Deep belly breaths… meditation has always served me from a place of awareness. Like leaving the thoughts in my mind instead of trying to push them out. Or paying attention to where the thoughts go to inside my body. Like what thoughts invite more peace and smoother breaths and what does it feel like. I use movement and breath like that to commandeer a mindful state that tells a story. As creatives we are inundated with so much damn information all of the time, so we have to be intentional about sifting through the garbage to get to the Jewels. 

Over the weekend, I found a bracelet with my sister‘s name on it at a rural thrift shop far away from the big city where we’re from. I had actually gone back to get something for an art project when I came across the bracelet. There was no reason on earth that I should’ve ever found a bracelet with her name on it at that location, place and time. It was confirmation that were conn no matter how far apart. Also of a truth I had known all along. It’s wild how divinely guided both my art and life path is. How ancestors and spirit confirms and reaffirms every time. My sister and I share the same father, so we didn’t grow up together. In fact, I don’t even know if the spelling on the bracelet is the correct one, but I know its her name. Gives me joy to say it aloud. I haven’t seen her since 2007, after a painful truth, not mine to tell, came out about her and our father. Made me weep for my sister, but proud of the courage she was born with.

Movement is one of the many ways I work in this life to heal my families lineage in the next because I truly believe we can’t just honor ancestors and those to come simply with words, but we have to honor them in our actions, the ways we live out our lives, the ways we change traumatic, unhealthy patterns in our structure once normalized. When I push, pull, bend, flex, stomp it’s a cosmic wave of energy that does something for them too. This movement is my sister Maisha for her courage and innocence lost…

Honest to God, I just wrote my dad who is in prison, explaining to him many things, but mainly that we can’t continue to shrink into or behind shame and guilt. We can’t shrink because the pain can grow us if we let it. We can no longer hold ourselves hostage for bad choices we made or hide behind distorted mindsets and actions either. We have to do the work that will allow ourselves to be eternally free beyond this body, beyond this earth. Because the truth will set us free or on fire.

Warmest,

—TheeAmazingGrace