Lately I have been keeping odd hours and am unusually quiet for a Gemini with a lot on her mind and heart.

In deciding to launch The Human Brigade, I have been reflecting on and tracing my journey. This point in the road is the most awake and conscious I have ever been in my life. It would seem, that such a progression is natural, time passes and – hopefully – we mature and age well into our paradoxes, contradictions, and the art of living.

More than anything, The Human Brigade is about the art of living that *I* have discovered through learning and evolving through morphic, generational, ancestral, and interpersonal relationships.

From a young age, I was more comfortable with the unseen world and lived in a world – not of make believe – but of dreams. My favorite activity as a youth was to call things into BEing. Though I did not have the words, the layers of the building blocks that fashion the material world both puzzled, frightened, and fascinated me.

My first hero at the age of four was Sojourner Truth. She is still my personal hero and her essence stops me in my energetic tracks every time! Attending an all-Black private school here in Los Angeles, from the ages three to twelve, I learned early on of Shirley Chisolm, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner (obvi!), and so many more heroes and icons. I held their stories of struggle and triumph close to my heart, as I could see how my living was a continuation of that very essence – the desire to be fully formed in one’s own image. And to experience freedom. From watching my parents work tirelessly to cultivate my life towards 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔟𝔢𝔰𝔱 I was aware that such a destiny does not come wholesale, nor with the ease of mediocrity.

*𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐮𝐬 𝐦𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝.*

So many tales, and many moons later, I find myself together integrating a lifetime of images, experiences, feelings, and sensations. The horrific and incandescent elegance of living – the art of the living – that is where I reside. That is where I lay my head and receive solace. This living- this realm of the extraordinary in the ordinary. How much splendor is in the air – and how much there is left to foster and nourish.

As this year of The Great Pause continues to unwind and loll into futures unknown, I embrace the incomprehensibility of where we head – now living through a pandemic, the continuation of crumbling economic and cultural paradigms, and the continued work of creating the living.

We are the envoys and relics of times being imagined and created through the living. May we walk the coals of transformation with dignity and the magic of being attuned to Self.