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. Eve seemed to intuit that this knowledge would allow her to access the power of choice and to become less dependent on a so-called benevolent god who kept secrets and the sources of wisdom to himself. Rather than the power to harm, I picture Eve reaching for a power to create both her present and future.  

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 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

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.

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.