the OLD ways in the NEW.

Yorùbá Orishas – Oshun, divinity of rivers, love, feminine beauty, fertility, and art, also one of Shango’s lovers and beloved of Ogoun

Maria Borges by Rory Payne for Mixt(e) Magazine Spring Summer of 2015.

If the intellectual concepts of water are not sacred the power of man and women is a dead concept. The difference between a whore and a woman is the sanctity a woman embodies, or doesn't. If there is no respect for land based upon the divinity of land as Mother there is only factual dissemination of why land is property, and no soul to the laws of ownership need apply to forcibly remove money as the reason for drilling for oil knowing it will pollute a significant water supply not that far from a predicted drought coming to middle America because of the disrespectful use of water in the past.

Oshun entering American life, thought life, and the practice of leaving altars and offerings upon land would be a return to reverence. African spirituality is older than the modernity of corporations somehow faceless with no soul attached to a body of business practices affecting human life robotic like with no feeling, no real culpability as the laws have been written. But, the centuries of contact with greedy white people deemed this old but celebrated spirituality as the work of the devil. Demonized the Orishas cannot become a part of a lexicon we need to overturn what doesn't work as we face melting ice raising shorelines, droughts as white men make decisions about correcting these problems with profit uppermost in their thoughts and concerns, and economic development as their guiding light of environmental reformation. What we can do is stop our lives and let thousands of American citizens including policy makers and decision makers live in abject poverty in other countries for at minimum of a month to learn how to see with other's eyes, feel other's pain to know American life is not the center of life.

"What does the world see when they see us?"

We will never know if we don't listen. We will not understand if we cannot, if we refuse to, or are unwilling to switch position and live where someone else lives to see how we live in their perspective of us. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories Jan. 10, 2017

Cigar smoking old Cuban woman in Havana, Cuba. photo by Ania Blazejewska on Flickr.