What Belize Showed Me

There was a song playing on the radio during this trip — one of those simple lines about not needing a perfect plan, just a hand to hold. That's exactly what this trip was. Nothing about it went the way I expected, and everything about it was exactly what I needed.

The First Sellout

Since I published Song of Hummingbird Highway and started doing signings, I've never sold out of books at an event — until the Belize Diaspora Summit. Every copy, gone. But the number wasn't the real story. The real story was the conversations that got me there: readers who wanted to understand why Terri's journey unfolds the way it does, who saw themselves in her, who asked the kind of questions that made me even more certain of why I wrote this book in the first place. I came home with my own reasons cemented in a way they hadn't been before.

And the connections didn't stop at readers. Two bookstores — Bakabush and Bricks N Books — will now carry the book in Belize. That's the kind of full-circle moment that happens because you show up.

Mahogany and Art

Every school in Belize plants a mahogany tree — not because it grows fast, but because it takes over a hundred years to mature. Children grow up watching a tree they'll never see fully grown, so they never forget that it's one of their country's greatest natural resources, second only to the people themselves.

I keep coming back to that. It's a slow, patient kind of stewardship — plant something knowing you won't see the whole of it, because someone after you will. That's not so different from writing a book, or building a community of readers, or any long-term work worth doing. Art, like a mahogany tree, is something we shape for people we may never meet.

Quiet Beauty

I practiced pilates at sunrise on the edge of the Belize River, right where it meets the sea. I sat in a mindfulness session led by an expert alongside a Miss Earth titleholder named Destiny, and what she said has stayed with me: the true road between beauty and peace isn't found in a crowd — it's in quiet time alone, getting right with yourself. The Miss Universe delegates I met carried that same lesson in how they moved through the world — beauty on the outside, yes, but mostly an inherited pride and discipline underneath, aimed at literacy and a better future for the people coming after them.

It's easy to lose sight of that — of natural resources, of beauty, of the people and places that shape us — when we're moving fast. Belize slowed me down enough to remember.

The Small Things

I ate organic coconut, craboo, guava, and horchata. I learned that bug repellent does not survive a rain shower, and that wearing black in the jungle is an invitation to mosquitoes — lessons learned the hard way. I watched manatees, crocodiles, nurse sharks, howler monkeys (not to be confused with baboons), macaws, and parrots, and ended more than one evening with a glass of blackberry wine, watching the river hold the last light of the day.

And everyone, it turns out, has a cousin they wave to at a bus stop or a traffic crossing. That's Belize — a country small enough that everyone is connected, and generous enough that strangers don't stay strangers for long.

Clarity

Narrative is how we choose to look at our circumstances. That's true in fiction, and it's true in life. This trip reminded me that every achievement — a sold-out signing, a new bookstore, a single reader who finally understood why Terri had to take the road she took — is a step toward something bigger than any one event. Sands of time, moondust, starlight: it all adds up slowly, the same way a mahogany tree grows through storms and sunshine.

Thank you, Belize, for the reflections in the river, the orchids, and for reminding me that the biggest resource — in a country, in a community, in a book — is always the people.

Are you creating? ✦