I was raised to be a complete person of purpose. I knew I was responsible for my own success and understood human jobs had no sexual assignment.
There were things to be done, and as a child I was taught to use all my gifts and all my skills to lead in love and compassion. I was the oldest of six children. My mother needed support to make the family unit work in harmony. I was raised to show up and suit up for life and participate in life by using my developing skills to make a difference in all of our lives. Because my mother and father had their issues, and I ended up being raised with my grandparents during a very important developmental portion of my upbringing. During that period, I got to witness the working aspects of relationships and a true partnership between my grandparents. I saw how the strengths and weaknesses of the relationships and how balance was created. The nuclear family within the village family was my working model. I needed my place in the gathering of the gifts to succeed, I accepted my role with pride. My five brothers and sisters, who would come later, needed the love and support to be whole and balanced people, as did my mother. We all existed on love and support. It was our blood of life.
I learned as the other half of a working team, my mother and I together had a chance to win.
Also, I learned to receive love from being a helping hand. I understood the importance of joining a team at an early age of awareness. I also learned to appreciate the role of a partner. I saw the reflect of love and the beauty of a partnership by watching my grandparents. My grandmother pulled warm money from crevices of her breasts. My grandfather spent hours telling me stories of how the world operates and how love holds all that we are together. I felt that truth when I looked into his eyes.
Since I am his namesake, I wanted to be worthy, because I respected my grandfather, his love of knowledge, language and people.
He was a man of God and a tender soul. He believed in the respect of other people’s cultures and languages. He spoke five languages that I knew of. He was a man who was self-taught through personal study and he wore many hats, as he displayed his art of survival. I watched how my grandmother guided him to be his best. She knew his weaknesses and loved him anyway. She supported his strengths. I enjoyed their dance of sharing each other’s blood. He loved her love.
As I look back on my development as a young man unfolding, I would always stumble when I was not connected to the rhythm of the blood of my village, my holistic building block of life.
I had decided to be a success by being me. I was not sure what my “me” was, but my focus was developing my own personal vision and brand of living. I was not at my highest level of performance when I felt disconnected from my blood source. This state of being only occurred when I did not fully nurture the basic relationships around me, the relationships that supported my being a wholehearted person. I did not function well without my blood of life, or the support my weaknesses of character needed to become healed. I had forgotten to apply the tool of love. When I would remember to be love in my actions, my life would change its course for the better. The pattern was the same, but it took me a few tries before I realized the results of my actions produced the same results. It seemed life took its own sweet time. Life was waiting on me.
My grandfather was a man who spent a lot of personal bonding time with me, told me stories of the Bible, the metaphors and their meanings. He loved Latin poetry and he told me tales of Africa and Japan. He taught me to grow food from the ground in my assigned personal garden and how to cut off a chicken’s head. I was not too good at cutting off the chicken’s head as he ran around the yard, blood flying as I yelled until he fell dead. Then my grandfather took my hand and took me for a walk to tell me a story of forgiveness as I sighed deeply. But, I knew how to grow food.
I always loved the times he took me fishing and we would talk about how life was a series of stories that gave you lessons and answers. I saw the world in images of solution. I give my thanks to my grandfather. And I always remember to thank him for driving me everywhere I wanted to go. All I would have to do was to ask him, give him a time and he would show up. He would sit and study, read his Bible until I came walking back to the car with a smiling, ready face. I remembered this times when my dreams were not producing my desired results, when I was running out of money and personal time. These were the times I felt alone, hungry and afraid. In those times, I heard the echoes of the stories and the conversations of being in the middle of notes of loving. I would stop and breathe and bathe in the blood of my grandfather and his ancestors. We are one in our being.
My grandfather taught me to stay calm and still within myself whenever I was troubled, so that was what I did for so many times in my life that I felt dizzy from the repetition.
It seemed to be in my blood to try and fail, to only try again. “Nothin’ beats a failure, but a try…” my grandfather would say. In my darkest time I would remember what my grandmother would say, “And when life gets to you and you are down on your knees, don’t forget to pray before you get up…and then get busy.” As a result, I never developed the habit of sitting in my failures. If these Black people could travel across rural America in the 1930’s doing tent revivals, I could make a few stumbles and learn a few lessons to move on. I still hated to make mistakes. I craved perfection. I was full of my male ego until the art of solution became my salve to achieve some semblance of perfection. Also, being the eldest of six children and being responsible for their behavior played havoc on my performance of perfection. I had to learn acceptance and the gift of evolution within the journey of life.
I made a decision to become a man of solution and take the lessons I had learned from my grandfather, to choose love over fear.
I chose to challenge the traditional roles given to us as a society by being love in action with an open heart and a listening ear, especially as a man. I also came to recognize the profound truth of the matter, the peace I was seeking begins with me. That peace is reflected in the core group of family that surrounds me. It took years of practicing my rituals of loving, but soon I knew it like breathing. I guess it was because love is a memory embedded deep within the flow of my blood.
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