Even when I do not know where I am going and cannot find my way, the mornings remind. They always remind.

Imagining…A Future, A Good One

When did you stop comfortably wrapping your mind around the future? When did you stop imagining, so ridiculously and so enthusiastically, about the things to come? About the things that could become, including yourself? Can you pinpoint when you started fearing it would only really come with bad news, or at least news that would interrupt any good thing you had been privately expecting from it? Been thinking about black girls and women dreaming and fantasizing and if we truly know how to engage a knowing that iterates and reiterates that the future also belongs to us? That not only is it ours to have, but that we also have a right to it. A right to imagination, to thinking that any kind of goodness could and can and will be ours, in this lifetime, on this earth, and in every future in which we agree to exist in.

Worry About Yourself (c.)

The hallway became a metaphor for a thing I cannot currently name. I walked that hallway for about three years at all kinds of hours, in all kinds of confusion about what I was feeling. It is funny how quickly God will give you clarity when you release your vision and start learning how to truly look at what you are seeing instead of making it into the beautiful thing it is not. Had no idea about the ghosts that had been dancing in anticipation of the victory in a battle they had not won.

In the middle of some relentless night that morphed into a beautiful opportunity to simply breathe, be, think, and feel without distraction or expectation, I found myself unbelievably preoccupied with all of that worrying and how thoroughly it got in the way of my ability to access to my own peace, my own pleasure, my own comfort, and my own, well deserved time. In the midst of the wrestling, I was struck by a simple and clear internal nudge: worry about yourself.

It is wild how long it can take to give yourself permission to rightly order a thing. It is also wild how we come to believe we are a thing that is not even worthy of unwavering consideration.

This year I think I am gifting myself the honor of worrying about myself, first. Consistently. Maybe this will give the strength to be more attuned to others, the patience to listen my way into being a better lover, and maybe even a better presence in the light, and the dark.

Awakening

For reasons, our ears and hearts have become quietly attuned to what has been braided into the wind of things to come. The unfolding of what we were looking at but did not understand. Now, we are seeing the real reel of what we were beholding. The shedding of images or maybe the putting of two and two together. Moguls we thought were getting it honest. Stars we thought were ascending or descending, naturally. But, no this was a construction of something. Made to deceive. A manipulation of imagery. Focused on controlling thought, industries, people. Right in plain sight. The arrogance of thinking you can kill and intentionally harm others, at your leisure, for however long you please, with remorse being the only thing you swallowed. Because how can that and power peacefully exist in the same space? Perhaps the process of seeding is not something that was understood. Maybe seeds were haphazardly and carelessly strewn about. Or maybe they just never perceived you could have a harvest of dead things who started speaking and would not stop.

Lemons

Lemon. And water.

That’s what I smell in the air all around me.

A Pause.

There are not-so-tiny-fires happening, everywhere. Old thought patterns are on fire. Old ways of doing this and that are on fire. Old laws have reemerged, and they are not isolated from these flames. What people did to people they did not love and who they thought would never have their day to speak on those things. Those things, the stuff you thought only remained or existed in the dark, yes this has been found out and is on fire, too. Even those who normally exist in their sort of selfishly warped world, which is most of us, have been syphoned (or will be) out of comfort zones and doing life as usual by the smell of something beyond insidious. The kind of something you had to experience on your own because if you told it, no one would believe you saw what you saw. The ask is to continue to pause, to not take our eyes off what is happening - because they keep saying what we see ain’t really what we see. And yet there is the smoke, everywhere, undeniably there.

Without Ceasing

Watch. And Pray.

Worry About Yourself (b.)

I worry.

I worry about being honest. I worry about being too honest. I worry about what the truth does to others. Specifically, what MY truth does to others. I worry about people and their capacity to hold the truth (me). I worry about what truth (I) does to bodies and hearts and emotional states. I thrive in the comfortability of others — I do not want anything about me and my truth to make for uncomfortable realities. I worry about failing people with the reality of who I really am.

I worry about not telling the truth. I know what a practice of non-truth telling does to you. What it does to your mind, your outlook, your days, your body, your spirit. I understand what it does to relationships. The distance and bewilderment not telling the truth provides, the divide it erects between hearts. It is not a good place. I worry about what happens when I do not say it all - have I let you down when I do not fully say a thing? How much truth belongs to me? And how much of it am I required to share with others? I worry about what happens to people when they do not have the truth. When they find me “out” will they love me the same? Will they see me the same?

I worry about the world beyond me and how much of it I need to consistently hold and make space for.

I even worry about my worry. The weight of it. The space it takes up in my life and body. The exhaustion. The premature mourning and the premature grief.

Erykah Badu talked about me; called me a bag lady. And then asked me to become less of one by putting those bags down.

There is this long, dark hardwood hallway in the house that runs from the back bedrooms to an open living space/kitchen/connecting garage. It is one of my favorite features and my favorite path to walk as I am chasing that first sip of coffee, the soul-stirring quiet and the stillness of an early morning…

Worry About Yourself (a.)

I do not collect people.

I collect the stuff people carry.

I carry the things they teach me to hold because I do not necessarily know how to be without the weight of carrying, something. However, I am learning how to better manage the weight of what I choose to carry…

Choking

Have you returned to forcing dry, unsaid words into the back of your throat, my dear?

Is this why the breathing has become more like hissing?

Grateful…

for the senses and the way they point to the now, make you feel for the future, and offer some kind, any kind, of relationship to the complicated and beautiful nature of memory

for the acquired taste of things that remain

for the recognition of pleasure found inside an eager mouth, moans that come as quickly as they go, and full, satisfied lips wrapped around themselves

for love and warmth and warm places

for community, group hugs, and our people gathering to sing and pray and press remedies into our skin when we find ourselves all variations of sick

for the darkness that swallows you whole and spits you out - changed, altered, armed at least with a knowing

for the gooey, bright, ethereal divine thing that sometimes happens while you’re just sitting there, right after you whisper to yourself, “How? Why me? I’m not sure I can make it through this.”

for the moments we find the same things funny at the same time, over and over and over again

for the full heart that meets you when you’re done with all of that

for every ancestor who decided to come here and be here so we could become

for you. that beautiful beating heart. and every detail that makes you, you

Fall Things

Seasons have feelings. Specific feelings.  Fall air is specific. The landscape is specific. The mornings are their own kind of miraculous. And the crackling warmth of fall evenings is its own kind of beautiful cocoon.

With the bliss of fall in sight, September brought along a lot of space for solitude and alone time. And intimate relationship misunderstandings and internal struggles. Seemed personal work came with more steps backwards than forward. But we press. On.

The between before the shift. The sort of unavoidable chaos before the calm. The interruption of self and your world before you arrive there. “There” being the very specific feeling I have asked my life for. I stepped away from a job in pursuit of this very specific feeling. My bank account reflects all the therapy had in pursuit of this specific feeling and this very specific life.

And here is life starting to whisper its response. Yes and a little more yes.

But not before trauma and the idea of good things meeting a bad thing has its say. The brain wants to lean into this particular kind of ying and yang.

Almost ten years ago my father and his best friend drowned in a boating accident. A day before he was set to pick up the baby brother who had just completed his first year of graduate school at NYU. Two weeks before the middle brother's wedding ceremony. Dad called a few days before the accident. The excitement in his voice around us gathering in Hilton Head to celebrate JR and P, palpable. His suit arrived on the front porch three days before his funeral. It took us two days to open that box. Only to close another the next day.

Many good things are starting to happen all at once. But Too many good things happening all at once is a trigger.

Seasons have feelings. Specific feelings.

Release

My last day with the academy was June 30th. Momma finally retired from the social security administration (yes, she was one of the rude ones) on June 30th. Us both leaving a thing on the same day; there's no real significance here. At least, I  don't think there is. We got to celebrate her and love on each other as a family over the 4th of July weekend. Gathering together in love always pushes life back into this skin and these bones.

Called Ma as we inched closer to the house after the drive back down South. Day 1 of retirement: she's bored.

Relationships grow you. They show you where you thought you were, what you thought you worked on and out. They encourage you to deal with you so you can appropriately deal with others. They show you the real you.

Whenever we all get together some kind of blowup is inevitable: the personalities are strong, strong. And black people be arguing. We managed to get through the weekend with just a few murmurings, a few irritations, only two almost-blowups, and lots of apologies. Maybe that's growth. Or existential fatigue.

The Evangelist Missionary mother wanted a toast on the 4th. Her Highland Park crew sent her home with a personalized bottle of white wine (allegedly). As always, the day was filled with the kind of love you can't really describe. Love that evades how shallow your mouth might make it. Thankful for her and dad (pops, we had a ball) and all these divine beings taking up pre-destined space in my little universe. Thankful for all the love that comes around to help us become, the love that reminds us to breathe.

I owe love so much more love.

I'll never grow tired of talking about Mornings. They've done too much for and to me. Another opportunity to witness your breath, to witness yourself. To observe. I'm noticing how and why I've been bad to others. I see how and why I've been bad to me. I've been worried about repetition. Saying the same thing/s over and over and over again. In different ways. Some days, in the exact same way. I just heard something by Yrsa Daley-Ward on this, something along the lines of forgetting and remembering and repeat, and that repetition is an integral part of our everyday living. Which helps. So, here I am with the repetition. Again. Me, in my own hands, turning myself over and over and over. Again. While opening myself to the instructions buried beneath the stillness that is so much more accessible (and tangible) in this place I never grow tired of talking about.

Names ought to be whispered with delicious urgency in the shadows of a day ready to begin again. This is a kind of rebirth.

What are you hearing these days?

Roe v. Wade: 2022 Edition

Guns, fear, mayhem. A not-so-quiet stream of blood on their hands. Mine, too.

You won't break my soul?

Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy.

Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves (fruits of the labor/the harvest) with them. (Psalm 126:5-6)

On the other side of a job. Facing down whatever is next. Coming to an understanding about the things that came undone. Still. And tuning into a frequency where the vibrations are suggesting it's time for that something. All things are made new.

My last with the academy was really June 30th.

Release the love, forget the rest.

What Is True?

"And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise." -Phillipians 4:8, New Living Translation

Since school dismissed for the year, mornings have become mine again. There's real space to unfold, slowly and fully, in my own head and in my own home.  Early mornings are filled with that sappy kind of sweetness that's easy to miss when hurrying and rushing to begin are a practice. I haven't found an alarm necessary in months.  My days now start somewhere between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. - my body, more specifically the things happening in my head and heart, decide when.

I roll out of bed, pulling myself together in familiar dark morning shadows. I whisper a good morning here and plant a kiss there, and shuffle down the hallway. Push the shutters apart, crack the kitchen window. Open the patio door. Start the coffee pot. Light a candle and incense. Get the diffuser going. Welcome the new and fresh energy into the house, into me. I love this part. This welcoming part. The getting still part. This space to talk to myself, my God and my Ancestors part.

There's so much possibility in the breaths taken here.

I've had to acknowledge that the pandemic and everything it brought about did a number on me. I want to say it crushed me. The reality is it did that and more to so many of us. I've grown weary of looking at all 2020 (and on) pressed out of me. Thinking about it. Talking about it. Holding it. Trying to figure out how to let it go. Turning it over in my mind. Petting it. Attending to it. Worrying about it.

I'm tired of heaviness, blame, selfishness, conflict, and the cost of...everything.

Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable.

The sun is starting to position herself for viewing. I step out onto the deck. The cool wood feels good beneath my bare feet. At the end of a yawn, I swallow a mouthful of life. Isn't it incredible how wonderful a breath of fresh air tastes? How it feels inside you and all it communicates? And how one really delicious inhale and exhale can save your life and give you the hope to keep reaching for more?

Noticing

For the past week, my mouth has been filled to the brim with complaints. Fatigue and lingering insecurities aggressively dictated how and when my tongue and lips moved. I complained a lot. About work. About what goes unnoticed. Complaining sends me to less than great places. It's a catalyst for unhealthy conversations between me and me in my head.

Am I a narcissist? That's where I went at week's end. I asked my girlfriend if I was that. She said she doesn't believe that's who I am, but walked me through moments where my behavior was congruent with a very basic idea of it.

Do I have an unhealthy need to be acknowledged? Do I think I am more unique and special than others? Do I show up in the world like this? What's a proper way to react when there's no reply to your email initiating another session with your therapist? (activating event/something happens). I think I have been ghosted by my therapist. (belief/I tell myself something). How can one not feel like something is incredibly wrong with them if your own therapist grows weary with what she sees in you. (consequence/I feel something).

The ABC worksheet I was given to process the truth of a thing. I am not sure if the thing I am telling myself is truth. Cognitive Processing Therapy. I still feel something.

That's a lonely place. That "I still feel something." That place where you hang out as a misunderstood version of yourself, whispering, "nobody gets me or it."

It's wild to hold expectations of being noticed and intimately seen when you close off most entryways to a deeper understanding of you. You want a thing you refuse to allow. I want a thing I refuse to allow. So this idea of noticing is maybe sometimes more poetic and disappointing than anything else.

The connection crisis. The crisis of knowing what you need but not knowing how to really have what you need. Or if I'm transparent, lacking bravery around the opening of your chest and allowing folks to really see and hear you so you can get what you need. Being noticed and seen requires this. Braveness that is. It also requires a commitment to emotional labor and emotional health. Staying open and this steady acknowledgment and observation of the existence of others is work.  But the work is a necessary thing that allows for a deeper experience with grace, love, joy, goodness, and healing. And a mouth full of less complaints and a brain that trusts and leans into this mutual exchange of being seen.

I be tired. I be complaining. I be lightweight narcissistic. I am both too much and also not enough. I talk about the beauty of love and need for it while being a mess in it. Full of contradictions and half understandings of complex truths. But I also know 2022/God/Universe is stripping away pretense and these very isolated and self-contained experiences I'm having with self. I know for sure that everything going forward necessitates a radical posture of openness and willingness to really be known and to really know others. To give them permission to witness who I am/you are. To see. To notice -- thoroughly, honestly, and sincerely. To activate the bliss of life and the wells of more through the power of human connections. I'm aware of the absolute need for more of this.

Monday, May 16th

I've been pondering dates. And repeat.

There's a lesson lingering in the transition from Sunday to Monday.

Today's meal: fried pork chops, sweet cream style corn, black eyed peas, and rice. They say meaning-making, remembering, rituals and celebrating the dates that remain matter.

Adding this month to that digit. Trying to make sense of a thing. Always trying to make sense of things. The numbers have to hold some magic. This adding, this figuring and considering - all this living and making meaning have to matter.

I'm still leaning into surrender. I still have real anxiousness around death but I'm leaning. But I want to know. I want to know what's next. I want to know the work (physical and emotional) will open something, anything up. That the efforts towards better will offer a much needed "continue this way" reward. Because what's all of this, if you can't feel the wins as thoroughly as the losses that ate/are eating you alive.

I've been pondering possibilities. And repeat.

Passion. That's the thing that keeps me up at night. Passion is its own kind of ghost.

Leaving a job. The leaving is right. The leaving is always heavy with symbolism. Wanted and uwanted. I'm always considering and pondering the signs and symbols.

Going to offer myself flowers, rest, and consideration all week long. Not sure what's next but I know I deserve that. And then some.

You. Have you paused to consider yourself? And isn't it wild how long you can go without pausing to do so?

5/15/2022

I've been pondering dates. And repeat.

I’ve been pondering possibilities. And repeat.

“She puts cinnamon on tomatoes
white pepper on carrots
mustard seeds on unlikely things
and takes wine and ice with breakfast.
She sits awake at night
and dreams with open eyes”
― Yrsa Daley-Ward, Bone

5/8/2022

I have a tendency to obsess. Over things, ideas, love, people, places, death, existing. One of my first obsessions was basketball. Uncle Kenny put a bald Wilson basketball in my hands while I was still mastering multiplication tables and offered me the basic mechanics of the game. That was all it took.

Basketball would soon consume me, as obsessions tend to do. Somehow becoming another thing I would use to determine my worth, my social capital, and my sense of belonging. I got good at it: basketball. Then better than good at it: obsessing. Both began to intermingle with the quiet compulsions around my hair, my lips, my breasts, my weight, my body, my voice and anything anyone had a strong opinion about as it concerned me.

But who is one without an obsession or two? And how is one seen if not for a thing that gives people a reason to pay attention to you in the first place?

The summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college, I ran miles on a gravel track before heading to my internship/teller job at Comerica Bank on East Gratiot Avenue. After work, I would play pickup basketball for hours. And hours. And hours. Jumar and I would play full court games of 1-on-1 on blacktop — in that Detroit July humidity until exhaustion or the night sky, or both, forced us to give it up for the day. There was always another run before I climbed into my full-size bed for the evening. David (RIP), who had his own share of obsessions, was always game to trace our route from his house on Electric to the 7-Eleven and back, no matter what hour I showed up on his front porch.

A tupperware bowl filled with a box of rice-a-roni red beans & rice + one cup of mahatma long grain white rice + water. Microwave for 6 - 8 minutes. A cup or so of orange or grape Faygo. 1-2 Nectarines. 4 Giant Sweetarts - save the green apple one for last. My diet most days. Was down 20 pounds before I was set to return to campus in late August. Told myself this was all about getting better, putting in the work, topping who and whatever I was or had done the previous season. It was mostly an exercise into shaping myself into something I thought was more noticeable.

I was 19, 5’8, 125 pounds. Semi-unhealthy. Lonely even. But the crossover was lower, faster, and tighter.

The obsession with your own secrets can kill you.

The unseen, unspoken, unexplored, and under-examined places cannot stay this way. Not if freedom is what you have in mind for yourself.

Sometimes, you have to get to the root of your obsessions.

Several days ago, in an overly dramatic moment with myself and the concept of surrender, I decided to finally work through a box filled with scraps of memories from high school and college the mother dropped off last April. Tucked underneath the terrible powder blue prom dress are basketball trophies and plaques. Amongst other things, there’s a page ripped from some magazine (Ebony, Essence, or honey). This particular page is a surprisingly well-kept coming soon ad for the movie Love & Basketball. I be needing God to talk to me nice and Loud. The box got incredibly Loud. And spiritual. And then I got incredibly scared and overwhelmed by the Loud messages coming from that box.

Basketball was an obsession until it was not. Until I found that I had nothing left to give it or to prove to myself in it - when I discovered I did not need to it be seen or adored or approved of. For a long time, even after college and after I stopped playing consistently, I wrestled with my own sense of failing at something I thought should have granted me more far more success. This wrestling ended up being one of those exercises in disentangling yourself from a thing you thought defined you way more than it did or ever will.

Sunday - 5/1/22

Sunday mornings. One day I’ll write my way into understanding why this day feels like *this.*

I began this day with Ain’t No Need To Worry x The Winans and Anita Baker. Felt God and my momma there. Hit repeat on Before I Let Go x Beyonce (4) times. Felt God, words of life, community and my family there.

Beautiful, poetic lyrics becoming something more with the assistance of incredible musical production: Escasty. Like this blue water road x Kehlani. I just jumped in but I’ll be here for awhile. “I want you to pick up the pen and write me into your story.”

Speaking of, Viola’s new memoir is stunning. I’m feeling God here, also. Feels like she’s on some higher assignment.

Surrender is teaching me things. Rearranging me. Blowing my mind, actually. Finding that it’s a posture you have to ask yourself to assume every day. I fought against it. I resist things. Rules. Advice. Rules. Myself. But I’ve grown weary of fighting me. My arms are tired. My throat is pushing out the words and pain that I’ve being silently choking on for…well, years. I've learned the resistance will kill me. And today, I'm in the mood to live. I cannot sustain a life that is in perpetual resistance.

The words and sentiments on this blog are circling the same bush. The bush is speaking (ugh). Even if it’s repetitive. It’s the process. It’s showing me me. Some possibilities concerning this life of mine. And then some.

What do you want in the second half of this year? What do you need? You should have and do some of those things. You get to explore your own new chapters just as thoroughly as you support the becoming of everything and everyone else around you. Why not you and why not now. You deserve.

Discovering that healing feels especially good. I mean really, really good. I know this is not an absolute feeling. Things shift. Things will shift. Including where I find myself along this healing path. But it’s an absolutely amazing thing to watch yourself coming together in ways you could have never imagined.

First day of May. May is a month that will forever conjure feelings of loss. There’s a date stamp to commemorate the loss. But May contains more life than death. May always reminds of (water)ing, flowering, blossoming, becoming. The moment when the messy metamorphosis is at least less messy. There is possibility here. Potential. Birth. A kind of dying. Re-birth. God is here. The ancestors are here. Love is here and it’s here in abundance for our having. There’s a particular sorting and harvesting happening here in May.

Also, Alice’s Walker’s Gathering Blossoms Under Fire….is like, I don’t know, like being invited into a most private place and being asked to take a seat, to listen, to learn, to observe, to consider and stay. And stay some more. “I have been reading Tolstoy and wondering how one comes to true honesty with oneself and at which point honesty becomes exaggeration.” -Alice Walker

Maybe we need to invest more time into our own gathering. A gathering of truths, stories, lies - looking at what’s in our hands, what’s lying dormant on our tongues, in our wombs. A gathering of self and pushing that gathered self out into or unto something.

Skin and Spring

Probing at this flesh. Tasting and considering the pieces of skin that have fallen away -- unable to meet the demands of where I am, who I am, what I have finally said, the splintering and the things that have finally broken me. Open. I taste like love and sadness. When I put my lips to the jagged and exposed places where old skin used to be, I can taste my own heartbreak and narcissism and failures. I can also taste the expanse of my own blossoming. I swallow and run my tongue through the daisies coming to life inside my mouth; perceiving their beautiful bitterness and that specific, familiar ache and craving for my own more-ness. The desire to turn myself inside out and spill yellow or any kind of bright thing into the soil of this earth. To offer something beyond hurt and an unyielding commitment to a lifetime of shrinking all this god-like matter into nothing. Sometimes, the rebirth looks like a devouring of self. Like a fire consuming oxygen to become more of what it is. Like alchemy.