Since the beginning my people have been fighting for Freedom. That fight has passed on through the generations and has been flowing through the blood of the descendants.
Freedom for me has felt like a lifelong battle. Breaking chains I didn’t know existed. They teach you about the external chains. The ones that held my ancestors captive. The ones that separated families and hearts from their homes.
What they don’t teach you about are the internal chains. The fears that remain even when the body returns to land. The scarcity that plagues the mind, remembering a time when all we had was what was right in front of us and that is all it would be. The beliefs that keep you chained in survival mode. What we have inherited goes deeper than cotton fields, manual labor, and soul food recipes. What we inherited were scars that stretch beyond flesh. Doubts that a world exists beyond the plantation, beyond the reservation, beyond the Big House, beyond Massa’s house.
I feel their fears in my bones. A rush of red crosses my mind whenever I think of leaving home and not returning. Panic ensues at the thought of never seeing my mother and father again, of leaving home for a land foreign to my tongue. I wondered for a while where this intensity was coming from. I knew myself to be bold, courageous in the face of fear.
Where did this fear live in me? Whose was it?
I remember one dark day when I was on a bridge between life and death. Literally and metaphorically. My body saved me and I went to yoga instead of taking the leap. That was not the leap I was meant to take.
“What you’re feeling is not yours” my teacher said, intuitively sensing my agony.
“This feeling is ancestral and is being worked out through you. You have been chosen.”
I’ve shared before here that my ancestors speak to me through the trees. I asked them one day about what it was like to leave home, to be together for a lifetime.
They left because they did not have a choice. They stayed together because dependency is all they knew.
“We were each other’s survival.”
My people dreamed of a life beyond Ivy existence. Beyond the South, Beyond Buffalo, Beyond the picket fence.
My people dreamed of a life of vivid imagination and wildest dreams. Of sovereignty. Of self definition. Of Love that honored independence.
This Freedom is internal. It is a state of being. A healing of a bloodline. A healing of my own trauma story that I no longer choose to carry. A healing of the many traumas that are held in the bones of my body that were placed on me by others that are not mine to carry. My soul chose healing in this lifetime, it chose freedom, for myself and all those who came before me. To not be bound, not be censored, not be silenced, not be confined. To embody Love, to move in Faith and not fear. To free myself from the inside, break the chains that held generations, so that we all may Fly.
Today, I take the Leap of Faith and let the ancestors be my wings with God as the wind that carries me.
In their Honor. For their Freedom and mine.
Happy Freedom Day
I love how varied your writing and musings are Grace, thank you and Happy Summer Solstice! <3