The Wisdom That Holds Us
Welcome to the divine wisdom within you, where the breath of your ancestors stirs courage, clarity, and connection. With love and grace, I greet you.
In these uncertain times, when the old rhythms seem to falter and familiar paths dissolve, we are called to listen more deeply. Not just with our ears, but with the soul. There is a wisdom that does not shout. It hums, it pulses—it lives in the marrow of our being. And it has been with us from the beginning.
This wisdom is ancestral. It does not rely on data or headlines but is passed through memory, story, presence. Peter Paris reminds us that the ancestors are the bridge between community and Spirit. In times of trial, they do not abandon us. Their presence is not decorative—it is instructive. They have weathered storms, and their legacy is a living map. Mahalia Jackson's voice echoes through the ages, asking, “How I got over?” It is a question and a testimony.
We all come from people who gathered around firelight, who sang through struggle, who held one another through loss. Our lineage includes not just those with our blood, but those who lived and died with spiritual clarity and ethical courage. Harriet, Mandela, Merton, Black Elk—these names do not simply belong to the past; they walk with us now. When we name them in silence, we recover ourselves.
Our spiritual ancestors, too, offer ways of being rooted in compassion, resistance, and liberation. They remind us that our suffering is shared and that we are never isolated unless we choose to forget our belonging. As Baldwin said, we are the witnesses—the ones who must carry memory forward. And we are accountable not just to what was, but to what will be born from this moment.
The shifting earth is not a sign of doom—it is a sign of life. We are not here to create permanence but to move through these changes with clarity, love, and a joy that cannot be undone. Not surface happiness, but the joy that pulses through the body like breath, even through grief. The joy that sings when all else has fallen silent.
So listen—not just with hope, but with presence. The Spirit is near. And not always in the ways we expect. Sometimes it arrives not in wind or quake, but in the quiet kindness of a neighbor, in your own heartbeat, in the still small voice that calls you home to yourself.
We are held
by the ones who came before
and by the breath of the unseen.
Their stories curl around our shoulders
like smoke from ancient fires—
warm, quiet, remembering.
Nothing is fixed.
Not the pain, not the joy,
not the path beneath our feet.
Yet everything sacred
is already within us.
Listen. Rise. Remain.
