To nurture cultures of belonging, we need both grace and accountability. Grace which makes room for us to reconnect with our highest aspirations and deeply rooted values.

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.