The blessing of a functional toilet

I will never forget an exchange that I had with my mother many years ago regarding the toilet in our bathroom. It was an exchange that I now feel helped me to slice life into smaller pieces at a very young age and it still reverberates throughout the framework of the faith that I have today.

I can’t recall exactly what the situation was that led to the exchange, but I can still remember how stunned I was at what my mother said. I had made an innocuous comment regarding the fact that our toilet had never been stopped up to the point where my father had to rod it out, or worse, remove it to rod out the drainage pipe.

My mother meekly replied, “We’ve been blessed.” Now, you have to know my mother in order to fully appreciate what I’m trying to describe here (God I love her so much. I have truly been blessed). As she said those words she looked right into my eyes with a sweetness, a simplicity and sincerity that disguised the depth of the point that she was making.

Without this spoon-fed revelation my young mind would have never linked a blessing from God and a toilet together, understanding as I did what went into toilets and what was flushed down toilets.

Yet this was Mama who was telling me this. And I knew how serious she was about God and church, because she dragged me to church every Sunday against my will. But I still looked at her with what I’m sure she recognized as stupefied silence, a look that I’m also sure said, “Now, how you gonna sit there and tell me that God blessed us with a good toilet?”

She met my silent expression with a silent expression of her own, but her’s definitely wasn’t stupefied…

Jealousy is cruel as the grave

Recently someone confided in me that her mother had spread a vicious rumor about her throughout their family. Tears welled up in her eyes as she recounted the instances where she had given emotional and financial support to her mom during the past couple of months, a time period that featured her mom spiraling deep into despair and depression, even though it appeared that she had so much to be thankful for.

To compound all of this, it became quite apparent during my conversation with this person that her mom was jealous of the beauty and strength that she possessed, that enabled her to overcome obstacles- both without and within- that her mom is presently unable to overcome.

This person’s pain was convoluted even more by the fact that other women in the family were all too willing to embrace the hurtful lie as truth because they themselves shared the bitterness of unfulfillment and broken dreams with the mother.

So here you have a woman, with a truly humble and loving spirit, that can no longer find comfort in either the emotional or collective womb that she was developed and nurtured in for so long.

I walked away from our conversation amazed at how we can be so fragile and destructive at the same time, like two sides of a primordial coin that God flips to test those that we love and those that love us.

Thank you: Sade

“It is a possibility, the more we know the less we see…” 

Those words are from the song Never as Good as the First Time, released in 1985 by the sultry and soulful singer Helen Folasade Adu (better know as Sade). Even if she chose to go by the demystifying stage name of Helen her voodoo would still be in full effect mode.

As I write these words I can hear and feel the funky bassline of the song surging through my consciousness, kicking into a vision of a wild stallion galloping along the shore of an ocean, just at the teasing of sunrise, signaling the dawning of greater self-awareness. Yeah, that’s what a song can do to you.

It’s amazing how a song can take you to another place, a higher space, and how certain lyrics can provide you with mantra and meaning.

I had heard the song many times before, but for some reason, on a particular day, at a particular moment in time, that verse became a revelation for me. It’s not unusual to get inspiration from a song; I believe that happens everyday and all day, around the world. But I also believe that there’s inspiration, and then there’s revelation.

Maybe I had to go through some stuff to understand where Sade and the song’s co-writer, Stuart Matthewman, were coming from when they came up with the verse. Maybe they were coming from a totally different place than where the verse transported me. But for me the verse is about the dangers of being blinded by our beliefs.

We believe that we know our parents, our siblings, our spouses, our friends, our lovers, our co-workers, etc. But do we really see them, or are they simply living and breathing labels? We have our beliefs about how a “parent” is supposed to act. We have our beliefs about what being a “brother” or “sister” is all about. We have our beliefs about what our “woman” or “man” is supposed to look like and how they should act. So on and so forth.

When I consider the current climate in this society, where labels are being tossed around like hand grenades to neutralize and destroy,  I can’t help but wonder: How often do we engage in labeling and how much damage are we doing, even to those that we say we love and care for? Just a thought…