how it feels so close you swear you could reach up and bruise your fingertips on the light, and yet it remains untouchable. A promise that never collapses into possession. Who knows how far it goes, how long it’s been burning, or how many eyes have lifted toward it in need. Tonight, even though the tears in my eyes blur the big picture, the twinkle feels sharper. Like the sky is insisting on being seen anyway.
I think about what my ancestors saw when they looked for instruction. Not inspiration, instruction. The North Star was never poetry first. It was a tool. A covenant. A quiet agreement between the living and the unseen that said: this way. North was not a place so much as a refusal. A direction away from captivity. A belief that freedom could be followed even if it could not yet be held. Home was not a house. Home was each other. Home was survival. Home was saying goodbye in the dark and trusting a light you could not touch.
I was raised to believe that nothing in nature is neutral. Stars are not decorations. Fire is not only destruction. Ash is not an ending. Everything has a job, and everything remembers. The sky remembers who needed it. The land remembers who bled into it. The body remembers what it survived, even when the mind wants to hurry past it.
Recently, fire came for me.
Not metaphorical fire, the real kind. The kind that eats without apology. The kind that leaves behind silence so loud it rings. As I look at the “loss”, everything I held onto, remember everyone I loved that has long since left this earth, went with it. They heard every prayer each morning as I battled getting to this current moment. Every dream and every nightmare, they were there right there with God. But now prayers are just uttered while looking at the sky. I have come to learn that the rituals are my breath every morning and my eyes looking at everything around me, appreciating the blessings of a new day. Actions aren’t enough, but intention is everything. I am more than my practice, but rather I am walking in God’s plan. Nothing is needed to be me.
There is no romance in watching things burn that once held your life. Fire does not negotiate. It takes what it takes. And afterward, it leaves you standing in a widened world, holding grief with no walls left to lean against.
But I have also come to know that fire clears roads.
In the old ways, destruction is not cruelty; it is preparation. It strips illusions. It removes what was weighing the spirit down, even when the heart is still attached. After the fire, there was loss. And alongside that loss, uninvited, undeniable, there was space. Space for breath. Space for truth. Space for a quieter, deeper kind of freedom to enter.
This is the part people don’t like to hear: grief and joy are not opposites. They share a spine. I have cried for what I lost and smiled at what I was released from in the same hour. I have mourned the familiar while feeling lighter in my body than I have in years. That is not a contradiction. That is initiation.
Right now, I am not chasing stability the way I used to. I am not asking materials to tell me who I am. I am following the same thing my ancestors followed: freedom as a direction, not a destination. I am learning to be my own safe house. To make a home inside myself that no fire can take. To trust that what is meant for me will recognize me without my begging.
As I think about the current state of the world, it feels like everything we once aspired to is slowly dismantling itself. It’s easy to place the weight of that on one person, and it does belong there, in part. Donald Trump and his administration have made very intentional decisions to turn the world in a different direction.
But in the span of 100 years, we have made monumental progress. Overturning laws that never saw us within the frame. Electing our first Black president. Giving women responsibility and autonomy over their lives. Seeing representation in almost everything. Entering rooms we were once locked out of, with a whole lot more in our pockets than granddaddy ever dreamed of. Great-grandma was a sharecropper who remembered the feeling of cotton on her fingertips. The stories of Jim Crow were never that far, so we knew it could be different. And we made it different.
But when you make progress, others will push back. That is exactly why this moment matters.
Because even as things feel like they’re slipping, our belief systems have never looked like this. We are in the midst of a Renaissance. Creation is more important now than ever before. Every choice in every field, art, policy, community, and story is part of keeping progress alive. It means showing up. It means outwardly rejecting the demands of those who want radical redirection. It means being present enough to build something new.
It has taken more than 50 years to repeal what took generations to build. So recognize what you’re living in. You are the dream your ancestors carried, and when I say ancestors, I mean beyond blood. It is not only lineage that links us. It is thought. It is souls. It is music. It is the art, the gifts, the skills we bring into the world.
You’re important.
The North Star does not move closer when you walk toward it. It does not reward you with arrival. It simply stays. Constant. Witnessing. It asks only that you keep going.
And so I am.
I am walking with my grief in one hand and my joy in the other. I am listening for signs in unexpected places. I am letting destruction teach me how to travel lighter. I am choosing freedom, not as an idea, but as a daily practice. Not north as a promise, but north as a remembering.
We are still searching for freedom. And maybe we always will be.
Tonight, I looked at the stars with someone. We traced the constellations, and he described someone lying down, looking at us from the sky, two eyes, arms, legs, and something so bright it looked like a chest, even though all I could see was a heart. He told me, “You would think it’s the North Star, but it’s really Jupiter.”
I’d like to think of it as the North Star anyway. Because everywhere I look, I know it’s above. Following each step to where I want to be.
But now I know: I don’t have to find home.
I can be it.
Sincerely,
maeko
thank you so much for sharing these words