Not what should a person believe.
Not how should they heal.
Not how should they grow.
But what is the organizing principle beneath it all?
What is a life organized around?
(Even before I knew I was asking it):
I have spent my life asking the same question
The question followed me through art, relationship, leadership, spirituality, family, culture, and belonging.
Again and again, I watched people attempt to solve problems without questioning the systems generating them.
And I watched myself do the same.
So I went deeper.
Over time, it became impossible to ignore:
Many of the structures we inherit ask us to adapt to conditions that disconnect us from aliveness.
We learn to survive them.
We learn to succeed inside them.
We learn to heal from them.
But rarely are we invited to recognize what frames them.
The work I serve begins there.
In the practice of recognition.
Through noticing where life is already continuing.
Where estrangement has become structure.
Where continuity has never actually disappeared.
With learning to recognize the patterns quietly organizing a life.
The continuities that survive beneath culture.
The places where life is still teaching itself.
The questions that remain alive long after certainty has ended.
Again and again, that practice returns me to the same places.
We don't begin with answers.
We begin with attention.
Not as ideas.
As living ways of organizing a life:
How we belong.
Metabolize.
Relate.
Create.
Grieve.
Initiate.
Listen.
Make love.
Make meaning.
Place ourselves in relationship with one another and the living world.
Ancestry.
Body.
Relationship.
Dreams.
Money.
Grief.
Relationships.
Questions.
Of inheritances.
Attention itself.
This is the practice of recognition.
Together, we practice it.
Recognition has required me to learn across worlds that are rarely held together.
Mystical and Material
Symbolic and Structural
Ancestral and Contemporary
Ceremonial and Academic
I am an initiated Sangoma Priestess and hold an MFA from an Ivy League institution.
Neither defines my work.
Both have taught my way of meeting life.
Together they showed me that the deepest transformations do not occur through new information alone:
Through encounter,
Through gathering,
Through grappling and discerning,
Through asking and noticing differently,
Through recognizing what was always there,
Through learning to carry exactly what is needed and nothing more—
Through changing where we look to organize our lives.
They occur through returning.
Not temporarily
Not through optimization,
or self-improvement,
or another modality.
But through what has never stopped carrying life.
Recognition continues differently for each life.
Continue
SUBMIT
Leave your email below to receive a seed packet of prompts for unburdening the human. Journal. Create. Move with them in art. Plant them in your life. May they nourish your legacy.
Unburden. Return. There you are.
