Friendships & Alchemy (Podcast Interview with Environmental Organizer and Apprentice to the Earth, Jendaiya Hill)

If we’re lucky, sometimes in life we find a friendship that changes the fabric of our lives forever. I first experienced this at age 8, in the form of a silly, smart, athletic girl who lived at the end of the cul-de-sac where I grew up. Her name is Jendaiya Hill. 

As children, we bonded over a shared love of fiction, fantasy, and magic. We could basically recite pages of Harry Potter back and forth. We loved to walk and play and explore all around the East Cary suburb where our parents had found homes, always making up stories as we went along. There was a rope swing on the corner near our houses that was the site of endless imagination (perhaps to the dismay of the neighbors) where we often practiced our very serious auditions for American Idol or Disney Channel.

A whole year older than me (this means a great deal as a child), I couldn’t help but look up to Jendaiya. Our age gap meant she entered middle school a year before I did, and her decision to attend the big magnet middle school in Raleigh influenced my choice to follow in her footsteps. 

Once in the throes of middle school, it started to become apparent that, while we could still play together after school in the magic realms of our imagination, the public world received us differently. As Jendaiya has reflected on this stage of life and friendship she shared; “Our different racial experiences in the world became more clear. We began to understand our identities as more complex, but our love for one another stayed and grew.” I feel similarly; middle school, puberty, and growing consciousness of the world and inequality can make life at that age seem almost unbearable, but we always had each other.

When it was time for high school, I received devastating news: my best friend had been accepted on an almost complete scholarship to a private, very prestigious school in Washington, DC, that costs more than most public universities. When the news that her mother, a school teacher, had also been offered a teaching position there, it was decided: Jendaiya and her family would be moving to the nation’s capital, and our era of living just a few houses away was coming to an end. Life changed quickly — at just 14, Jendaiya was transported from our world of the public, magnet schools of Wake County to a new world of massive wealth and privilege. Her classmates were children and grandchildren of the political elite and heirs to some of the wealthiest companies in the world. For all its advantages and disadvantages, this experience was a masterclass for Jendaiya on the racial, economic, and gender power dynamics that built and shape our society. 

I heard about all of this through phone calls and visits in the summer. Jendaiya is many admirable things — smart, strong, empathetic, and brave — and she was doing great work to remediate the suffering she saw around her. Maybe it’s because our friendship started over a love of magic and Harry Potter, but I’ve always seen her as an alchemist: turning bad into good, suffering into opportunities for healing. While at this school, she and a friend created the institution’s deeply needed Black Girls Society and a separate multi-racial student support group, which still exist at the school to this day. And still, as her friend, I knew that all the positive change she was making at her school was not without personal costs. On the outside, she could be her normal smiling self, but on the inside, she was navigating cruel bullying, gender violence, and discrimination. It was very hard to live far away from a loved one when I  knew they were suffering.  

Amidst everything, she excelled as a student and athlete, and easily landed a place at a great private liberal arts college near Philadelphia with a beautiful and expansive green area (a much needed refuge for a city kid that loves to meditate in the woods). However, her college education outside of the classroom was far more abundant than any class curriculum, a condition that mirrored my own. She was learning from grass-roots environmental organizers, engaging in a personal meditation journey, and learning from transformative books like My Grandmother’s Hands, Braiding Sweetgrass, and Parable of the Sower. It was becoming clear that this power of alchemy — of creating real-time change and transformative justice — was Jendaiya’s purpose, not sitting in a classroom. 

Her soul was calling. In 2020, at the top of her class, she made the decision to leave college and focus on community organizing, leading mutual aid efforts amidst the pandemic to support those suffering most. Supported by grants, she worked this way for a year until Covid-19 disrupted life as we knew it, and she knew she needed a radical change. When the lease of her Philadelphia apartment ended and she could no longer afford to live in the city, she moved outside, and spent two and a half years living nomadically in a tent all along this country’s natural areas, from Pennsylvania to California, witnessing climate change in real time, and learning first hand the urgent lessons that mother nature offers. 

Through all of this, we stayed connected via our phones. I heard intermittent updates on how life on the road was going: stories that ranged from the kindness of strangers to the impossible hardships of navigating life so far under the poverty line. The lessons and adventures she gained in this time are monumental, and you should hear it from her. 

Jendaiya is now living back in Philadelphia, working as an organizer for environmental justice, living in a little apartment with Sama, her soul mate in dog form. I now live in Durham, working at RCWMS, and it’s been an incredible gift to know that for us, growing up has also meant growing closer. This year, while an Anita McLeod intern, I started a podcast called Earthly Presence where I interview folks passionate about creativity, community organizing/social justice, and spirituality. It should be no surprise that Jendaiya had to be a guest. 

I took the trip up to Philadelphia in March of this year, excited to see her new home and witness the stability she has cultivated in the city she calls home. She took me on a tour of the neighborhood and to the forests and arboretum she loved so much at her former college. This visit formed the core of the Earthly Presence episode I share with you all today. 

Thank you for reading. I pray we all find life-changing friendships that ground us and grow us. 

If you would like to listen to this episode of Earthly Presence, you can visit here.