How do you find your way back to your own path when the path you have chosen to walk is not your own?

By the time I entered my thirties, I was drained emotionally, physically and spiritually. I’d come from a family where fitting in with the status quo was mingled with the race, class and gender issues of the civil rights movement. My mother left Mississippi in her late teens and happy to join the noble civil rights movement for social equality.

I was born, just as the roar had begun to dissipate some:  but the “struggle” still continued in the African-American community and the world in general. I grew up exposed to the communist teachings of my brothers father Jack H. Odell; radical black pan Africanist like Kwame Ture (Stokley Carmichael); and to the more subtle conservative politics of my mother’s heavily Christian middle class family.

I also grew up hearing stories of other greats that my mother had worked with such as Ella J. Baker(who I actually had the pleasure of meeting), Fannie Lou Haimer, Coretta Scott King, and her dear friend  the late Medgar Evers. 

My mother was a revolutionary. She was a warrior woman who wanted the same warring qualities to exist in her daughter. I, for my part, was far from a warrior. I was a shy, highly sensitive child inclined to visions and other strange spiritual talents.

 I preferred books and solitude to the public eye and was more concerned with the apparitions that flew askance my vision; or to spirits that spoke through the little plastic telephone that I cherished. Seeing or hearing ghost were far more exciting (and terrifying at times), than the revolution I was expected to join.

If I had any ambition, it was to be a writer. Ironically,  my writing choices led me more to the works of: Robert Frost,  Edgar Allen Poe, Jan Eyre, Langston Hugh’s, James Baldwin, and the bible than they did to  black political theory and thought. When I look back now, I realize that I was hopelessly American; struggling as hard as I could to live up to my mother and her generations dreams.

But the calling of my own spirit would not let me stay long on the path of other people’s aspirations.  I had seen too many contradictions for me to ever settle for long in one spot where revolutionary struggle was concerned.

Even as I collapsed with movement and purpose among shouting crowds in many of America’s streets-moving against traffic to protest against the injustices of war; the death of Amadou Diallo; or raped women- I knew I was only an observer- watching for the hidden things that haunted the people in the crowd.

I was acutely aware, while collective “power concedes nothing without a struggle”, true personal power could only be attained with internal personal clarity and willingness for responsible self-growth.

Once again, even as an adult, while I absorbed writers like Kant, Fanon, Frere, John A. Williams, and Cheik Anta Diop; or worked toward feminist aspirations of equality for all women; something was still missing. For one, I clearly saw from a feminist perspective that many women were still in need of personal healing.

 I watched quite often as women shouted equality in one breath and then doubted the woman who had been raped or beaten; abused their daughters in one form or another; or gave power over to people who were not ready or worthy to receive it. 

 At some point, the contradictions became too much. The loneliness that existed at each part of my path became too much. And being too different, no matter which world I found myself trying to exist in, was too much also.

I was, as Audre Lorde said of black Lesbians, a sister outsider. While I was not a lesbian, I felt the weight of separateness. When we are not following the true voice of our soul: our true connection with the divine source will always seem severed.

I neither felt at home within my own biological family; in the many activist movements I aligned myself with; nor the many  radical spiritual groups that I sought our  for companionship and answers to the many spiritual questions that haunted me.

It was only in the study of metaphysical thought, and the continued encounters with the unseen, that the seed of purpose germinated in the earth of my consciousness.  Still, my quest to belong, to be normal, continued.

I went to college-though I could barely remember a thing I learned there; dedicated my writing to power struggles-though spiritual fiction was more to my liking; and sought to find a relationship that would make me feel more feminine.

It would not be until I took a long and dangerous walk through domestic violence-one that could have ended with the loss of my life and my child’s-that I finally accepted the spiritual calling that I had long denied myself the chance to hear.

It was during that dark and lonely time in my life, that I realized that there is no salvation that exists outside of the self. The answers that many of us are looking for- that we think have answers in the world outside of us- are actually to be found within our own willingness to grow and change.

This does not mean that social, political and religious movements have no validity. America, itself would not have been built, were it not for the quest for collective freedom.

But, without a spiritual evolution: a true flight of the soul into its own social upheaval, and a landing in its own independence (which is connected ironically to the divine ones of all things), the happiness we are seeking will lead us only to more battles and endless wars.

Now my reality has changed. Chakra healing; aura reading, channeling, and the way of the empath have replaced the shouts of “no justice no peace”, the endless nightmares, and the sense of purposelessness.

I am a social activist of a different order. I am a part of the movement to bring in a new revolution: the revolution of peace, love and personal truth. And while I am no warrior woman brandishing fire from an angry mouth: I am at peace.  I am a healer content on spreading the message of the oneness of expansive love. I am finally home.