Vagabroad Journals

Purchase my work at journeysoulfully.co I make journals for teastained women who journey soulfully; I call us Vagabroads (vagabonds+abroad): well-traveled because of all we've been through. With journaling we narrate, protect, and document ourselves.

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And to think, you and me and we still have more to witness for and against, again and again until we are no more. For now we handle immortal things in the form of books that travel with us and carry our voice intonated by handwriting. These will travel beyond us; sempiternal conversation with then and now and when, encapsulating and convicting, causing refusal, quickening dreams, announcing prophecy, firing proverb and inspiring quake. All the books in the world could not contain what we contain. But we must put in the labor with the portion of testimony we’ve been given, keeping our many New Testaments.

I say this in honor of an ancestral witness and Black messiah, whose holy spirit still dwells amongst us (perhaps even more strong on this her birthday, Jan 7); who said that “there are years that give us questions and years that give us answers”, Zora Neal Hurston.

📷: Josmine’s collection of VGB journals. Over a decade, I think?

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Your silence has much to relay to you. Be still and note the miraculous. Journal to catalog and calendar the emotions of your understanding, and how the [grieving] process of dismantling lies you once held as true has has transformed and situated you. Page by page, the consolation comes; your victory is discovered; strength is realized; tears are released; enemies’ works are recognized; wisdom is chronicled, and assurance is received. In the midst of all of this, journaling is your participating in acknowledging the beauty that surrounds you—not as aesthetic, but as a messaging technology: beauty facilitates healing, memory, and bearing witness. Look up and participate.

The intuitive compilation of your entries is history and scripture in the making.

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Journaling ensures we are not sojourning with a disconnect from our preparation. Circumstances teaching us new definitions of good and evil, safety and violence, soundness and insanity are preparation. Encountering— and transcribing— neologisms for new emotions is preparation. Using the pen to extricate sentience coiled serpentine around our internal organs is preparation. The inquiry into and study of “what happened?” (in your family, region, decades ago, by law…) is preparation. The rhythym and relationship of analog witness statement recording is preparation. For what?

For indictment. It’s not a singular future moment. It’s the moments that manifest clearer along the journey because we are prepared to face enemies made familiar through documentation, solutions revealed through discerning archiving, and other ways stillness with our books equips us with arms and armor to not fear, to declare, and to operate in timely fashion bt indicting the vile, violent, and presumptuously evil when it is our time.

The hazed can’t. The sold-out christians can’t. Those on the devil’s payroll can’t. The ones eschewing soundness to uphold a lie can’t. The ones with an ideology including their enemies can’t. The ones rejecting protection and incubation to be liked by everyone can’t. It’s a precious few who can and will witness and indict.

Don’t let anyone (!) condescend you about the means by which the Most High has coalesced your sojourn to prepare you for mandate and your time to indict.

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A shop update is happening soon. In the meantime here are reminders as to why we teastained women are journaling:

✨ TO OWN OUR TESTIMONY. Testimony is a technology for liberation of self and others. Journaling keeps the elements of your testimony in your book, and in chronological order so that when your soul needs encouragement as to the worthiness of your sojourn, you can read what you have come through and besr witness to your AUTHORity.

✨TO SUPPORT DISCERNMENT. Writing it out can draw much to the surface including who is/was the antagonist in a situation or event, the root cause of whatever you’re facing, the role of a certain person or event to grow or delay you, the memory containing the remedy or malady of a current circumstance; journaling helps you extract the clamor of lies, identify your weak areas, and map out what’s being attacked around/in you, why and by whom in your current spiritual warfare or in the warfare against your people in these times.

✨ TO RECORD REALIZATION. To realize something is a holiday, a landmark. Whether it’s adding 2+2 for a arriving to a conclusion long awaited for, your realization is worthy of record. Those moments of “You know WHAT…” are moments where the Divine is conveying to you your significance. Moments when you realized how much you have healed or grown are also book-stuff. Record them!

✨ TO OWN CONVICTION. When conviction comes from a third party it’s never as powerful as when you’ve gleaned, mined, and sojournedt” “through” to own it for yourself. Journaling means you are the AUTHOR, operating in AUTHORship in your book to accept and muse upon the words being relayed to your spirit. These words are giving you assurance and confidence to continue that no one outside of you is capable of giving to you (they may confirm, but not provide…). #Journaling is ownership of your testaments, your conviction: it prevents your being easily manipulated and brainwashed by any wispy idealogy, image or message blowing through society.

✨✍🏾📖✨

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Found myself here. I’ll stay for awhile…

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Teastained women, with our journals, we WRITE OUR WORLDS.

(From the eponymous photo series in VGB’s zine)

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Evening. Misting the pages of a newly-sewn journal.

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Reading from the zine.

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A posture. Make sure you are found receptive.

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Life is about continuing, evolving and witnessing. Now add the glory and mandate of Blackness— The memory, the spiritual deprogramming, the OOMPH, the dialect, the hope, the lividness, the truth, designation and wisdom. All of these have narratives we are required to transcribe. And this demonic society creates every distraction necessary such that we miss our Divine appointments with testimony and testament. What distractions make you miss your encounter? Journal this, and how you will fight back.

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It’s in the heaviness someone told you to give over to a god set up for you by colonizers so they’d always know who you were praying to. It’s in the weariness you were told comes from unforgiveness. But really you just needed someone to tell you to release it into a book and declare that your living witness testimony is heavy enough to hold 5 centuries of colonizers’ sins accountable. That’s where you can begin.

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Don’t be afraid.

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Teastained diarist, your role is to discern the lies. Expound in handwritten chapters. Live the truth.

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Books of dignity, for authors of the same quality.

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A few VGB journals from the recent past. I’ve been doing mostly private sales for the past 3 years, but I’m still here; the journals aren’t going anywhere, and *yes* a shop update is coming soon. I love and appreciate you all.

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Peace, loves. It is especially special to reinvigorate VGB’s Journals+Journeys interview series— the first since 2019!!!— with a sis and diarist from my matrilineal “homeland” (via the Middle Passage) the US colony (formerly Danish) of St. Croix, Virgin Islands. Given the current state of the world and what Black people are coming to realize more and more about this society, I appreciated the subjects Kaila @kailathecrucian touched on in our conversation.

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Big HAIL UP and thanks to you, sistren Kaila for speaking to VGB about bearing witness, the journey of coming home, neocolonization in the islands, anger, and keeping record.

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Read her interview on the site now! Click “sisters” on the homepage.

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Image: Kaila journaling in her VGB journal with a sleeve of Cruzan bracelets.

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Peace, sisters. There will be a shop update soon… I’ve been working on a special project for VGB to compliment the snailmail newsletter and explore a new facet of my work in a more accessible means. Can’t wait to tell you. Much love.

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