Category: The Journey
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Keep the joy of eating jollof rice together!
My jollof rice is joyful, so it’s heavenly taste with my people. Every Sunday afternoon is joyful. So the smiles of my people. Joyful also are our gathering. Joyful also are these memories with my people. I have been reading Braiding Sweetgrass and the idea of the holder and the braider reminded me of what…
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Keep all that makes you create!
I have been in class the past 4 weeks. It ended today hence my absence here. Ben Okri once shared that the most authentic thing about being human, is our ability to create. We can create, overcome what we create, endure as we create, transform what we create, love all we create, and still be…
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Keep the memories of LIGHT Year 3 and Rest in Peace, Dr. Ivis M. Richardson!
Our LIGHT festival just ended. I was supposed to close and inform people about the plans for next year. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Our last speaker, Christell Roach lost her grandmother, Dr Ivis M. Richardson yesterday. She could have cancelled, she could have called and told us about her death. We would have understood. My…
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Keep the 3rd annual LIGHT festival for the public by the public with public health!
When we started this three years ago, we imagined we would do as Audre Lorde’s once noted and bring a burst of light to public health. The world was in a pandemic, health was in a disarray, everything with the public was complex and messy and at that moment we knew that light was needed.…
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Keep Dr. H. Phillip Venable Memorial Park!
In a town called Creve Coeur lies a park that should have housed a home, that should have been full of black people jocking and jiving, singing or playing trumpets on Sunday afternoons long after a sermon at church. Dr. H. Phillip Venable, would have been sitting outside of his front porch, catching the breeze,…
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Keep dreams at a park!
We went to Pioneer Park today. A small park on Taille Street, off Manchester road. Four children were fascinated by the playground that lined the park. Three boys and a girl wearing a red tie dye shirt. Tall oaks lined the park. About 21 if sitting on a black park bench across from the restroom.…
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Keep things delicate!
The word was delicate. In a class assignment tonight (yes I am taking classes hence my absence here), I joined late but just in time to begin writing the first thoughts that came to mind with the word delicate. The assignment without using the word, tell a story, write a poem, do or say anything…
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Keep this quiet storm!
The roosters are coming home. Every single one of them. What they forgot is that we are where we are by design. Where they fail to understand or see our worth, we know it to be our worth. Nothing we touch is by accident. We decide too what we touch. So it gives me great…
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Keep the power of poetry, writing!
We are on a mission to widen and deepen our understanding of what we know and don’t know about everything there is to know of why we write as we do. Adrienne Rich is our guide. Imagine breaking down the world as you have always known it. Doing so through an art of your own.…
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Keep peace!
There is a certain kind of peace I long for these days. The kind that lets me be. Free, with no demands. No strings attached, no noise, no worries too. Just a life lived well, my way, because peace flowed like a river.
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Keep this collective “we” if black, female and in academia!
These days I am seeing, not myself, not work, not my family, not my children and lord knows I love all four of them. I am seeing instead a collective we. With insights that help to re-vision a future we. When eyes finally see, it doesn’t float free pretending that “I” am alone in struggle.…
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Keep seeing the world as children and cicadas do!
We have held giant lizards, held tiny alligators, touched snakes as yellow as the sun and hummed to the sounds of cicadas. Summer is only just beginning And this summer in Saint Louis, is the season of children, of sitting in the shadows of children, sitting in their joyful lane, in a season where joy…
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Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor 