Something happens when you ask a person to tell you their favorite memory.

You see them begin to search; opening the archives in their mind’s eye looking for something delightful, and grabbing what’s most on the surface.

Tell me when you felt the most free...

Their gaze drifts, slightly up and to the right. They’re on a quest to retrieve that treasured memory, and bring it back into the air of the present now.

Eyes go aglow.

There is it.

I remember when I first bought my piece of land down in Beaufort, South Carolina….

When I first left home…

When I first touched my feet on the campus at Morehouse…

I remember feeling home, when I first traveled across the world to Benin…

We began here, touching the feet of freedom remembered so that we could imbue the seeds with new frequencies of liberation. Seeds of mustard greens and okra; two items of nourishment whose seeds travelled from the African continent in the braided hair of our ancestral mothers when they parted those doors of no return. Whispering prayers of survival, no matter what. Preparing with seeds to make it so.

Florida’s Emancipation Day and Juneteenth Celebrations found me guiding beloved community into their heart and mind to bring back those memories of freedom, and to sow it as a seed toward the future now. A memory, a seed, of freedom to nurse. All the while whispering steady prayers into these plants that will one day feed and nourish themselves, and others with that essential nutrient;

Freedom.