Hearty with a stiff upper lip. That’s how they described my great grandma. Hard. Strict. Sturdy.
So, imagine my surprise when I met her as a gentle old soul by the pond in the Ancestral Plane. Her toes dipped into the water, causing small ripples of waves as she drew lazy circles with her feet. She wasn’t smiling, but the look on her face was happy. Calm. Serene.
She had her head tilted to the sun as if she was soaking up all its warmth.
“I loved when you would sit outside— in gardens, at the park. When you laid down in the grass with your arms and legs stretched out like an angel, just soaking up all that sun and grass and earth. Mmm! Now that was good medicine. I always felt calm like something was healing when you did that. What is it you say? Mashallah? Yeah, that. MashAllah!”
Great-Gran was my first encounter in the Ancestral Land and it surprised me to realize she felt what I was doing. That my healing really aided hers. She’s kinder in her visits to her children these days. Her blood burns less restless in the veins of Mommy and my aunts and uncles.
I wish someone told me this earlier. Maybe I would have made different choices. Better ones.
“No such thing as better choices,” Great-Gran lectures me one evening when we sit pond-side, legs crossed and picking at the weed-flowers that blossom around our feet. “The choices you make are the choices you make. Here is where we experience the consequence of those actions and try to atone through our attempts at messaging.”
“So… just more choices?”
“Yes.” She turns and smiles at me— radiant, brilliant, blinding. This, this is what her true spirit is. How she would have shown up in the world had her society not been designed in a way to thoroughly crush her. “But here you get to do it with all your family, all the love, centuries and centuries worth of accessible knowledge. Everything we were robbed of flourishes here. The pain of our actions is… hard.” Her smile dims into a firm, flat line. A hard stiff upper lip. “But when you know better, you do better.”1
I am happy for Great-Gran’s beauty peace and love overflowing that is allowed to flourish here.
I am, as an artist, a writer, too curious for my own good.
“Why do y’all keep sending me messages? Like 444 and 555 and 1010?”
Great-Gran smirks. “Why do you keep looking for them?”
My brows furrow. I wanted straight answers not riddles.
Great-Gran laughs. “Girl! You run to look up every repeating number sequence. You thrive in metaphor.”
“Okay, but… can I get an answer?”
“We already gave it to you.” The sun reflects off her warm brown eyes, making them two shades lighter. Her smile is soft as she starts to fade from the scene. She needs to rest. Her message has been delivered.
“The only Truth that matters is the one in which you choose to believe.”
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“Redemption,” is what she’d say in a storybook retelling of this encounter but here, in this journal, this personal communion between her and I, she leaves the sentence at that. Because it’s not redemption she’ seeking but rather love she is acting out. In a world surrounded by her Ancestors and knowledge, free of the whims of man who try to block or stifle it, Great-Gran’s love overflows. You do better because that’s simply what you do when you love.
