The Weight of Wholeness
“Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.” - Toni Cade Bambara
M. Jacqui Alexander, a spiritual feminist, teaches us that “you have to know who walks with you.” It is this knowing that allows our sense of self to cross the discrete borders of individualism and into the realm of spiritual consciousness.
In an African sense, “There is no I without the we”.
John Mbiti, in African Religions and Philosophy (1990), explains two dimensions of time and space called Sasa and Zamani which ground an interconnected view of existence as expressed in Akamba, Gĩkũyũ, Swahili and other East African languages.
Sasa is described in three ways, as an immediate past, in-the-moment present and lastly, as a near future located within a period of six months to two years. Zamani in contrast, is a primordial reservoir of time that has stored everything that has ever happened. Situated in an interspace, Zamani will eventually overlap into Sasa as time moves towards the past.
To know who walks with us, then, is to retrace the footsteps of the ones who walked before us. There are rich ancestral artefacts that can only emerge through the practice of ceremony, where we offer a designated site for ancient futures and bone-deep wisdom to land, and in doing so locate other ways of seeing. Clear sight is the prerequisite for visioning.
As someone ushered into healing work through an ancestral calling, a psycho-spiritual initiation grounded in traditional and African indigenous ways of knowing, my path is a contribution to an eternal circular cosmology. I inherited purpose from the ones before me that still accompany me in this life.
There is a sacred story in An Exposition of the Ifá Literary Corpus (1997) about Àjàlá, a potter who shapes heads that speaks about purpose. Three friends in heaven decide to leave so that they can go down to earth, but before they can begin their journey, they will need to visit Àjàlá to choose their heads. It is only with their chosen heads that they will be able to actualise their destiny on earth.
The heads in the story represent consciousness. Consciousness as Joanna Macy describes is “actually a continuous choice-making process”. A chosen head is something that we must continue to engage with throughout our lifetime. To refine, to wash, and to maintain.
When we choose to remember and undergo the fulfilment of our sacred task in this life, we fall down and bring our forehead to the Earth’s soul/soil. By granting the touch of our consciousness to the Earth, we answer the call of our purpose and attune ourselves to the utter openness of deep companionship.
We choose the weight of wholeness and taste the fruits of the responsibility that it bears. Both sweet and bitter. Our sense of self is no longer individuated, we experience ourselves through relations, both human and non-human, who walk with us. We unify our consciousness with the Earth and its many names.
Do you trust the land enough to lay the weight of your life upon it?
I hope that you do.
Sources
Alexander, M. J. (2005). Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Duke University Press.
Abímbólá, W. (1997). Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus. Athelia Henrietta Press.
Bambara, T. C. (1992). The Salt Eaters. Random House, Inc.
Mbiti, John S. (1990). African Religions and Philosophy. 2nd ed. Oxford: Heinemann Educational.
Schneider, D., & Macy, J. (2023, June 26). Positive Disintegration. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. https://tricycle.org/magazine/positive-disintegration/