Roots & Hope
Soulful Reflections on Faith, Healing, and Young Adulting
Category: Poetry
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Give yourself time to get through it and learn from it, to cry and cuss and wonder how you’ll overcome. You don’t have to know how to summarize the beauty of your struggle right away. You don’t have to worry that your gift for uplifting an open heart and a hungry ear will expire soon.…
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Lord, Today is a new day. Thank you for waking me up to see it. Thank you for not allowing yesterday’s troubles to defeat me. Thank you for being my reason to go on in victory. Today, I can begin to change how I speak to myself. I can begin to change how I treat…
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I am proud of you. I am overwhelmed with gladness because you are still here, breathing and living and moving. I admire what courage looks like in your life, in your now. I am proud of you for all the challenges you have already overcome, some of which I may not ever know or understand.…
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Sometimes, I know that being alone and whole at the same time is possible. Sometimes, lessons only heal me when I hear them in solitude. Sometimes, adventure only comes alive when I follow the pace of my own schedule and curiosity. Sometimes, I need to be anonymous to everyone in my surroundings except for God…
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Dear Feelings, You are my soul’s response to every experience and the teacher who inspires me to make art out of life, but when you arrive, I am careful not to change my name to yours. Sentences like, “I am sad”, or “I am sorry”, are imprisoning whenever I put emphasis on the am. The adjectives…
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What if I told you this: You are not weak for walking by faith into cushioned couched offices and narrating an hour of your burdens in hunger for hope and professional help. You are not a failure to God for having a brain that works over time in a factory of worries, sometimes paid in…
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June 30, 2018 I vividly remember that relentless hot day. After living in my apartment for two years, I moved back home with my family. I made the decision partly because I was preparing to enroll in grad school full-time. My rent was also ridiculously increasing. I knew that if I renewed my lease, I…
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I am committed to Stevie Wonder’s music like Stevie Wonder is committed to his braids. Growing up, I annoyed my Mama while singing along to every song on 92.3 and 105.9, songs like “Ribbon in the Sky”, “Do I Do”, and “Overjoyed”. To this day, I dream of marveling at his talent while he performs…
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I am at a bonfire for young adults at my church. Minutes before, I drove down McNichols, speaking to God as if he were somehow chilling in the passenger seat with 80 degrees of sunshine pouring on his face. I pleaded that he would help me to conquer anxiety and be myself. I am sitting…
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I am learning how to accept that taking up space in the rooms that I enter can be nourishing and generous and okay. I am learning how to practice the balance between honoring my gift of listening and offering others my rumble of laughter with rambles of reflections about dreams, annoyances, and mundane things. And I…
Roots & Hope 