One Blood One Village

“If we don’t protect the roots, the branches will never know what it means to rise.” — ESSOESS

As many of you know, I’m an oracle. A seer. A mystic. A teacher. But I’m also a writer.

This morning, I had a vision — a collective one. It came through like a current, steady and insistent, carrying the words It takes a village. The message wasn’t symbolic. It was instruction. It was revelation. It showed me what happens when we forget that we belong to one another — when we trade the drumbeat of community for the static of survival. The vision was clear: we are standing at the precipice of something familiar and urgent, something that demands we remember how to move as one.

Usually, I keep these visions to myself. Why? Because it’s a lot to hold — that kind of power, that kind of responsibility. It’s one thing to see for those who ask to be seen, and another to pour a revelation no one requested. So I share what comes through during readings, yes, but I rarely give unsolicited visions. They’re heavy. They arrive with consequence. But this one pressed hard on my chest. It didn’t ask to be kept. It demanded to be released — and the only way I know how to deliver something this potent is through writing. Writing has always been my cleanest form of expression, my truest way of translating what I’m shown into something others can feel.

I pause for a moment, because truthfully, I write for me, and for my five loyal readers. But for those five — and for the millions who may never find these words but are already living them — thank you. Thank you for reading, for bearing witness, for holding the line when it would be easier to look away.

Later in the morning, I went on a mini solo road trip. The sky was overcast. The air smelled like rain and fallen leaves. The trees along the highway were drenched in autumn — golden yellows, oranges, and deep reds blazing against wet pavement. Crows lifted from the fields in sweeping arcs, their calls deep and commanding, while a blue jay sounded out sharp bursts that split the air with authority. I was driving with the windows cracked, the hum of the tires blending with my thoughts, still asking for clarity on what the message meant. And then it happened — Prince’s “Free” came on.

Anyone who really knows me knows I’m the ultimate Prince fan. I can recite his lyrics like scripture. I know the grooves, the falsettos, the secrets between the notes. But this song — this one — I’d never heard before. That’s what made it so unexpected, so arresting in its timing. The moment felt sacred, too precise to ignore. His voice cut through the noise, and when he sang “Be glad that you are free,” it moved through me like prophecy — a reminder that freedom is not a finish line, but a practice. Freedom isn’t self-congratulation. It’s obligation. A call to act, to remember, to serve.

This message — this essay — is a call to the Black Diaspora, yes, but also to every human who has forgotten where their body began. Because every human body began in Africa. The blood that built this world runs through that soil. The first heartbeat, the first cry, the first word — all born there. And yet the same hands that inherited her wealth now strip her bare.

Voting is not enough. Protesting is not enough. Reposting is not enough.

And before anyone clutches their pearls — that doesn’t mean those things don’t matter. It means they don’t complete the work. We keep mistaking the spark for the fire. The protester mocks the poster; the poster mocks the one who stays quiet. But revolution needs every hand — the ones typing, the ones marching, the ones holding, the ones creating, the ones building.

“If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” — African proverb

Africa is the world’s body. The Diaspora, her nervous system. The village, her heart. And right now, that Body is being dissected, exploited, and numbed. We — her descendants — are both the patient and the healers now.

Blood of the Village / The Body

Before colonization, the village was law. Existence was never solitary; it was sacred agreement. Every harvest, every birth, every burial depended on the circle holding. That truth lives in the proverb our elders carried: “It takes a village to raise a child.”
And science, centuries later, only confirmed what spirit always knew — that every human being descends from one mitochondrial mother in Africa. Every lineage, every language, every life is an echo of that first village.

Africa is the world’s body — every artery of industry, every vein of trade, every cell of wealth still feeding on her lifeblood. What’s called “globalization” is just colonization reborn. They renamed the chains “supply chains” and called it “progress.” The world still drinks from the same well it once poisoned, and we — the descendants of the first people — are expected to swallow quietly.

Her rivers are arteries. Her minerals, bone marrow. Her people, the heart’s rhythm — steady, enduring, undefeated. But the world has been performing surgery on her without anesthesia.

Cobalt mines in Congo, oil in Nigeria, gold in Ghana — these are bloodstreams. They’re bodies. Children digging with bare hands to power electric cars that will never drive down their streets. Women laboring beneath dust and heat, invisible in headlines but essential in markets. Congo’s eastern provinces echo with gunfire. The world calls it commerce. I call it cannibalism — the devouring of the very flesh that feeds it, disguised as evolution, sanctified by greed.

The metallic taste of cobalt dust. The oil-slick shine on the Niger Delta. The glimmer of Ghana’s flooded mines. The sound of children’s feet running from gunfire. The smell of iron and smoke in Sudan’s massacre fields. The Body is bleeding now — not centuries ago.

And when Africa bleeds, the Caribbean bruises. Hurricane Melissa tore through St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica, flattening homes and washing away farms — the very soil that once sustained generations. The salt-sting of Jamaican air carried the sound of rooftops tearing from their anchors. From Haiti’s coast to the Dominican Republic’s inland villages, the same story repeats: when roofs collapse, corporations and foreign investors circle, turning tragedy into transaction. And in the aftermath, foreign “aid” arrives like a hand that both offers and takes. The same pattern repeats: disaster creates dependence; dependence creates control. Meanwhile, U.S. military ships idle just off the coast of Trinidad — presence disguised as partnership. The body is being watched, monitored, contained.

Across Africa, the Body is soaked in both smoke and blood. Sudan — a massacre. Civilians executed in streets that used to host weddings. Families starved into silence. Ethiopia, Niger, and Burkina Faso bleed quietly beneath the world’s indifference. Libya’s collapsed dams — proof that the Body’s pain is not memory but presence. And in Palestine, the soil itself remembers every child buried beneath it. Every bomb dropped there reverberates through our DNA, because humanity began in the same cradle we’re now burning.

Call these what they are: atrocities, thefts, desecrations.
Audre Lorde once wrote, “Your silence will not protect you.” Silence has become a luxury none of us can afford.

This is what I mean when I say It takes a village. A village that is alive, awake, and accountable. The world’s survival depends on remembering the original blueprint — where survival was communal, where protection was sacred, where every life mattered because every life was part of the same pulse.

The problem isn’t that we’ve forgotten how to fight; it’s that we’ve forgotten who we’re fighting for. We’ve become disconnected limbs of the same body — protesting separately, posting separately, praying separately. The left hand bleeding while the right scrolls. The eyes numbed while the mouth sings freedom songs written by ghosts.

“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” — African proverb

Look around. That’s the world right now — fires in every direction. And we wonder why the heat won’t stop.

But every fire is also a signal. A call home.

And home, for all of us, no matter the passport or pigment, begins in the same place — in the red soil where the first woman stood. In the rhythm of a drum older than war. In the shared memory of hands that once built together before they were taught to compete.

Another proverb says, “Wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it.” Freedom, too, must be collective. It takes all of us — the thinkers, the builders, the dreamers, the defenders — reaching around the same trunk to keep it standing.

If Africa is the world’s body, then we are her blood — and every act of apathy is another drop drained from her veins.
The Body bleeds. And the surgeons keep cutting.

The Stage of Half-Measures / The Surgeons

Screens glow in dark rooms like votive candles for the indifferent. Thumbs march in place. Hashtags rise and die in the same breath. We mistake movement for momentum, attention for action, algorithms for uprising. The revolution scrolls past in pixels — outrage on demand, empathy on a timer.

Reposts, retweets, recycled slogans — they sound radical but cost nothing. It’s easy to stand for justice when all it requires is Wi-Fi. We call it awareness, but awareness without embodiment is anesthesia. And yet, let it be said: your prayers are not wasted, your donations are not meaningless, your words are not without weight. Every act — when done with intention — matters. Being intentional is the difference between noise and nourishment. The problem is not posting; it’s the emptiness that follows when the post replaces the practice.

We are watching the same hands that wounded us now pose as healers — operating with the precision of surgeons who cut to claim, not to cure. They call it progress; we call it dissection. We’re numbing ourselves with performance — mistaking visibility for victory while the surgeons keep cutting.

While we trade slogans, corporations trade lives. Rare-earth minerals torn from Tanzania. Ports militarized along the Horn of Africa. Caribbean shores converted into private playgrounds for the same nations that once auctioned our ancestors. The cradle of civilization turned into a factory — its people worked, watched, and worn thin.

In Sudan, it is a massacre.
In Palestine, it is a massacre.
In Ethiopia, it is a massacre.
In Congo, it is a massacre.

Not “conflict.” Not “tension.” Massacre. Civilians shredded in markets, children pulled from rubble, whole bloodlines erased between headlines. And when the world looks away, the silence metastasizes.

This season, the winds became a sermon. From Jamaica’s southern coast through Haiti and Dominica, the Caribbean stood at the edge of ruin and still chose to rise. Roofs torn, crops flattened, yet the people gathered — passing buckets, sharing bread, praying beneath half-standing churches. Melissa’s name will be remembered not for what it destroyed but for what it revealed: that our survival has always been communal, that the old village still breathes through us. The same storm that stripped our homes made visible what has always been true — the comfort of the world still rests on the exhaustion of ours.

Across these islands, neighbors build with what they have, not what they are given. Children gather candles for the night. Elders whisper blessings into the dark. The power lines may be down, but the current between hearts hums unbroken — and still they rise at dawn to clear the debris because no one else is coming. This is what dominion can’t replicate: the covenant of care that outlives catastrophe — the living proof of my vision, the reminder that if we don’t protect the roots, the branches will never know what it means to rise.

Back on the African continent, the pattern shifts shape but not spirit. Kenya’s drought-scarred farms. Burkina Faso’s ghosted villages. Somalia’s hollowed plains. Extraction wears new masks: debt, charity, diplomacy. Every loan a collar. Every silence a currency. Mercy, renamed manipulation.

To those living in comfort, convinced that this struggle belongs to someone else: the same phone you scroll with is soldered with our suffering. The same gold on your wrist was mined from our pain. The comfort of distance is an illusion — you are living inside the consequences.

“Until the lion tells its story, the hunter will always be the hero.” — African proverb

It reminds me that history is not written by those who survived, but by those who profited from survival. We’ve been told their version for so long that we forgot our own. But every storm, every march, every village that rebuilds from ruin is the lion beginning to roar again — the hunted becoming the historian.

And as Audre Lorde once wrote, “Without community, there is no liberation.” It’s the line that threads through every act of care, every refusal to surrender, every heart that keeps working long after the world has turned away. This is what this moment asks of us — not perfection, but participation.

Enough of half-measures. Enough of mourning online while the ground sinks beneath us. Enough of calling it allyship when it’s only observation.

Enough is local organizing, not just posting.
Enough is redistribution, not charity.
Enough is funding liberation work, not following it.
Enough is building, teaching, feeding, healing.

Different roles, yes — but doing any of them halfway starves the whole.
The protester without purpose, the poster without follow-through, the teacher who stops at theory, the healer who hoards their gift — each wound widens when any of us settle for less than full.
The people need every hand, but they need them open, not idle.

Because the surgeon is a symptom of the dominion’s logic: to master, to measure, to divide. Ours must be a different practice — an anatomy of care, a radical study in restoration. We do not dissect to know; we mend to re-member. Healing, here, is a political act — the refusal to let the world be fragment when it was meant to be whole.

The Village Must Rise / The Scar

When the shouting stops, the truth takes its first breath.
It moves beneath the skin like light under water — quiet, steady, impossible to extinguish. The lesson never changes, only our willingness to hear it. The world keeps offering mirrors, and we keep mistaking them for exits. But this time, something holds. This time, we do not look away. What we build now has to be made whole — no longer pieced together by pain, but joined by purpose.

The scar is geography. Memory. Inheritance.
It stretches across oceans and alphabets, visible from satellites and altars alike. Colonization carved it. Capitalism keeps reopening it. But scars are proof that the wound closed once before — that the Body remembers its own capacity to heal.

To the Diaspora — Caribbean, African, American — you are the same scar, healing in different climates. The rhythm in your walk, the fire in your tongue, the way you endure a world not designed for you — it’s all the same power translated through distance. You are the aftershock of the same creation, the continuation of a story that refused to end. And this is why remembrance is sacred work — because forgetting is how erasure begins. We preserve our history as direction, a living compass that ensures we do not disappear inside borrowed lies.

And to those who treat Africa as elsewhere instead of origin: she is not an idea to be studied. She is your first breath, your unrecorded mother, the soil that shaped your ancestors’ lungs before there were borders to divide them. You do not stand apart from her — you stand because of her. Every human born of light shares her imprint; even the indifferent are made in her image.

James Baldwin once said, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without.” Love is not sentiment — it’s structure. It’s showing up, investing, remembering. Love is the discipline of rebuilding what dominion calls impossible.

The scar lives not just in the land, but in us. It breathes in migration routes and borderlines, in the salted air of new beginnings, in the silent rooms where survivors translate pain into purpose. It is drawn in skin and soil, in every language that refuses extinction.

And yet, from within it, hands reach for soil. Fires are lit again. Villages emerge from ruin. The ancestors whisper not comfort but instruction: build differently this time. Build with memory, with music, with mercy. Build structures that do not need oppression to stand.

“Even the best cooking pot will not produce food.” — Akan proverb (Ghana)

No pot feeds anyone without fire, water, grain, and hand. Liberation is the same — it requires all of us. The warrior, the farmer, the writer, the healer, the visionary. The revolution is not a solo. It is an orchestra, and every note counts.

Stop policing how others contribute. The protester and the poet serve the same flame. The teacher and the midwife labor in the same love. The coder and the drummer keep rhythm in different languages. Our differences are not distractions — they are directions toward the whole.

As Langston Hughes dreamed,
“I dream a world where man / No other man will scorn.”
That dream is a design plan — a map for how we find each other again. We rise from the scar not as victims, but as architects of the new village. The ones who remember, who rebuild, who re-member. The vision was never mine alone; it was ours, waiting to be recalled through the wound.

Own the Village, Save the Village / The Heartbeat

I am speaking as both witness and participant now. The vision arrived clear, collective, undeniable. A call to gather, to rebuild the roofs that sheltered our elders, to open the skies that hold our prayers. It takes a village because a single heartbeat cannot hold the world, but a thousand in rhythm can move it. The phrase is mandate. Every hand, every resource, every intention belongs to the same creation, the same tomorrow, the same continuance of us all.

This is the moment when remembering becomes strategy, when love turns to logistics, when prayer becomes plan. This is where the dream stops floating and starts building. Creation is still speaking through us, asking for coherence, collaboration, continuity. The world is raw material — but the blueprint is already in our blood.

For my brothers and sisters — remember who you are. Return to the sacred labor that made your people endure: the ritual, the rhythm, the rebuilding. Reclaim your economies — skill by skill, seed by seed, sound by sound. Build circles of protection that multiply wealth, wisdom, and will. Freedom breathes through discipline. Through unity. Through every act that says, we are still here.

For our extended family — those who crossed these same waters and still carry her salt in their veins — honor the source that made you human. Allyship lives in endurance, in the quiet choices that refuse erasure, in the courage to stand inside the fire rather than observe it. It is the work of equity sustained long after the spotlight fades, the long devotion to justice without applause.

Africa and the Caribbean are not just coordinates — they are consciousness. They are a living continuum, pulse and memory, the architecture of humanity. They are the people who continue to make meaning out of ruin and ritual out of rebuilding. When we remember that we are the people, fear loses its governance. Because no one can tell your story but you — and when you tell it completely, courageously, consistently — you rewrite what the dominion keeps redacting. You restore the archive of us, continuously remade by those who refuse disappearance. Every retelling is resurrection. Every act of remembrance is repair.

What You Can Do

Move with precision. Give where it matters. Support Jamaican-, African-, and Caribbean-led organizations rebuilding homes, clearing roads, feeding families, and circulating funds inside their own economies. Reach directly across oceans — send help to those who know what their people need. Every contribution counts: money moves fastest, but intention travels deepest. For those across the Diaspora, giving is a return, a reconnection of arteries once severed. Every prayer, every dollar, every repost, every conversation is an act of repatriation — the village calling itself back to life.

But this work is not only about offering aid; it is about remembering that we are the village. To unlearn the isolation sold to us as freedom. To replace competition with care. To understand that power lives in proximity — that protection is collective. The myth of self-sufficiency is how systems keep us small. Every time we share a resource, a recipe, a remedy, we fracture the illusion that survival must be solitary. We rise by returning to the ancient design: interdependence as infrastructure.

And to the children of the Western world — those told to pledge allegiance to borders before blood — remember: you were Black before you were branded citizen. That hierarchy is the oldest weapon of the state — to convince the descendants of brilliance that geography is greater than genealogy. You belong to something older than the state. The moment you forget, the world fractures again. The moment you remember, the village heals.

We are the system now. The supply chain is spiritual — each link made of will, grace, and mutual care. The revolution is local, intimate, personal — what you build, where you give, how you remember. “When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion.” — Ethiopian proverb

That truth breathes here. Every act of courage, every thread of faith, every network of hands — when woven together — dismantles what was built to devour us. Power is not inherited; it is constructed. Through relationship. Through responsibility. Through the refusal to abandon one another. We are the architecture of interdependence, the builders of what lasts.

If we pause, the loss spreads like drought. But when we join — fully, urgently, without hesitation — we turn scarcity into solidarity. Africa, the Caribbean, the Diaspora: one current, one inheritance, one blood. Together, we remind the world what wholeness looks like. Liberation is not preservation; it is participation. We rebuild by remembering that we belong to one another.

Prince once sang “Free.” That song breathes like instruction — freedom as stewardship, as responsibility, as continuity. Freedom is the act of tending to one another, of maintaining what we have built with vigilance and grace. It is creation in motion, compassion in structure, the work of breathing together until the air clears.

And so the vision expands — the village, the remembering, the rise. The horizon opens like a held breath released. Every act of unity draws the world closer to coherence. Every outstretched hand becomes the bridge to another future. I saw it. I heard it. I feel it still. The world is turning toward itself again. The village is awake. The people are the architects now.

One love,
ESS xo

“When we remember that we belong to one another, we become ungovernable by fear. Love — organized, disciplined, and collective — is the only system they can’t colonize.” — ESSOESS