Welcome home,

Yes, I am.

Despite the lies I've been told, I still am.

Yes, it may seem a bit bold.

Welcome home, cojourners.

I'm glad you're here for another episode. I'm Dr. Tema, Bryant, licensed psychologist, ordained elder, and sacred artists here to facilitate your journey home to yourself.

On today, our topic is giving yourself grace, giving yourself grace.

And we're going to start the episode, as we often do with poetry. The poem on today is written by my late mother, Reverend Dr. Cecilia Williams Bryant,

from her book, I Dance with God. And it is being read by my daughter, Efei Davis, a sophomore at

New York University, theater major, playwright, and poet,

Efei Davis will share the work of my mother, her grandmother.

So let us ramble through the forgotten dreams of women who no longer know themselves,

who have fallen off the steep cliffs of rejection and now live in volcanic ashes, who remain awake at midnight, courting the storms of childhood

memories, whose lips turn to stone, and it's time to pray, who cannot remember the names of their children or their lovers?

Who don't know where their grandmothers are buried?

Who retie their head rags over and over and over again

because they can no longer love themselves?

Who cannot feel the future, who welcome only death.

In the canyon of dreams, there is music. There are portraits, there are precious gems,

there are unfinished curtains and novels, a thousand million poems, there is the laughter of unborn babies,

and so many, many gardens, angels, confidants, and beautiful moments, cakes that should have been baked,

a bright yellow balloon that escaped my young fingers, a cup of tea with too much, honey,

...