When I view the mythical story of Eve and the snake in the Garden of Eden through the lens of this etymology, I’m moved by Eve’s willingness to risk her safety and security and step into the unknown. I’m struck by her desire to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and to know both the world and herself more deeply.
My paternal grandfather suffered from severe diabetes, and he became bedridden near the end of his life. My grandmother did all she could to maximize his comfort and minimize his pain. I imagine my grandmother propping up her husband’s rail thin body to feed him. I see her rubbing tiger balm on his legs and feet to bring warmth and sensation to these areas where he experienced poor circulation. I picture her showing extra care when rubbing balm around the nub of his one infected toe which was amputated to prevent the spread of gangrene.
Beloved, i want all of us stripping. Stripping all that makes us itch for more and keeps us from being present with what is. Stripping what has spread to us imperceptibly and proliferated quietly, creating endless cycles of patterned behavior. i want us to clear our body/soul/minds of all that is not ours through daily release practices and regular purifying rituals done on our own and together. And more than anything, i want us to let our hair down and move in this world untamed and free.
While there are different versions of Cumbayah’s origin story, the one most likely is that it was a song of the Gullah Geechee people of the Sea Islands of Georgia. According to Dr. Sumpter, Gullah Geechee people resisted the prohibitions of enslavement and sustained ethnic traditions from one generation to the next through language, agriculture, and spirituality. When heard against this backdrop of herstory, Cumbayah is transformed from a naïve panacea for peace to a call for action amidst the most oppressive of conditions.
We need to go at the pace of grief, creating and finding spacious containers so grief can unravel and its slowness, quickening, and stillness can move through us. Through this, we receive grief’s medicine and remember what we need to heal and return home to ourselves and one another.
In April, I moved into the 2nd floor apartment of a quaint multi-family home that felt like hitting the jackpot to my son and the answer to ancestral prayers to me. The home has beautiful features. My favorites are the covered front porch, copper painted radiator pipes with leaf engravings, deep window sills ideal for sun worshiping plant roommates, and a view of Mahicantuck, the “river that flows both ways”, also known by the colonizer’s name of Hudson.
Last spring, I exchanged coaching sessions with my friend, Mary Hoffer. Over the course of four sessions, Mary supported my exploration of what pleasure feels like in my body, what pleasures I long for, what gets in the way of me experiencing pleasure, and what it would be like to center pleasure in my life.
Even while surrounded by and immersed in people, experiences, opportunities, and spaces which keep my cup filled, the memory of not having enough is strong like the pull of gravity - it influences my movement even when I am not conscious of it.
In his exchanges with his teacher, my son reminds me that the dismantling of heteronormativity requires these small disruptions which wear down the normalizing of straightness, gender roles, and gender binaries like ebbing and flowing tides which transform rocks and minerals into millions of soft grains of sand.
Marginalized communities have always been sources of profound wisdom and creativity. By embracing our people’s practices—be it through people’s songs, earth-honoring rituals, or storytelling—we open ourselves to sustainable and liberatory ways of being.
Creating conditions for resonance means cultivating a sense of connection, energy, and presence. Resonance is an embodied experience that affects how we communicate, connect, and influence others.
In organizational development, network building, or systems change work, what is the fire we need to sustain in order for processes to be transformative and life giving?
The lessons of compost are encouraging. They incite me to imagine spaces where we create the conditions for curing the violent energy that fueled the conquest of the lands and peoples of the Americas. It is this same energy which drives the ongoing, relentless extraction of natural resources and human labor for an illusory sense of profit and wealth.
When our starting point is sovereignty and abundance and not oppression and scarcity the vital work of transformative justice becomes one of coming full circle to our intrinsic power - power that can never be taken from us.
– Cole Arthur Riley
In this time of enforced confinement, wildness beckons me to vast terrains of my inner life. Terrains of ancestral wisdom, traumatic memories, survival responses, and resilience practices mapped onto my organs, muscles, and tissues