Where Are You Landing?

History didn’t teach us how to move.
We moved, and they started writing.
There is no such thing as arrival when you come from origin.
The land means nothing without the ones who move it with intention.

The earliest forms of knowledge weren’t written—they walked.
They moved across desert, through currents, under moonlight.
Our ancestors were the first to move in rhythm with the seasons and the stars.
They traveled as scientists and spiritualists, as seed-bearers and myth-makers—guided by memory, and returning by design.
They crossed thresholds not to escape, but to observe, translate, plant, and consecrate.
Movement wasn’t departure—it was data.
Every journey was a liturgy.
Every arrival, a recursion.
Movement wasn’t deviation. It was the deepest expression of connection.

This is movement as archive, as proof, as generational instruction.

But the record doesn’t tell it that way.
Because the record begins when we are already in chains.
It begins mid-sentence, mid-ceremony, mid-abduction.

It catalogs rupture and forgets everything that came before it.

And so we are forced to distinguish what never should have required separation:
There is the motion of the explorer, and the motion of the extracted.
There is the map made in dialogue with the land, and the map made in defiance of it.
There is the body that walks in search of insight— and the body relocated as possession.

To explore is to make meaning through relationship.
To be moved is to become resource.

This is the design of domination.

Still, the spirit is a historian.
It archives what the record omits.

Even when we were displaced, we moved like those who remembered.
Even when we were scattered, we traveled like those who still had coordinates.
There were whispers in our blood older than any flag.
Routes encoded in breath.
Maps tattooed behind the eyes.

True return requires no distance.
It is a circular intelligence— an origin carried forward through time, not backward through memory.
It begins not with location, but with recognition.
It is the moment the body says, this is it.
Not because it was found.
Because it was never left.

We are not coming home.
We are home.
Wherever we land, the ground adjusts.
Wherever we speak, the air listens.
Wherever we remember, the land remembers too.

So I ask again:
Where are you landing?

Not where are you safe.
Not where are you seen.
Where are you sovereign?

To land with intention is to proclaim authorship.
To stop wandering is not to settle— it’s to remember what the wandering was for.

⸻

There is a moment—just before descent—when the air thickens.

The light changes. The wind quiets.
The world does not pause, but it rearranges itself around your arrival.

You can taste it in the back of your throat like iron.
Like salt in a wound you didn’t know you carried.
You don’t feel it in your feet—you feel it in the soles of your teeth.

Landing is not a decision.
It’s a recognition.

Ask the griots why their stories begin with dust and not with names.
Ask the elders why they close their eyes when memory crosses the threshold.
There are coordinates more ancient than compass, and the body remembers them in taste, in temperature, in timing.

Somewhere along the line, we were taught to distrust what does not explain itself.
Told that if we could not articulate it, we must not understand it.
But knowledge does not always announce itself in language.
Sometimes it comes in texture.
In rhythm.
In a silence so specific it could only belong to you.

Among the Akan, they say
“The path is made by walking it.” (Akan proverb)
Not by asking for a map.
Not by watching for signs.
But by knowing when the ground beneath you shifts from waiting to receiving.

This is the science beneath instinct.
This is the architecture of knowing.

We were never meant to drift indefinitely.
We were meant to recognize the moment the ground says yes.
To step into it not with apology, but with presence.
With appetite.
With memory that lives in the tongue and the joints and the pulse behind the knees.

Where are you landing?

Not in what they see.
Not in what you show.
Not in what they can name.

Where is your body saying yes before you speak?

Because this is how the ancestors landed— through sensation, alignment, and timing so exact it made the earth respond.

Whimbrels migrate across hemispheres without hesitation.

They fly over 2,000 miles of open ocean, guided not by maps but by an inherited geometry— a pulse of direction that lives beneath the bone.
In 2020, one whimbrel flew from the Arctic to the coast of South America in five days,
crossing storms, heatwaves, and open sea with no pause for rest.
It did not question the route. It remembered it.
It returned with precision so old, even the weather made way.

This is movement made faithful to memory.
Design—carried through origin, affirmed by belief.

There are instructions embedded in the body that no storm can override.

And we, too, carry that design—though we’ve been taught to ask for proof before trusting it.

Landing is convergence.
A moment when what lives within meets what was always waiting.

Sometimes the place has been listening longer than we’ve been speaking.
Sometimes the signal isn’t loud. It’s exact.
Sometimes the call arrives not as language, but as quiet, as temperature, as a change in posture, as appetite returning to the body.

The whimbrel does not hesitate.
It moves with memory sharpened by repetition and unbothered by doubt.

And there is a version of you who already recognizes the moment when presence meets instruction.
That knowing lives in the body the way instinct lives in breath.

And it waits—patiently, precisely— for your agreement.

⸻

There are things you can only hear once you stop moving.

Like how much silence you’ve been translating into speech.
Like how many of your choices were permissions you gave to fear.
Like how often you called obedience wisdom because it kept you alive.

And you may find that survival taught you rhythm, but not rest.

That you learned how to navigate noise, but never learned how to live when the noise stopped.

Because the world does not reward quiet certainty.
It rewards pageantry.
It rewards resilience in the shape of self-abandonment.
It names you brave for staying where your spirit has long since left.

But what happens when you no longer need the applause?
When you no longer need to be understood, translated, proven, or explained?

What happens when your voice returns to its original pitch?
When you stop performing softness for access, and begin reclaiming the sharpness that was never meant to be dulled?

You begin to hear your name in places no one is calling it.
You begin to speak without preparing your exit.
You begin to stay.

Staying is movement of another kind.
It honours the ground that holds you.
It teaches the air how to carry your name.

Because the land remembers those who remember themselves.

And if you are still, truly still, you may find that the grief you’ve been calling ambition was just your body asking you to come back.

⸻

To return is not to go back.
It is to arrive with the weight of what you now know— and refuse to leave it behind again.

This is not a return to place.
It’s a return to power.

A moment when presence stops feeling like interruption.

Because knowing is no longer enough.
Recognition is not the destination.
We were never meant to live at the threshold forever.

And so we cross.

We cross with calloused feet.
With unspoken prayers tucked behind our teeth.
With blueprints etched into our sleep.
With languages that do not translate, but hold.

And this time, we do not ask for directions.
We ask the soil what it needs.
We ask the wind where it hasn't touched yet.
We ask our bodies what they are ready to release.

And we build there.

Not in the image of what was taken— but in the image of what was never lost.

That is the difference.

We are here to resurrect the future we were told to forget.

To make presence the infrastructure.
To make memory the method.
To make the ground a partner in the dream.

This is emergence, not escape.

The point where landing becomes legacy.
Where the act of staying becomes the seed of something sovereign.
Where you no longer fear being seen because you no longer fear being true.

You did not just come here to survive.
You came to return the world to itself.

And the first place it starts— is with you.

So I ask you again, for the last time:

Where are you landing?

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References

• Chasing Hope: Innovation And Taking Flight In Stormy Weather - Forbes

• Akan Proverbs – Adinkra Symbols

The Holy Ghost is Trans

If God is everything, why are we still insisting God is either/or?

What we call Spirit has always existed beyond the architecture of gender. But the human impulse to categorize, to control, to contain what makes us uncomfortable, did what conquest always does—it narrowed the infinite. It carved binaries into being and dared to call them Divine.

The Holy Ghost is not bound by biology.
It has no fixed form, no singular voice, no allegiance to the constraints of flesh.
It moves as wind. As fire. As presence.
And if I’m being honest, it moves like queerness.

But still, institutions try to make holiness legible—palatable.
They put the sacred in a suit and tie. They give it a father’s tone, a pastor’s cadence, a theology of walls.
And they call anything outside that boundary unnatural.

Yet before any of us could spell transgender, two-spirit, or non-binary, there were cultures who not only understood these identities—they revered them.

Among the Fon of West Africa, Mawu-Lisa was both moon and sun, male and female—creator and container. They understood the divine as dual, unified, indivisible. Holiness didn’t divide itself to be understood—it expanded itself to be felt.

Among the Navajo, there is nádleehi—one who walks in-between.
Among the Lakota, winkte, whose visions were trusted, whose roles were sacred.
In the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso, dual-spirited people are seen as mediators between realms.
The Yoruba didn’t weaponize fluidity—they encoded it into the divine. Ọ̀ṣun does not explain herself. She simply is. And she is never just one thing.

Before queerness was politicized, it was praised.
Before it was punished, it was priesthood.

This is sacred memory—passed through story, through ceremony, through blood.
It’s a remembering older than the language trying to erase it.

The Holy Ghost is trans because Spirit has never needed to choose.
And maybe the reason that makes some people so uncomfortable…
…is because they’ve built their entire sense of holiness on the assumption that God looks just like them.

⸻

Before gender was boxed and labeled, it flowed—between bodies, across borders, through breath and ritual. It lived in those whose presence reminded the community that the sacred was never singular.

In Diné (Navajo) culture, the nádleehi—"one who is transformed"—embodied both masculine and feminine traits. They served as healers, spiritual guides, mediators. Their existence enriched the community, woven into the spiritual and ceremonial life of the people. (source)

The Lakota recognize winkte—those who move between gender roles, who hold spiritual functions no one else can. Winkte have long been respected as ceremonial leaders, dreamers, mediators—carriers of wisdom that lives between the lines. (source)

In Burkina Faso, the Dagara call them gatekeepers—individuals who live on the threshold of gender and spirit. Their presence sustains cosmic balance. They are tasked with bridging the seen and unseen, anchoring the spiritual health of the village. (source)

Within the spiritual traditions of the Fon people of Benin, Mawu-Lisa embodies a divine duality—Mawu, the moon goddess associated with night, fertility, and compassion, and Lisa, the sun god linked to day, strength, and power. Together, they represent a harmonious balance of feminine and masculine energies, illustrating that the sacred transcends binary definitions. (source)

In Yoruba cosmology, the orisha Ọ̀ṣun dances through contradiction—seductive and sovereign, nurturing and destructive. In her, gender is not a limit but a language. The divine doesn’t collapse into male or female—it expands. (source)

When colonial powers arrived, they did more than conquer bodies—they redrew cosmologies. Imposed hierarchies. Rewrote the sacred in their own image. What was once holy became forbidden. And the ones who once stood at the center were cast out.

But power doesn’t vanish. It adapts. It remembers.

Today, the flourishing of Black transgender and gender-expansive life is a revelation. A recognition. A sacred architecture being rebuilt in public view. And what people fear isn’t the visibility—it’s the vibrancy. The truth that wholeness doesn’t need approval to shine.

Naming and honoring these truths is an act of recognition. Of resurgence. Of returning what was never lost—only buried.

I write this not as someone speaking for trans and gender-expansive people—but as someone who honors them, learns from them, and knows that Spirit rises wherever truth is welcome.

⸻

Spirit has always adapted. It traveled in drumbeats and dreamscapes. It etched itself into scar patterns and language. And now—it hums through fiber-optic veins. It slides between screens. It speaks in 1s and 0s because it knows we still need it to speak.

For those the church exiled and the temple ignored, the internet became sanctuary.
Not a perfect one. But one where Black, trans, and gender-expansive bodies could begin again.
Where the altar wasn’t built of marble, but interface.
Where a livestream could hold as much power as a laying on of hands.
Where divinity didn’t ask me to apologize for being complicated.

These digital sanctuaries weren’t born from convenience.
They were carved from necessity.

When physical churches turned us away, we coded new temples.
When sacred texts erased our names, we wrote new ones—in blogs, on social media accounts, in voice notes between chosen kin.
When the systems refused to see us, we built mirrors that could.

Because Spirit has never required a building.
It requires truth.
It requires presence.
It requires a body willing to hold what cannot be defined.

Spiritual technology is more than apps and affirmations.
It’s memory coding.
It’s knowing how to make meaning in exile.
It’s making a ritual out of reclamation.
It’s turning digital space into devotional space—because when your existence is politicized, worship becomes reclamation.

And who better to engineer the future of the sacred than those of us who have always lived in the in-between?

This is the reemergence of the original code.
The sacred rising to meet us in every form we’ve ever taken.

⸻

There is nothing more threatening to a system built on control than the sight of someone it tried to erase—thriving.

To dance in a body they said should be hidden.
To love in a way they said was broken.
To call Spirit into a room and have it show up looking like you.

That is consecration.

Because joy, in its rawest form, is design. It remembers what the world forgot. It restores what doctrine tried to unwrite. It doesn’t just outlive shame—it rewires the frequency altogether.

Black trans and gender-expansive joy is not a side effect of healing. It is the healing.
Not a prize for survival, but a method of it.

This kind of joy doesn’t wait for permission.
It doesn’t ask if its softness will be palatable.
It doesn’t lower its volume to make others comfortable.

It anoints.
It takes up space.
It weaves laughter through the grief and says, “We’re still here. We’re still sacred. We’re still becoming.”

And in witnessing it, I learn too.

As a queer Black woman, I’ve watched how the binary limits not just others, but me.
How the rules about how to be “feminine” or “spiritual” or “good” don’t actually fit the mess and majesty of who we are.
And how the more I deconstruct what I was told holiness should look like, the more Spirit begins to resemble people I was taught to fear.

What if joy is the ceremony?
What if queerness is the prayer?
What if we are the ones building the altar—each time we choose truth over safety, aliveness over assimilation, soul over spectacle?

They don’t ask for answers.
They summon presence.
They open the door to the sacred already breathing beneath our names.

We were never meant to fit inside temples we didn’t build.
We were meant to be the temple.

To remember joy not as indulgence—but as data.
As design.
As divine.

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References

• Wikipedia. Nádleehi – Navajo Cultural Gender Roles.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A1dleehi

• South Dakota Public Broadcasting. The Winkte and the Hundred in Hand.
  https://www.sdpb.org/arts-and-culture/2016-06-06/the-winkte-and-the-hundred-in-hand/

• Rainbow Messenger. Gatekeepers: Gays in the Dagara Tribe.
  https://rainbowmessenger.blog/2018/06/23/gatekeepers-gays-in-the-dagara-tribe/

• Mythopedia. Mawu-Lisa.
  https://mythopedia.com/topics/mawu-lisa

• Taylor & Francis Online / Third World Quarterly. Decolonising Gender: Reimagining the Sacred.
  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2023.2213171

There Was a Dead Chicken in the Middle of the Kitchen Floor

There was a dead chicken in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Wings out like surrender.
Feathers slicked in blood, like someone had tried to baptize it and forgot to say amen.
It wasn’t tossed.
It was placed.
Laid out like ritual. Like memory. Like a body someone wanted witnessed.

The blood didn’t just spill—it crawled.
Creeped between tile grout like it had stories to tell.
And I was five.
Wide-eyed.
Barefoot.
Rooted to the threshold like the doorway itself had chosen me.

The smell—hot iron and lime peel.
The sound—wax dripping, breath stalling, a bowl clinking against porcelain like a slow drum.
The air?
It was thick.
Sweating.
Holy.

⸻

The woman in white didn’t speak.
She didn’t have to.

She moved like smoke remembering how to be fire.
Like she wasn’t walking—she was returning.
She flowed through that kitchen like it had once been hers in another century.
And maybe it had.

She didn’t nod at my mother.
Didn’t smile at me.
She just looked around like she was counting ghosts.

She set her bowl on the counter like an offering.
Salt.
Lime.
Water.
Truth.

And when she poured it over me—
cold down my spine like new birth—
I didn’t cry.
I didn’t speak.
I just stood there.

Open.

Like a gate.

⸻

My mother never told me it was coming.
She never talked about it afterward.

She said it didn’t happen.

But I know the difference between fiction and forgetting.
And I remember the tension in her jaw.
The way her hands didn’t know what to do.
The way her gift curled up in the corner like a dog afraid to be beat again.

She had it, too.
The sight. The edge.
But church told her women like her were dangerous.
And she listened.

Still, when things got too heavy,
too tangled,
too loud—
she called in help from the side of the ether that doesn’t take offerings in English.

⸻

That’s when I knew.

I wasn’t learning anything.
I was remembering.

My gift didn’t arrive.
It stood up.

⸻

I walk through this world with every ancestor I’ve ever carried still whispering in my blood.

I feel death before it opens its mouth.
I taste lies like sugar with mold in the middle.
I touch someone’s hand and the room changes color.
I close my eyes and the spirits crowd in, shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be named.

I’ve seen beings too beautiful to be safe.
I’ve heard music no choir would dare try to replicate.
I’ve felt energy curl its tongue around my name and moan it.

And I don’t flinch.
I welcome it.

Because I was made for this.
Because I’ve done this before.
Because I’ve burned at the stake and still came back singing.

⸻

It would take scientists decades to articulate what Black women have always known.

They now call it intergenerational transmission of trauma—the idea that memory can pass through blood like inheritance (Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018).
They use terms like epigenetics and cellular memory to explain what our grandmothers already practiced with incense, prayer, and protective herbs.
Research from the American Psychological Association confirms that trauma, and its emotional imprint, can be biologically passed down—altering gene expression, shaping behavior.

But Black feminist scholars like Christina Sharpe remind us: "The past that is not past reappears... it animates the present.”

My body is not haunted.
It is active archive.
It does not carry ghosts.
It carries instructions.

⸻

This is not softness.
This is sovereignty.
This is what happens when Black women stop apologizing for being oracles

⸻

I wear gold because my bones asked me to.
I wear white to clear the static.
I wear red when I’m ready to call down the thunder and make love at the same time.

My fashion is not costume.
It’s code.
It’s communication.
It’s how my ancestors show off through me.

You see a ring.
They see a seal.
You see a wrap.
They see a crown.

⸻

I love this gift.

Because it doesn’t wait for validation.
Because it drags the truth out by its teeth.
Because it saves people who never thought they’d be seen.
Because it forces me to stay honest—even when it hurts.

I love this gift like an altar.
Like a knife.
Like a kiss that tastes like war and honey.

It’s not for show.
It’s for survival.

⸻

And I remember everything.

The sting of lime in my eyes.
The way the bowl steamed like it knew something.
The smell of wax and blood and sweat and silence.
My mother’s stillness.
The priestess’s presence.
The chicken’s body—posed.
The air—electrified.
My spine—straight.

There was a dead chicken in the middle of the kitchen floor.

And that was the night I met myself in full.

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References:

• Yehuda, R., & Lehrner, A. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243–257.

• American Psychological Association. (2019). Legacy of trauma. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/02/legacy-trauma

• Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press.