There and Back again…

I have, over the last year, returned from my sojourn to the Enchanted lands of New Mexico to my native Colorado. My time there was about healing myself from so many wounds of my lifetime that had never been tended to. 

I returned with a spirit renewed and fed by time on the lands of the Tiwa, and all of the Indigenous tribes of the beautiful desert outside of Albuquerque. I returned with medicine given me by the Curanderas, and the many Indigenous healers, who helped me to bring a full circle to my own healing journey as I came to understand that the medicine of Curanderismo is deeply intertwined with the medicine of my African ancestors.

Those who journeyed there during and after enslavement—shared and cojoined their medicine with the Indigenous, thus creating a circle of healing on Turtle Island that I can rightfully partake of, know, and understand. 

For so many years, my spiritual journey had felt incomplete because as a Black woman, single Mama, self-employed therapist who had chosen to charge what those who most needed the help could pay, I didn’t have resources to get myself to Africa, to my ancestral lands, where I believed I would find the answers I sought. 

How would I have known that the answers were not only within me all along, as well as in the lands just 500 miles away, among a people I would never truly be a part of, but in a land that held magic, enchantment, healing, understanding, wisdom and love for me. 

Upon return to my native Colorado, I found love in the form of my family—my children, my friends/community and within my own strength of coming home, to remembering who I truly am and have always been.  

My healing was about coming to grips with my aging body, yet finding that my spirit is still infinitely strong, infinitely resilient, and infinitely aware of ancestral, historical, celestial and personal time lines that have shaped me into who I have been, who I am, and who I continue to become. 

I know that there is more to all of this than meets the eye. I know that I am as well, my own ancestor, in that I am the accumulated knowledge of thousands of lifetimes, and that knowledge is a part of what has made me. I know that there is more to this life than we can even imagine.