Thoughts On Ubuntu

In a recent speech, Emmanuel Vaughan Lee, the founder of Emergence Magazine said,

“An act of remembering and honoring the Earth as sacred, prayer sweeps the dust of forgetfulness that has enveloped our ways of being, and holds the Earth in our hearts with love. Whether offered from within a spiritual or religious tradition, or outside of one, prayer and praise bring the self into relationship with the mystery that not only unfolds around us, but also lives within us. When we remember that we are connected with all that exists, the ever growing divide between spirit and matter can begin to heal. “

I don’t know about everyone else in this call but in many spaces that I’m finding myself in, there is a sense of sorrow at the collective loss of memory of our inseparability with the Earth. But in indigenous communities it’s not forgotten. It is a lived experience. But even there, there are a lot of struggles to maintain this memory. I am sensing this growing urgency to remember by way of forgetting what we know and embracing new ways of knowing. Indigenous thinking is deeply rooted in the practice of spiritual ecology, which is a holistic way of honouring the whole Earth as one being. We are inseparable from the earth as the wind is inseparable from the smoke of a volcanic mountain. Spiritual ecology is a memory—when indigenous people pray to the sun God or moon God or Mother Earth, it is to keep this memory alive. 

The biggest question we are facing right now is: How can we embody the values that can reawaken this memory? I believe we can do this by activating Indigenous thinking. Indigenous people all around the world keep this memory alive through prayer and song. That is the answer. We don’t need to invent new stories or new ways of being. We simply need to remember the ancient songs of our hearts.

As a little girl growing up in Kenya, where I also was the youngest member of our church choir, my mother always said, singing is praying twice. I can imagine what she meant was that singing comes from the prayer in the heart, so by singing you are praying and singing the prayer to others too, so you are praying twice, maybe three times, singing is an infinite form of prayer. Ecological spirituality which can be awakened by songs and prayer to Mother Earth is our path back to this most primordial relationship with ourselves and as a collective, a return to our original mother. 

This is the spirit of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is an African logic or intelligence of the heart. In many cultures across the African continent, the word Ubuntu means being human and is captured in the saying, “A person is a person through other persons.” While that is very much an African spirit of communitarian belonging, which is also captured in the saying, “I am because we are,” I was recently directed to an Irish saying which translates to, “In the shelter of one another live the people.” That is the Irish version of Ubuntu. So Ubuntu has this particularity and universal effect that resonates with ancient traditions, and a primordial way of reconnecting with our true selves and back to one consciousness. 

Ubuntu is a constant remembering of who we are as a collective and who each of us is as part of this collective as offspring of the earth. Ubuntu is an art of continually making peace with your evolving sense of self. This sense of self is awareness being cultivated. There is no end to becoming aware. It’s like an onion whose layers are peeled off until in the end there is nothing left but the basal disc waiting to grow new onion leaves. If you’ve cut a lot of onions like I have, you’ll notice that at the core of the onion is more onion. The layer itself is actually a leaf. The very center does not have a name since it is just younger leaves growing out of the basal disc. And so it is with us. We are layers of potential, and as we peel off these layers, we invite the potential to be born new, because at the end of the last layer is new growth. Roses do the same and I like to imagine that we are all flowers blooming and shedding, blooming and shedding new layers of our becoming more human. 

If we don’t accept this as our individual and collective purpose, we do not grow, and therefore the earth too does not grow. 

Here I would like to quote the great Maya Angelou who in many instances said this about growth:

"Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth."

If we are the earth, and the earth is all of us, then our main job is to grow! Or else the Earth will not evolve. We can choose to Grow UP or continue to Grow OLD. Activated Ubuntu is activated free will. It is choosing to sprout (grow up) or to fossilise (grow old). 

This business or growing up is essentialy what it means to have activated Ubuntu. To become human. It is a process. It has no beginning nor an end. You simply pick the baton from where your ancestors left off, dust a few layers off and then you learn to grow in a particular way that is suitable to the generation and the times that you are in. And then you pass it forward. 

I was also asked to speak about a religious experience that shaped me and I don’t have a singular experience. My religious experience is my daily business of being born again every morning. 

I have a practice, maybe a weird one of saying hello to myself every morning as soon as I open my eyes and my feet touch the ground. No matter where I am, the first thing I do when I wake up is to say,

“Hello! Hi there! Lovely to meet you today,” and sometimes I’ll even cheekily respond, “Hello, lovely to meet you to. I am here to be seen.” And I’ll respond back to my new self, “I see you.”

I encourage you to practice looking at yourself in the mirror and greeting your new self with curiosity. You grew into a new person overnight and it is a privilege to meet this new self alive in your physical body. 

I believe we are constantly dying and being born again physically until the day our physical bodies lose their physicality and all that is left is your spirit, free of the body, free of gravity. Free to keep sprouting at any time and in any form. 

When my maternal grandmother died, I was 10 years old and did not understand the concept of death. It’s also the first time I saw and heard my father crying. It was shocking. At the funeral there was a lot of talk about accepting that she was gone physically but would always be with us in spirit. This too, I did not understand. Weeks after her death I had a frightening dream. I was in church, it was Sunday mass and our church used to have separate toilets that you had to walk to in an isolated part of the church compound. So I had gone to the bathroom and because everyone else was inside the church, it was eerily quiet outside and a bit scary. I was walking back to the church when I sensed that someone was behind me. I turned around angry it was my grandmother. She looked different. She was neither good nor evil. It was a strange combination of a look I had never seen on anyone’s face. She was beckoning for me to go to her. Part of me wanted to follow her but part of me also felt physically rooted in earth. I finally mustered up the courage to say, “No Cucu! You go back and let me go back to church!” She disappeared. I ran inside the church. That was the end of my dream. 

When I shared it with my mom she explained that my Cucu had answered my curiosity. I’d wanted to know where she had gone and she came back to show me. She also gave me the option to go there or to stay on earth and grow. I chose to stay here and grow up and that’s exactly what I do everyday. I embrace growth. We will all fossilise. My grandmother was nearly 90 years old when she died. She had grown up and grown old. 

Recently, I listened to an interview of Jane Goodall who was asked what next adventure she is looking forward to having and she said that death is her next adventure. She said she is curious to know what comes after death. 

When I’m 90 years old I want to remember that. In the meantime, I will continue to meet my new self everyday with the intention of peeling a new layer off and fitting into the wholeness of the one consciousness. This is my daily spiritual or religious experience. 

Maybe growing up and growing old means we have to become smaller everyday to return to that speck of stardust that fits perfectly into that one star that is the universe. So growth is what we need to embrace for the Earth to really grow up and become a new star made up of all our star dust. And growth requires new forms of knowing and even new physical forms of knowing. 

I believe that we are in the era of birth, which has strongly been molded into the form of the divine feminine and I can’t think of any other energy more needed than the energy of the doula to assist the birth mother. 

A philosopher friend of mine recently said to me, “History has ended!” And what emerged in my heart, or how his words landed revealed another truth. His-story has ended. Her-story begins. Her story has been told through his story. The voice of the feminine is finally able to speak. 

We are being called to be the doula and the expectant mother. To help birth a new world. At the same time, we are the children of the new Earth. 

And because I was raised in both the Christian faith and indigenous tradition, the mother, and I mean the mother of Christ was also symbolic of Mother Earth. There is a song that we used to sing in praise of the black Madonna with child and as I was practicing it I realized that it is very much a song about the Mother Earth and how much she gave up to birth us all. I think she is pregnant again with all our burdens, traumas, dreams, hopes and aspirations, and when a woman is pregnant, at least in my tradition, we praise her, we celebrate her, we shower her with love and blessings and wish her a smooth and easy birth. Usually it is the joyful aunties who show up at the time of birth singing and dancing and ready to swaddle the new baby with love and feed the mother with nourishing food from the earth. 

So here is a song praising the mother. Even though it is a song about Mary mother of Jesus, it is to me a song about the mother in all of us. And so I honour the maternal energy that is labouring and invite us to become the singing doulas, the joyful aunties in the delivery room, and give courage to the birthing mother.