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Quit Marching Down Dead Roads: The Trap of the Fruitless Tree

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Quit Marching Down Dead Roads: The Trap of the Fruitless Tree Look at your daily routine. Look at the calls you answer, the hours you surrender to a corporate logo, the conversations you indulge, and the checks you cash. You are sweating, grinding, and running yourself into an early grave. But when you look up at the branches at the end of your day, what are you actually harvesting? The Wolof elders from Senegal gave us an uncompromising law of nature: "No path leads to a fruitless tree." In the natural order, creation doesn't waste calories. A trail is beaten down into the dirt because generations found food, medicine, and clean water at the end of it. Nobody stomps a highway into the brush just to stare at dead wood. Yet millions of us wake up every single morning, lace up our shoes, and run full-speed down wide, paved boulevards that dead-end at a barren stump. We chase titles that feed our ego while starving our spirit. We maintain loyalty to toxic relationships and p...
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On The Other Side Of Kuumba

 Great Imani:

"Let us look at Imani through the lens of Kujichagulia"

Yesterday we spoke about the power of Kuumba and how it was unleashed when we were able to define our purpose. Now we are going to continue that conversation by traveling to the other side of Kuumba. Ladies and Gentlemen a present to you the principle of Imani. For us in Gye-Nyame Imani is the basis of the Nguzo Saba, which means that if we want to unleash the power of our principles we have to start with Imani.

"Imani means faith in self, family, community, and our people"

For today's post, I want to look at Imani through the lens of Kujichagulia, and ask what Imani is. Imani means faith, and in the Kwanzaa tradition it means to believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle. Faith in general means a strong belief or trust. In the context of Kwanzaa, it means the belief that we can be self-determined, self-authored and self-affirming. Imani is about having deep faith in ourselves as individuals, as families and as communities. If you don't have faith in yourself as an individual or as a community member, how can you determine your own destiny? How can you author your own life? How do you affirm who you are? Faith is a key component that allows us to be authors of ourselves.

"Make Imnai a part of your daily life"

This has been a powerful week for us to grow into. We wrestled with Kujichagulia, and came out still breathing. Now it is time for us to move into "Umoja in motion", the marvelous principle of Ujima. I am looking forward to completing this Journey with you. As they use to say in the old days ``gird up your loins and prepare for battle" we haven't even reached the halfway mark for the seven week trial, but those of you on the 21 day challenge, you are almost home. Either way hang in there and we will see you tomorrow.



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