The Sacred Bond of Cousinhood
The specific spiritual ties between cousins are sacred & unique.
Hey ya’ll, real quick before we get into this piece:
I’m hosting the Familial Energy Workshop Series and the first session is this month on May 18th. Session 1 is focused on the ancestors. We’ll do exercises and go over information about building healthy, strong relationships with your ancestors, understanding ancestral custody, and taking existing ancestral relationships to the next level.
This workshop is for you if:
You are dedicated to spiritually nurturing and protecting the children in your family as much as possible.
You want a deeper connection to your ancestors.
You are working to heal family trauma.
You need help setting boundaries with family.
You want to be a spiritually grounded parent/caretaker.
You feel disconnected from your blood relatives & have or want found family.
You want to step into your role in the lineage with more confidence.
Ticket prices are sliding scale and there are options for people who want to attend, but can’t afford the lowest price (reply to this message or direct message me if that’s you). It would mean a lot to me if you came and/or shared this along to others you think might benefit from this work. Get tickets here. Paid subscribers on Walking the Path, don’t forget you all have a discount code - use it!
Back to “The Sacred Bond of Cousinhood”…

When I think about my childhood, memories with my cousins are instantly conjured. Until my baby sister was born when I was seventeen, I was an only child. My cousins were my surrogate siblings. My paternal grandparents had nine children throughout their marriage of 63 years. That resulted in over 25 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, transcending generations, yet all connected.

An example of these connections is my cousin Stephanie and myself. She was the first grandchild, born around the same time my parents were. She became close with my mother and eventually introduced my mom to her uncle - my father. Without Stephanie, there would be no Kamila.
She transitioned nearly eight years ago. I was writing to her the other day and remembered we actually share a middle name - those middle names also being my mother’s first name. It’s no coincidence that I’m completing this piece on her birthday, in the midst of trying to figure out the best way to be a good big cousin to her children.
I find myself developing relationships with my cousins from different generations now that I’m older and after they have left this realm. It’s bittersweet and I feel like they try harder to connect now than they did when they were alive.
A couple of years ago, I found a letter that my cousin Roozani, who passed away in 2001 had written to my father. He was writing from a cell. The letter was dated two days before my 1st birthday. He mentioned how sorry he was to hear about my parents’ separation, and said he wanted to see his little cousin soon. My father took him at his word and brought me to visit him in jail when I was a baby. I read the letter, realizing how much of my origin story was documented within it; written in handwriting that so closely resembled my father’s, I almost forgot whose perspective I was reading.
After reading it, I wept as if I’d seen and talked to him every day of my life. I grieved for the bond that was forged when I was too young to remember its inception, for the fleeting moments we had that I didn’t realize would be so few, and for his life that a gunshot wound stole. He died of internal bleeding in the literal sense, but that diagnosis also seems an apt metaphor in regards to how our family processed his death. Later that day, my cousin Manda sent me a picture of his obituary without knowing about my experience with the letter. I felt haunted, in the best way. Like he was trying every way he knew how to reach us.
I remember getting in trouble once as a teenager, meaning I couldn’t use the phone, go out, or have visitors. During this dark period, my big cousin would bring me letters written with gel pen ink, in neon colored envelopes. She would put them in a little door on the side of my house (I think it was probably once for the milkman or something - that’s before my time). I would retrieve them and write back, placing my letters inside the little door for her to pick up when she could. We wrote to one another, talking about whatever was going on in the worlds of teenage girls…it wasn’t the content of the letters that mattered so much, but the fact that my cousin would walk across East Outer Drive to my house to drop off and pick up letters just to stay in communication with me.
To this day, we remain committed to updating and being there for each other. This is the sacred bond of cousinhood.
The sacred bond of cousinhood also manifested as 13 year-old me hearing my cousin Colin’s music from the hallway in their childhood home, prompting me to go into his room and ask him who it was. This led to him giving me a mix CD with the song ‘Smile’ by Scarface and 2pac on it the summer before I started high school. That interaction definitively made me truly fall in love with hip hop. It’s also why I love Tupac Shakur, not only as a musician, but a revolutionary figure.
It’s the foundation of why Colin is the only family member I can talk to about much deeper aspects of spirituality and the darker parts of society.
The sacred bond of cousinhood is Spirit guiding me to read the Biblical and Quaranic stories of Joseph days before Colin’s sister tells me she’s pregnant with a baby boy who she’s thinking of naming Joseph (he was born when Neptune was in Pisces and carries the familial trait of being active in the dream realm).
There’s just something about cousins - particularly when it comes to Black folks whose roots are in the American South…We hold on to each other with a different kind of fierceness that transcends time, space, life, and death.
Word to Lucille Clifton,
We truly are each other’s magnitude and bond.
This was such a beautiful piece about the connection between cousins. Thank you for this, I can relate to this in many ways!
so excited for this workshop series!