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I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. What do when you have lost your way? What are the songs you hum that a treasured elder once sang? What are the questions that

anchor your existence that you keep returning to? What keeps you awake to the world?

Humans, it seems, are bound to feel adrift.

So many times in my life, I have worked to muster a belief that all of it matters.

I have made great efforts to not be lulled into amnesia, nor medicate myself blind to the forces that harm and

to those that truly heal.

Living a spiritual existence means developing strategies that keep us in possession of ourselves, ever aware that we share this fragile world.

Today's poem works the energy of the vernacular, of folkways, of leaning into

one's people as the balm and crux of their humanity.

From Take Me Back, Burden Hill by L. Lamar Wilson.

Take me back to homesteaders who pronounce palm and perm the same and know neither take too

well watered or waited down. To those who teach the difference between

wahoos and know-hows and haints and taint nobody's beast or business or

property no mowal. To endless nobody's beast or business or property, no more, to endless backroads, verdant and muddy, to

racing waist deep in fields of wildflowers and cornstalks as tall as your big brothers crown.

And verily I say, and because I say, so it is.

To fields of blinding white and chiggers and bowls that burrow deep and soil richer and

veined and reddened by all those black bruised palms blood.

To Never Will I Pick Again.

...