It’s hard to leave New Orleans when the jasmine is in bloom — especially when you’ve spent a decade learning its rhythm. The scent floats in the air like a soft spell, the sudden sweetness a harbinger of spring and the slow turning of seasons. The white flowers seem to appear all at once, adorning the tangled vines that trace the city’s fences and phone poles.

A friend tells me that every city you live in is a kind of love affair. Some are short and tempestuous, others stretch across seasons, years. After 10 years with New Orleans, I finally know it is time to go. They say it takes exactly as long to move as you need it to. I think I needed that whole time to learn what this place was trying to teach me — about pace, about care, and about feeling things in your bones.

PACE

My first home was a house in the Irish Channel, a red camelback shotgun with too many roommates and not enough hallways. What I remember most are my neighbors sitting on their porches every day, long talks interrupted only by the sounds of Mr. Okra driving through the streets selling vegetables. Compared with what I knew from the East Coast, the most striking difference was the pace of things. People just seemed to have more time, and a willingness to spend it on others.

Years later I would learn a word for this ,  that New Orleans has aspects of a polychronic society, in contrast to the more rigid monochronic frame that dominates the rest of the country. In polychronic cultures, time is seen as cyclical and relational rather than fixed. That shift in orientation touches everything: multitasking, unscheduled connection, a generosity of presence. Much of what’s good about New Orleans ,  from its rhythms to its spices ,  comes from Latin America and Africa. So, too, does its relationship to time.

Everyone thinks their early 20s were the golden age of the place they lived, but New Orleans in 2015–2020 had a special quality to it. Cheap rent. The best dive bars in the world. DJ Soul Sister spinning classic vinyl Saturday’s at Hi Ho Lounge. The Superdome rocking with Drew Brees. Somehow, it felt like there was time to do it all. For my 20s, New Orleans was the Goldilocks city — slow enough to feel luxurious, fast enough never to bore you, big enough to feel expansive, small enough to always run into someone at the grocery store.

When people ask me about Louisiana, I often start by talking about the swamp. I tell them there’s more life in a cubic inch of swamp muck than in a whole pile of Virginia clay. But you have to know what to look for. The swamp doesn’t offer the postcard peaks of the Sierras or the expansive plains and skies of West Texas. It reveals itself slowly, paddle by paddle.

One night during a kayaking trip in the Ponchatoula Basin, I lay in a hammock strung up between old cypress trees. Dusk came with a deafening chorus of frogs, the clicking of katydids, the rustle of roosting herons. That night I happened to be awake at 2:00 am and heard the heavy splash of an alligator rolling off of a log. Louisiana can’t just be seen ;  it has to be heard. The choice is deciding to stick around long enough to listen.

CARE

One feature of being alive for the last decade is that we’ve had lots of time to soul search about why things are on the wrong track, and how our society has become so polarized. Recently, a heatmap from a 2019 study in Nature called “Ideological Differences in the Expanse of the Moral Circle” made the rounds on the internet. Participants were asked to assign moral concern to various groups of people. The allocation options began with immediate family and radiated outward to “all things in existence.” The heatmaps could not be more different across political divides: liberal respondents’ allocation was clustered at the outer edge, toward the universal; conservatives were more concentrated on their inner circles.

Each side interpreted the findings to confirm what they already believed. Liberals scorned conservatives’ narrow empathy ,  demonstrated in their recent glee over the dismantling of foreign aid and unlawful detentions. After all, what kind of life is it to lead where you can’t extend your care beyond just your family and friends? 

On the other hand, conservatives mocked liberals for caring more about “all natural things in the universe, including rocks” than about their grandmothers. On its face, the criticism is unfair (last I checked, grandmothers are included in “all natural things”!), but the thread is worth pulling, reflecting arguments from progressive movement leaders about how internal dynamics are harming our movements for social change (adrienne marie brown & Maurice Mitchell, to name a few). I know from my own experience that it is true: sometimes we are so focused on the universal that we forget to inhabit a lived politics of care.

In New Orleans, I found a model for balancing these perspectives. I’ll never forget my first second line, a massive parade snowballing through the Treme and snarling traffic on Claiborne. On the corner, someone had set up a popup bar in the bed of a U-Haul rental. Like so much in New Orleans, second lines are celebrations born from exclusion. Black mutual aid societies and pleasure clubs formed in response to lack of access to life insurance due to racial discrimination. These clubs held jazz funerals to advertise their services. The first line was the mourners; the second line was the band and everyone else. Today’s second lines are jazz funerals without a body , open to all.

That sweet spot between intimacy and universality is something New Orleans does well. Walking along Bayou St. John or through any number of neighborhoods in the city, you’ll see it all: family time, networks of neighborly care, but also a willingness to extend that graciousness outwards to strangers. There is no contradiction between caring deeply for those closest to you and extending that care outward to the broader community.

Extracting ourselves from the political and spiritual hole we’re in will require this embodied politics—not just about issues, but about how we carry ourselves and treat others as we move through the world. Coincidentally, this is something that organizers in the Deep South have in spades. What the progressive movement needs isn’t more ideological refinement or a perfect policy agenda, but better ways of being with each other; a little less theory and a little more porch time. In fact, I’d argue the level of care that New Orleans excels at the most is actually missing from the Nature study. It’s a circle that sits between “all people you have met” and “all people in your country” — an allocation for collective care at the community level. For the people you haven’t met yet but still feel connected to, the other faces in the second line.

BONES

Lately I’ve been working on how to stop thinking things through so much and just feel. I remember one of the first times I really cried because of a beautiful thing:  listening to a recording sent to me by the archivist from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Archive. The video, from 1992, features legendary performer and songwriter Allen Touissant at Jazz Fest. Halfway through the Soul Queen of New Orleans, Irma Thomas, joins him to perform “It’s Raining,” which Touissant wrote but has since become a Thomas classic. It is one thing to know intellectually that art and ritual are a tool to metabolize grief. It’s another thing to feel it in your bones.

It’s been a hard year in Louisiana politics — decades of policy progress ripped up overnight, seemingly out of spite. The Justice Reinvestment Act, bipartisan legislation that ended Louisiana’s reign as the most incarcerated place in the world, was eliminated in a two-week special session with the stroke of a pen. Governor Landry recently moved to pause the Barataria Sediment Diversion despite the dozens of millions already invested, undermining a linchpin of the Coastal Master Plan effort to address land loss. As the Queen of Soul would say, “It’s raining so hard, it’s really coming down.”

Census data tells us 77% of Louisiana residents were born in the state , one of the highest rates in the country. The Pelican State doesn’t pull too many people in, but it doesn’t let people go, either. A friend lovingly calls New Orleans the “velvet ditch” :  a place comfy enough to distract you, but easy to get stuck in.

That feeling of being stuck is how I know that it’s time to go. I suppose the simplest way to say it is that things have stopped feeling “just right”—that the proverbial porridge has gone cold. I’m ready to try something new :  to live closer to my family, to move at a different pace, to swim in a slightly bigger pond where we can fight for more than just the bare minimum. I have to go . Even if it’s just for a time.

On the way to the airport, my Uber driver tells me she’s trying to leave, too. The governor has cut funding for special education, which her child depends on. Indeed, leaving is rarely about lack of love and is almost always about protection.

But I am returning changed. It’s striking how many people from the East Coast look down on the South as backward and broken. What they’re missing, of course, is their own role in the story: the South is full of things they can’t stop using but don’t want to see the byproducts of. The gulf absorbs the runoff of all the nation’s choices ,  from fertilizers washing down the Mississippi to oil rigs drilling up fossilized dinosaur bones to keep the gas pumps from going dry. Centuries of extraction and resistance settle in the delta mud.

My great aunt Anne — a longtime New Yorker and one of the people I most admire—told me not long before she passed about a trick she’d use to fall asleep. Instead of counting sheep, she’d recall each bed she’d ever slept in, what it felt like, and which direction it faced. Starting from the cot she laid in as a young girl in Guangzhou, China, to her north-facing bed in a Brooklyn row house. For my own studio in Brooklyn I think I’ll set it up the opposite way: head north, feet south.

Leaving New Orleans is like saying goodbye to a teacher at graduation: you know you’ll see them again, but that this chapter is over because they’ve given you enough. This place taught me that you can hold universal politics and still care deeply for your neighbors. That it’s possible to be passionate about your profession and still move at the beat of your own drum. That you can’t participate in every parade, but you have time to join more than you think. And, most of all, that when you feel something in your bones, you have to listen.

As the plane lifts, I look out the window one last time. The sun hangs low and enormous ,  red and round at the edge of the world. Like the jasmine blooms, it marks another cycle ending and beginning, another beat in the rhythm of a place that taught me everything I know.

For more writing from this author visit his Substack here. 

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons. All other photos by the author, unless otherwise noted.