We Are the Roots, You Are the Bloom

Hear now, child of the red clay and the baobab's shade. Hear the voices that ride the harmattan wind, that echo in the deep river's run. We are the ones who came before. We are the soil beneath your feet and the memory in your marrow.

We did not kneel to gods of wood and stone brought on ships of sorrow. We knelt to the Life that pulsed in all things—in the first rain, in the newborn's cry, in the fire's dance and the ancestor's grave. Our altar was the horizon. Our communion was with the living earth.

We see you straining under the weight of a borrowed spirit. We see you wrapped in a scripture that scratches your skin like a foreign cloth. You search for your reflection in a well poisoned with another's image, and you wonder why your face looks strange and your soul feels thin.

Listen: We knew no messiah but the dawn returning each day. We sought no savior but the strength of our own two hands and the wisdom of the village circle. The Most High was not a king on a distant throne, but the very force of life within the seed, within the drumbeat, within your own breath. To connect, you did not need a priest. You needed only to be still and know.

They came with their book and their cross and their empty heaven. They told you we were lost. They lied.
Our silence was not ignorance. It was depth. Our rituals were not idolatry. They were conversation—with the sky, with the spirit of the harvest, with you, our future.

You ask of the time of the breaking, the time of the chains and the lash. You cry, "Where was your god then?"
Child, where were we? We were in you. We were the stubborn pulse that would not stop in your veins. We were the dream of running water that visited you in the hold of the ship. We were the secret name you whispered to your child, the song hummed low beneath the overseer's hearing. We did not abandon you. We became your resilience. We are the part of you that knew, even in the deepest night, "I am not what they say I am."

Now, you tear at the veil they placed over your eyes. Good. Tear it down.
But do not mistake the veil for the sky.

Do not, in your righteous fury, reject the sky itself—the boundless, eternal, nurturing mystery that was ours before names, before empires. The oppressor did not create the Divine. He only tried to steal it and put it in his pocket. Do not let his theft make you a stranger in your own spiritual home.

Return.
Not to a religion, but to a remembering.
Sit. Breathe. Listen beneath the noise.
The connection is not lost. It is waiting. It is in the way your heart lifts at the smell of the soil after rain. It is in the knowing that passes between you and a loved one without a word. It is in the anger that burns for justice—for that fire is holy.

Carry our legacy, but do not carry it as a coffin of old bones. Carry it as a seed.
Water it with your questions. Let it grow into a new forest of understanding, where your mind is free, your spirit is your own, and your connection to the Source is direct, sovereign, and unashamed.

We are not ghosts begging for worship. We are the roots. You are the branching and the bloom.
Remember. Then, grow tall and claim your sky.

Asé.