Sankofa

Looking Back to Myself to Lay the Road Forward

Blessed Saturday!

Welcome back to the Chapel of Honey! We meet you as you are, where you are, no judgement.

It’s a funny wonderful feeling, to come back to myself. I can’t say it is solely from the journey with sobriety, or from the renewed embracing of life. I got tired of being sick before these things came into play. Related, intrinsic, catalysts woven together to ensure I weave a stronger thread with myself. Return is not easy, but it is offered.

When I was younger I wanted a faith home. I wanted to know, without a doubt, that I was in the right place. It was an earnest and naive desire, thinking that if I found the perfect spot I would stop feeling like a round peg in a square hole, that somewhere held a correctness about God that would in turn satisfy my inner searching about myself. But the truth is - so far as I understand it this morning - that the only surety about oneself comes from within. Likewise, faith is an inner light. A personal Sun that is returned by the reflective Moons of the world around us. In revisiting my own roots, the walk with faith and conjure that is inextricable from my understanding of myself, I’m finding blessings and gems. I’ve got a basket in my hands, tender care in my heart, walking along the shoreline of who I’ve been and who I am blossoming into.

Sankofa bird and heart, image sourced here. I frequently wear earrings with the hearts and a Gye Nyame cuff, my current favorite adornments.

I had a lot of religious and spiritual freedom until I was a teenager. My gifts of sight, knowing, and dreamwork blossomed from kindergarten up, alongside an innate interest in the Dead, an internal preoccupation with ghost stories and mediumship and romantic ideas about wandering in cemeteries. Christianity was a vague part of my life, never offered in doctrine or dogma. I went to VBS with my neighborhood friend and internally scoffed at the “No God, No Love// Know God, Know Love” slogans while still enjoying crafts and games. I attended Baptist services here and there with other classmates, visited non-denominational churches, etc. But it always felt plastic in a way that made me itch. By the time I was put into catechism I had already gotten my hands on Scott Cunningham and Silver Ravenwolf, created my own rituals, sneakily read the Sylvia Browne books my mom hid in the basement. I knew what color candles to use for which purpose, had a small herb garden, started my self love baths. But alongside all this was still a feeling of plastic, the sense that I was in the Claire’s of spirituality. What had awakened my curiosities and constantly led me, the ever-referenced thread in my forehead, was the feeling, the hum. It was the way I collected rocks, spoke to the stone head I bought at a yard sale and kept in my windowsill until I lost it as a late teen. It was the way I wrapped special blends of things in hankies and scarves tying my knots just-so without ever knowing why. It was the way I would listen to the wind and trees, read the fallen sticks after a storm and feel a sort of remembrance in my bones. I used to keep a Bible under my bed as a kid, even until early high school. It was pink and brown, one of those Bibles-for-Girls that snuck in notes about being God’s daughter and what to look for in a man. I don’t know who gave it to me. I tried to read it often but mostly found myself in Psalms, over and over returning to lamentation pieces. I was sad often, in my own world. I frequently felt like two people, one face out with a smile and one face in, weeping. I would read the same Psalm nightly for weeks and then place the book back under my bed once I felt like my candle-lighting, goddess invoking Self again. It was a sort of confusing torment at the time because I didn’t know what to believe or what was true, but looking back now I see a girl following the thread: ask for help, speak it into existence until the Spirit is lifted, and craft again from a tended Head.

I had a lot of knowledge, and even fiery confidence, but underneath it was a poorly built foundation with no sureness of self. As my teenage years ended and my twenties began the road was a series of crash and burns that left me feeling lost. Dropping out of school, changing jobs often, mostly finding my worth in my looks and interactions. My innate faith in the natural world and my understood connection to it began to fade, save for the mediumship and divination gifts that were always there to help support me. Consultations and cards have kept food on my table in more seasons than I can count. As traumas and escape mechanisms began to walk hand in hand my senses dulled. It became more difficult to smell seasons and messages on the wind, to hear the trees speaking, to know. The more I stepped away from myself, the less I felt I belonged to the world, to the Mysteries. I suppose I felt rejected, like I’d failed. I forgot, for a long time, that I was my own Spirit House, my own God Body. When I began the the first return to myself things changed. I rejoiced again in ritual, in pleasure, in connection. But the foundation of the house had not been fixed, the basement was still full of ghosts. I was a shell wrapped in memories and shoving skeletons into the closet. Underneath it all I still relied on this feeling of simply no longer being who I was, that my new and limited identity of being sick and hurt and changed excused the way I was running from myself. And while it is true that trauma changes us, that there is no self to return to the same way, it’s equally true that there is a road forward. There is a present and future you being fed by your care this very moment, by the choices you make today and the possibilities you are allowing for tomorrow. It’s been a long time since I’ve been my whole self but she is still there: still reading the sticks and the scent of the wind, still painting ornate designs on her face and dancing with iron. I just spent time with her, drumming at the altar, eyes closed, the rough scent of old cheap tobacco swirling still potent cleansing around the room and through time.

Me, Honey, before I was ever known by this name. I don’t recall the photo being taken but I’ve loved it ever since I saw it and always wonder how I did not love this woman then as much as I seem to now. Going through old photos is such a lens correction in self love, a reminder that I often don’t see myself well in the moment. Cheers to me, and blessings to me, and justice for me. Amen.

Love always, Honey