What My Family Taught Me About Community This Week

Hope you all had an amazing start to your holiday season.

This week, I want to talk about community but not in the way that you are used to me talking about it. I want to talk about the community we build with our families.

Most of my life, I haven’t celebrated Thanksgiving. Not because I’m not grateful, but because the history of the holiday never sat right with me. And even though my family celebrates it hard, for years I stayed away. Distance became my default. Being a flight attendant didn’t help either. I doubled down on traveling, and somewhere in those miles, I started to feel disconnected from the people I loved the most.

The truth is, my family has been through some painful losses.

My grandmother. My mom. My cousin Crystal. All within the last eight years. All around the same time of year. Grief has a way of rearranging you, and for a long time, I didn’t realize how much I was rearranging myself out of the picture.

But during those same years, my family grew. New babies. New marriages. New inside jokes I wasn’t around to witness. The cousins I grew up with at 190 Etna Street in Brooklyn now have families of their own, creating moments I wasn’t there to see.

This year, I chose differently.
I took a week off.
I went home.
I showed up.

Almost fifty of us in one house—laughing, storytelling, hugging, eating, catching up, meeting the newest little faces. And for the first time in a long time, I felt something I thought I’d lost: joy that fills your whole chest. The kind my grandmother prayed for. The kind she built her entire life around. The kind she wanted us to carry long after she was gone.

And shout out to my cousin Wendy for holding down that legacy. She’s officially La Jefa now. She’s the reason we still gather. The reason we still have a place to show up and be together.

Even while we were celebrating life and love, we had to pause later in the evening to mourn the loss of yet another member of our family, Maggie Ortiz, who passed as we were praying for her recovery during grace. This is us… in real life.

I’m sharing this with you because what I learned in that house full of family is the same lesson I see creators learning every day:

Community doesn’t just happen. We build it. We choose it. We nurture it.

Sometimes it’s family by blood. Sometimes it’s family by love. Sometimes it’s the people we meet on our creative path who show up for us in ways we never expected. Many of you are building community like this every day…in your art, your platforms, your work, and your intentions.

Here is what I want you to leave with…

Lean into the love.
Don’t let being “busy” cost you the people who matter.
Show up, even when it feels easier to stay in your routine.
Meet people where they are.
Rebuild what’s drifted.
Grow what’s special.

Reconnect with the ones you are estranged from, life is too short.

(I am working on this one starting today)

That’s the heart of Siembra.
That’s the work.
That’s the seed.

Let’s Grow.

Here are some updates on what to expect as we move thru the Holiday season…

Based on feedback,

I am republishing some of our most helpful content as standalone blog posts and tagging them so that you can easily find them. That means that in between newsletters… there will be content to read and learn from.

I will be adding audio versions of each blog to make our posts more accessible as I work towards combining these newsletters with my YouTube channel in 2026. The goal is to make a youtube version of the newsletter and have this be the detailed show notes.

I am in the process of refining the welcome process to the community by giving subscribers access to some tools that will hopefully help you organize the back office of your project or business. (stay tuned)

Will be spending the next week editing interviews for the Youtube channel…

PS… This was my highlight of the week, feeding my new granddaughter Cheryl Anne for the very first time. I am soooo in love with this little girl.

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