Growth

I think about this quote all every once in a while. It really fits now:


For a long time, from babyhood through young adulthood mainly, we grow, physically and spiritually (including the intellectual with the spiritual), without being deeply aware of it. In fact, some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don't even recognize that growth is what is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or person who explained it to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. I remember the waves of anxiety that used to engulf me at different periods in my life, always manifesting itself in physical disorders (sleeplessness, for instance) and how frightened I was because I did not understand how this was possible.

With age and experience, you will be happy to know, growth becomes a conscious, recognized process. Still somewhat frightening, but at least understood for what it is. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.

-Alice Walker

This Song is a Prayer

Each morning before the sun comes shining
I pray Jah Lord to keep me strong
To keep me far away from the wicked
And let me live clean and strong
Just let me live with my fellowman
Father oh my Father, Father, Father
Lift up my head and let me move along
Show me the way, the truth, and light lord
And let my days be long
And let my days be long

-Let My Days Be Long, the Abyssinians

I feel like a rastafarian hippie child sometimes (not unlike the the "rasta style, flower child" so embodied by ms. E Badu). I do though, because my folks raised me in such an Africentric hippie way, whether they'll admit it or not. My father used to blast the Abyssinians when I was growing up, this conscious reggae group from back in the day. And because of him, I love them. Their music is so simple and soulful, so intertwined with spirit. It's also so clearly influenced by Rastafarianism, with little bits of the Amharic language sprinkled in their lyrics alongside English and Jamaican patois, and countless references to the middle passage, zion and Africa. This song has always been one of my favorites. I was trying to explain to my partner, Seshata (she has a name! LOL) how it makes me feel, and has made me feel since I was a little child. I feel like you sing this song when you are truly, utterly content with life. When you are so grateful just for the opportunity to live and smell the flowers another day that you're not singing the popular refrain of our times, "take me now," "end this shit," or "when will it be over..."

...BUT you're praying, begging Jah to increase your shit! Increase the number of days you have on this planet. Power. To me it expresses such an ownership of your life, of your own destiny, when you have reached the maturity level to be able to be so in tuned with nature and the rhythm of the planet that you want to be here longer.

I feel that we have inherited this sad, sad legacy of colonization, unfulfilled promises and broken spirits that has made it so difficult for many of us to break through the barriers imposed by our environments and connect with the source. It's not often that you see a person just smiling because they are alive, and asking God to keep them on the planet longer. Not in our culture that is so addicted to depression. And to feeding that depression with more and more things, with more and more material products that by design and definition cannot possibly fill the cliched but all too real hole inside.

This is a song you sing when you know. When you know the difference between what's real and truly valuable and what's constructed. When you can distinguish between what parades as truth but has no substance, no space for soul to enter and what truly matters, and what is soulful (soul filled).


Prayer: "...to keep me far away from the wicked..."

An especially important line to people who have had the experience of colonization. An especially important line in the wake of Thanksgiving, the holiday constructed to obscure the depths and the breadth of the horrors that happened beneath the paved roads we now walk and drive. To obscure the stories, the voices of those that lived here first. "The wicked" assumed that those voices were actually buried when those roads were paved, when they washed their hands of the blood they spilt to pave those roads but they were wrong. They were wrong and the planet is in the process of rebalancing itself. And the buried voices, the bones and the strories are being reconstituted as the flesh of songs and refrains like this, as prayers, as creative inspiration, as the simple happiness of being alive and connected despite the continuing horrors of colonization, despite the pain that continues, that started when the first river was renamed, when the first tribe was forced to relocate, when the first person was smuggled and enslaved to do work for this empire.

(Dr. Marimba Ani: to take away a person's name is to destroy that person. To rename them is to colonize them.)

I most definitely want to be far away from the wicked when the planet enters its final stages of rebalancing. LOL. (But truthfully. In all seriousness: I do.)

But I still want to be around long enough to witness it and sing this song with conviction.