“Heal yourself with the light of the sun and the 

rays of the moon. With the sound of the river and 

the waterfall. With the swaying of the sea and the 

fluttering of birds. Heal yourself with mint, neem, 

and eucalyptus. Sweeten with lavender, rosemary, 

and chamomile. Hug yourself with the cocoa bean

and a hint of cinnamon. Put love in tea instead of 

sugar and drink it looking at the stars. Heal yourself 

with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs 

of the rain. Stand strong with your bare feet on the 

ground and with everything that comes from it. Be 

smarter every day by listening to your intuition, 

looking at the world with your forehead. Jump, 

dance, sing, so that you live happier. Heal yourself, 

with beautiful love, and always remember … 

you are the medicine.”

`”We are all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we’re alive

together during the same moment.”

– Maxine Hong Kingston

“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”

– Pema Chödrön

There are many kinds of power, used and unused,

acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource

within each of us that lies in a deeply female and

spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our

unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.  

– Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic-The Erotic as Power

“Memory, it seems, isn’t always material out of which to make art.

Sometimes remembering refuses us.

Sometimes I’m a shoveling the water of memory drags it’s palm across.”

– Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

I am a black woman, a mother, an incarnation, a testament of those gone before me. I am an oracle for my daughters’ daughters’ daughters; my sons’ son’s sons. 

My black round body, my touch, my scent, my ever whitening hair, my breath, my voice, my listening and speaking, my hearing and brazen deafness, my giving and receiving, my loving and loving failures, my forgiveness and failures to forgive, my chronicling of these times is my  insistence, my persistence, my resistance, my open rebellion to live and love and  create in the face of  the universal threat of my annihilation in the U. S. and beyond.

When I am living a life of action, consciously and conscientiously, in the face of that threat, I am new spun and carded wool threads that have been twisted, braided and fashioned into mooring ropes for over four centuries of enslavement, captivity, torture, dismemberment, death, and terrorized into crippling servitude and silence. These ropes are thickened with each passing rescue and healing and honoring and hope laden use. These ropes are passed from generation to generation as are lynching ropes. With them we catch, haul up, save, heal, teach, bury the dead honorably and respectfully, and guide us along the constant roads, plains, rivers, mountains, and seas of our sacred humanity, obligation, and promise to hang moons, fling the stars, and save worlds.

I am a cataclysm of reckonings for the incalculable inhumanity, depravity, exploitation, occupation, enslavement and slaughter of Indigenous, and African peoples and lands. 

My daughters, my granddaughters, my great granddaughters, my sons, my grandsons, my great grandsons, blood kin and chosen kin, named and unnamed, known and unknown are the unsuspected sparks in cold ash ignited in the threads of four centuries of deferred freedoms and promise. 

Andrea R. Canaan

© 5.19.202

“When explorers first encountered my people,

they called us heathens, sun worshipers.

They didn’t understand that the sun is a relative

and illuminates our path on this earth.”

– Joy Harjo

United Stated Poet Laureate

“The desire to break the silence with constant human noise is, I believe, precisely the avoidance of the sacred terror of the divine encounter.”

– Matsuo Basho

“We cannot rely on the silenced to tell us they are suffering.”

– Hunan Ashrawi

“And then the day came when the risk to remain tight as a bud was more painful than the risk to bloom.”

–Anais Nin

How do I re–choose myself, my young self, loved, protected and valued; my belonging and grand promise secured in my mothers’, my fathers’, my extended families’, tender caresses and the light in their adoring eyes?  How can I forgive them enough that they failed and men of the cloth, and their wives and mistresses, betrayed me, all of us, and we, unwillingly, betrayed ourselves and each other?

Am I willing to invite that child, that me, that joy–filled–delightful–curious–trusting girl out, now that all danger has been allowed to pass, after being hidden so securely, so deeply, for so long? 

Will I invite that sweet–gleeful–innocent girl to rejoin me after six decades of hiding, waiting, questing, remembering, confronting, revealing, confessing, testifying and challenging–challenging the harm grown inward to silence and crippling?

Will I invite her to live unhidden, unrepressed, uninhibited, unafraid and unsilenced and healed around the injured places among those of us who harbor and nurture our once hidden, repressed,  inhibited,  afraid and silenced and injured selves to full delight?

Together, will we welcome me, her, us? Will we hold her in belonging? Will we sleep, wake, pray, bathe, cook, eat, drink, dance, sing, drum, love in the joys of all of our journeyings, our comings and goings, and all of our returns?

Will we celebrate that me, that we, that us for saving my life, our lives?

Andrea R.Canaan  5.2021