Self-Love Has to Become a Practice The older I get, the more I understand that loving myself cannot remain something I merely say. Self-love has to show up in the way I actually treat myself. I can tell myself that I matter all day long, but my habits will eventually reveal whether I believe it.
You Cannot Keep Pouring From an Empty Cup: Learning to Care for Myself Read More »
Humanity Has to Come First The older I get, the more I believe that being human has to mean something deeper than belonging to a particular race, religion, culture, or nation. Those identities matter because they help tell the story of where we came from and what shaped us. I am not interested in pretending
Beyond Race, Culture, and Belief: Learning to See the Human Being Read More »
A Queen Powerful Enough to Make Kings Pay Attention Every now and then I discover a piece of African history that makes me wonder how I went so long without hearing about it. The story of the Rain Queens of the Balobedu people in South Africa did exactly that to me. For roughly two centuries,
The Rain Queens of Africa: When Kings Sent Gifts Instead of Soldiers Read More »
Thirteen Lines That Refused to Leave Me Alone When I first started digging into the Emerald Tablet, what caught my attention was how much meaning people had pulled from such a small piece of writing. The text is traditionally associated with Hermes Trismegistus and became one of the foundational writings of Western alchemy. Depending on
Becoming Through Doing: What the Emerald Tablet Taught Me About Change Read More »
How Can Superstars Be Broke? When I first heard that TLC could sell millions of records and still end up broke, something about the story did not make sense to me. This was not some little group struggling to get somebody to play their music. TLC was everywhere during the 1990s. Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins, Lisa
A Strong People Must Be Strong Everywhere The words attributed to the Honorable Marcus Garvey that a strong man should be strong everywhere carry a message much larger than one individual. When I think about that idea, I hear a challenge concerning the condition of African people wherever we happen to live. Garvey’s Pan-African vision
As the Mother Rises, So Do the Children: Marcus Garvey and the Strength of Africa Read More »
Most of What We Say Is Not Really About Information The older I get, the more I realize that much of what holds relationships together looks almost too small to matter. We spend a good part of the day saying things that carry very little important information. We ask, “How was your day?” even when
The Little Things That Quietly Hold Us Together Read More »
Reading the Room Without Losing Yourself There is a certain kind of wisdom in being able to walk into a room and quickly sense what kind of energy is moving through it. Some places feel open, thoughtful, warm, and easy, while others feel tense, shallow, competitive, or drained. Learning how to read those differences can
Do Not Shrink Yourself to Fit the Room Read More »
The Principle That Made Me Stop and Think The deeper I looked into Hermetic philosophy, the more one principle kept pulling me back, and that was the principle of mentalism. There are traditionally seven principles presented in The Kybalion, but mentalism is placed first because the others can be understood through the way we perceive
The Mind Behind the Life: Understanding the Hermetic Principle of Mentalism Read More »
When I Started Digging Deeper The more I started digging into the private life of Grover Cleveland, the more I realized the history I had learned barely scratched the surface. I knew him as the twenty-second and twenty-fourth president of the United States, the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms until Donald Trump repeated
Grover the Good: The Women Behind a President’s Carefully Polished Reputation Read More »