We want to bring y’all into a deep journey that we’ve been growing through as we unpack what decolonizing our lives means to us from the inside out or bottom up and the work that we’re doing of reclaiming our identity.

Before we even knew each other, we were both on our individual journeys decolonizing our bodies, minds, and lives. In our union, and even further as we built a family, we merged our decolonizing journey in a way that authentically integrated our values and ways of communicating into what we’ve called “Wellsprings of Umoja.” We built our website around a presentation of these values and then more recently, we decided to focus our site on the offerings and services that we wish to share as Ori Vitality Arts. Recently though, we realized that we really want y’all to know where we’re coming from so that we can offer and serve you all more effectively. So in this post, we share our values again but this time we’re going to go deeper into the foundation of our values and some of the unique approaches that we utilize to orchestrate greater quality of life within this decolonizing journey.

But before we get into it, we want to say that these values are a growing and evolving conversation that we’re engaging in together and are sharing with y’all because of the immense nourishment and clarity it has offered us. All the same, it’s not our wish to impose these values on anyone who may see things differently or live a different lifestyle. These values are simply the prism by which we interface with each other, the world around us, our own selves, our families, and all our relations. They are also a dialogue that we would like to have with those who want to build together with us, and use these elements to reference, discuss, evolve, and grow together by way of.

In order to share the values, (like we said in the beginning) we first would like to clarify the foundation of them which is how we understand the use of language as the vehicle to communicate anything, and particularly in this case – our values. So: we choose to maintain a deep and proactive awareness between two types of words in every human language as far as we’re aware. Those being words that are physically referential (such as tree, forest, leaves etc.) and words that are purely abstract (like love, liberty, goodness).

I would like to mention that we are using the English language to express ourselves and that shapes so much about how we document our perceived reality in our mind and bring meaning to the concepts we express. Studying and using various languages open up new possibilities of meaning because of how each language expresses our perceived reality. Every language has a different way of tying physical and abstract words together, for example the root of the English word inspire means “to breathe in.” We all know what breathing is and that helps us to reflect upon the meaning of the word inspire or inspiration. Physically referential words root us in reality and help us identify what the objects and elements present in the material world that we perceive through our senses. These are pretty simple to understand and agree upon. We can both stand in front of a mountain, point to it, if needed make a shape of a mountain with our hands and we most likely will have an idea of what the other is talking about, even if we speak different languages.

Abstract words, however, require much more effort to communicate. These concepts are, by very definition, not something you can point to in the physical world. You may be able to point to something that eludes to the concept in your mind, but it’s the concept that you’re trying to communicate, not the thing or the interrelation of things that you’re pointing to. This concept in your mind is what we refer to as “relative,” something purely unique to you that is a combination of thoughts, feelings, memories, experiences, imprints, and more. For this very reason, the relative multi-sourced concepts held within these abstract words are not simple or easy to explain. Nevertheless, we believe that the effort to explain them is what makes us uniquely human and nurtures community. Communicating and discovering our truth and the other’s truth within their constant evolution is how we get to know each other, our selves, and how we grow together – as we see it.

However, we have observed that most people don’t approach the relative nature of abstract concepts with a proactive intention towards mutual clarity. Instead, people approach abstractions as if there is an ultimate definition to which some thing (like a dictionary) or some one (like a teacher, leader or perhaps the person themself) has. Furthermore, this dynamic continues with arguments of who knows what is right or wrong, what’s bad and what’s good, what’s true and what’s not. To us, these arguments are fundamentally fruitless and distract us from having an honest investigation into the meaning of these abstract concepts for ourselves and learning how others define it for themselves, rather than just accepting definitions that are maintained by an authority.

And so our reflections and conversations around abstractions take a different approach: one of gentle discovery of what is being said and what can be heard, integrated, and evolved internally in relationship to one’s own truths.

So within our collective decolonizing journey as a ShepsuMa’at family, we continuously reflect on how we’ve been identified, told how we are supposed to identify and how we choose to reclaim our own identity by staying aware of the relative nature of abstract concepts (that no one can define for us if we don’t choose to allow them to) and the use of physical referents to root these concepts in our lives (by defining abstract terms in a way that connects it to the lived experience),

And while, we do acknowledge the general “modern” consensus and history of identifying large swaths people as Black/Red/Yellow/White, we also take into consideration the contradictions therein. One being the idea that someone is Black because they have African ancestry, but ignoring the scientifically based general consensus that all people on this planet have African ancestry. This is not to negate the experience of those that have been labelled these terms and been imposed common experiences by way of colonizing people but to cut to the root of these terms and reveal how their abstract nature and collective agreement (whether voluntary or by aggression) have been used for destructive purposes to create societal hierarchies.

But the concept of identifying one’s self or another as “Black” is abstract and changes based on who is using or defining the term. And so, like we said, instead of acting like there is an authority that we must accept or negate, we are going to use the concept black to unpack and investigate meaning for ourselves in an attempt to dismantle the colonization of our identity and reclaim it for ourselves in an collectively empowering way.

Lev’s definition:

My journey unveiling the concept of Blackness began from a deep desire to seek and reclaim a connection, expression, and Identity that reflects the origin of what relates us all as human beings. I was raised with a Jewish identity, an identity that by its own definition, distinguishes and separates me from those who are called “gentiles.” While I honor and acknowledge the unique experiences and history that shaped many of my Ancestors lives as they identified and were identified by this identity, I have come to see it as an aspect to my identity and lineage experience, but not the foundation of who I am. From a young age, I had an unexplainable desire to understand and connect to “Black” culture in the forms of Hip-Hop, Capoeira Angola, traditional foods, language, music, healing arts, and spirituality both directly from the “Motherland”, the Diaspora, and indigenous peoples all around the Earth. I found in these arts and expressions, ways to awaken aspects of myself that were dormant, like a distant memory of something I knew once before.

A concept that has guided my path is Mother Culture, which I define as the cultural elements that exist globally that transcend, include and embrace all of humanity. With this concept guiding my search, I looked to the Hebrew story to see where the identity I had inherited was born. As accounted in the Hebrew Torah, the Hebrews transformed from a family into nation-people in the Northern Nile Valley, what is called in the Torah as Mitzrayim, which can be translated as “narrow canal” or “birth canal” in Hebrew. Who was the mother that birthed this people from the Nile Valley? It was the Lower Lands (North being identified as lower) of Kemet (what is now called Ancient Egypt).

The people of Kemet (meaning Black Land) call themselves Kem (meaning Black). This is not a racial term and has nothing to do with skin color as seen by recordings of themselves being a metropolis of many different shades and colors of the spectrum. The term black for Kem people held the concept of fullness, ripeness, maturity, and richness. This black culture represents the first cultural, spiritual, agricultural, and technological civilization that spread globally, inspiring and educating the rise of civilization across the globe. Metaphorically, Kemet is akin to a trunk of a tree that connects the African roots of humanity to the branches extending across the Earth. The Kemetic term for the continent that we call Africa is Meritah (meaning Beloved Land) and it is no mystery to me that even in modern times it is referred to as the colloquial “Motherland.”

There are many accounts and investigations that point to Meritah (Africa) as the originating land of Ancestors that every human can trace themselves to from an archeological and genetic point of view. Traditional divination systems continue to reveal Ancestral connections to Traditional lineages on the continent from people of any background. In my eyes, blackness is the womb that has birthed all light and all life, and therefor holds the memory of all of existence. When we stare at the night sky we see a blackness that fills our universe and holds all the stars in symphony with one another. If we think of our existence as a soup; blackness is the base and every star in the cosmos is an ingredient or seasoning that exists to enhance and support the soup as a whole. So too each and every one of our lives, lineages, and cultural expressions can nourish, be nourished by, and celebrate the black base of our existence.

Ife’s Definition:

In order to define what the abstraction of Blackness means to me, I first need to clarify the fundamental context by which I frame my mind and thus any definition I consciously hold. To share that, I want to tell the story of how the context came about. So when I first started to reflect deeply on my life intentions, one of the first things I wanted to be confident about was the meaning of my name. Ife means love in Yuroba. So to confidently identify myself, I had to reflect on and define one of the deepest concepts in the human language in my sense. And in the process of trying to hone in on a definition to that concept (and thus myself) I realized that all abstractions are too dense in themselves to define another abstraction. So, having been exposed to these ideas around language pretty much in the beginning of my conscious reflection journey through the book Tyranny of Words (and then later through the book Science & Sanity) I knew that the only other option beyond abstractions were words that refer to physical reality. But after reflecting on various physical referents, I eventually realized that even most of them are still tainted with our abstractions because these stories color our perception and are the determining factor in how we even qualify the physical reality. For instance, rich soil can be held in one’s hand and seen as a symbol of abundance, wealth, and beauty or the same rich soil can be seen as a symbol of dirt, mess, and irrelevancy. It’s all in the fundamental story we tell. So I realized that if I was going to use a physical referent to define this abstraction and thus frame my identity I needed to get to something beyond my or any human stories, something that is a foundational physical reality not just for me (and thus biased to my colored perception) but is a universal reality, not just to our perception but also to our experience. This is how I came to using our creation in the womb as the foundational, universal, and experientially based physical referent by which I frame love, myself, and all of life. This frame I interpret as simply an all inclusive (to our perception), symbiotically nourishing (or else we wouldn’t be here) wholeness (or else we would’ve fell out! lol).

And by that foundation, when I reflect on the identity and culture of Blackness, I see the dark universe that Lev mentions for sure and I perceive that universe, and the qualities therein, as a WombVerse. (And, little side note, when I say WombVerse I’m using Verse in two ways, one in relationship to how we see existence like the way universe is used and then two as the verse of a song, how we sing into and thus co-create existence.) So I see that dark black WombVerse as it is by my own experience of looking up at the sky, and because I see it from the foundation of Womb, I see the largest view of that WombVerse as an all-inclusive wholeness and the underlying intention of that WombVerse as an all-inclusive process of symbiotic nourishment. So these then for me are the qualities that I imbue into the abstract idea of the deep Blackness that we all come from, are, and are contained within.

And then I also, just really simply look at the color black and honor that you can put a bunch of colors into it and it will still maintain its essence, it may even enrichen the depth and nuance of the blackness. Because blackness can simply hold all.

And so, by this vein, the ideas of yellow and red or more dynamically any of the other people who are generally considered of “color,” I define these abstract identities now in relationship to the WombVerse’s all-inclusive symbiotically nourishing wholeness, and the ways in which those dynamic peoples hold up that foundational truth. To play off of the metaphor Lev spoke of earlier, if WombVerse then is the bone broth base of a soup, then the dynamic peoples that make up the seasoning of the soup get to be in harmony with this base, can bring out the flavor of it and, thus, not clash with it. So, the qualities of these identities that honor our interconnection, the value of everyone to be symbiotically nourished, and the deep faith in the wholeness of existence get to be amplified and all else released for it’s irrelevancy to this decolonizing fundamental womb-based black context.

And then, on the flip side of this, in addressing the abstraction of whiteness as an identity that some hold or project upon others, while blackness for me and Lev is this all-inclusive energy, whiteness is an exclusionary energy. Even if you think about the generic definition that’s held and pushed by mainstream society, it’s usually referring to an identity that’s outside of all people of color. So, in polar opposition to WombVerse, in definite clashing to this base of soup, the sickening sense of separation and isolation that this would create for the person who identifies or identifies another as white is obvious.

But what is less obvious is how the acceptance of the existence of someone as being white and thus not a person of color, and definitely not black – breaks the profoundly enriching capacity of black from being an all-inclusive symbiotically nourishing wholeness to putting black in a lesser relationship to white, with black now as a truncation, the limited contradictory concept we mentioned earlier of having lineage rooted in Africa (except for some).

And then even further, the idea of a white identity is often associated with the “oppressor,” which is another abstraction that generally implicates a sense of badness for most people. But whiteness is also associated by many with a divine principle, particularly when there is a dualistic approach to existence – the “bright white light of God.” So, herein lies another contradiction and requirement to double think on the part of the person who is identified- or identifying another- as white. And, in continuation of that train of thinking, there is the opposite to the good white light of God that the truncated / not all-inclusive and thus lower blackness embodies that is now associated with the fundamental badness of what is opposite to God, that is, the devil.

So here we are with an abstract concept of a fundamental goodness (white light of God) inextricably associated with an abstract concept of a badness (the white oppressor) and an identity of blackness that could truly (even under the terms of the generic definition of the abstraction) relate to all people associated with badness too. And we wonder why we’re struggling to maintain some good in this world!

Conclusion

But that’s the thing, these definitions we’ve been given aren’t meant to support “what’s good,” as we perceive it. We understand they have been used as tools for oppression, subjugation, and control by those who we refer to as the ultimate DNI-ers or deniers, that is, the delusionally non-indigenous, meaning they are in denial of the need to live symbiotically with the Earth and each other . These DNIers are acting as plantation owners and are perpetuating constant infighting between the house and field slaves of a now worldwide plantation. Propagating fear and scarcity, the plantation has expanded as we have accepted convenience and distraction in exchange for our accountability and responsibility to the earth, each other, and our selves.

But if we are able to uproot the seeds of colonization within ourselves, than we have the wonderful opportunity to plant new seeds that flip the script and repurpose these abstract concepts in a way that reclaims how we interface with our world, our identity, and our paths towards our collective empowerment.

It’s for us to do the internal and external work of decolonizing our lives from the bottom up and the inside out.

For those of you who resonate and wish to add to this living dialogue,
we are here and ready to do this work together.

Thanks for reading.