Ceremony

I am just returning from three nights of ceremony. It was good to be offline. I return to a world in which Puerto Rico still reels from the irrefutable facts of climate catastrophe. We seem to be getting closer to nuclear war, and it has become more important than ever for black athletes to make calls for racial justice.

I name the darkness first because the light I see does not deny it. The keepers of the fire are real. The medicines of Mother Earth are real. The songs and dreams of the ancestors are real. Today. Here on this same earth that's in turmoil, there is sacred ceremony, and there is healing, and there is transformation. I have seen it. I have lived it. I have heard the songs and met the teachers.

I can tell you that there are people who punctuate their lives with acts of devotion, who make sacred offerings with every meal and who sing prayers into every hearth. And I can tell you that they are beautifully perfect as much as they are also flawed. They have moods, preferences, blind spots and human stuff as much as any of us. But they show up. They say yes to the work. They try harder. They try again. They do it with devotion. They do it with love.

I can tell you, I can assure you, that people are coming together. Because I have gazed into their eyes and I have touched them. I have heard their laughter and I have heard their cry. It is a forward facing remembering. And it holds our best hope for liberation. This is a light that has already survived darkness, millennia and centuries of darkness.

And it's not just individuals who are healing, and growing and becoming more human together. New collectives are being forged and imagined. New relationships of loving mutuality, of shared commitment to evolution and liberation. New forms of consciousness being nurtured and invited. A new "We" becoming possible.

It is real. I have seen it. I have lived it. And I am a part of it.

This is the song of my heart. And maybe it is also yours.