Welcome home cojourners. I'm glad you're here for another episode of the Homecoming podcast. I'm Dr. Tama, a licensed

psychologist, ordained minister and sacred artists here to help facilitate your journey back home to

yourself. And we're going to start today as we do every week with a poem.

And this week's poem, it's going to be an excerpt from Nikki Giovanni,

and the poem is called The Blues.

Some folks think the blues is a song or a way of singing,

but the blues is history, a way of telling how we got here, and who sent us?

The blues may talk about my man or my woman, who left me or took my money, and is gone, but what

they mean is I was stolen. We sang the blues in the cotton fields not to complain about our lives,

but to let each other know we are still here. We stir the blues in our stews to give us the

strength to go on. And Lord have mercy, we use the blues to give us joy and to make us laugh,

to teach us how to love and dance and run away. And much more, thank the Lord, how to stay until the next

day. The blues is our history, our quilt, the way we fry our chicken, the way we boil our

grains to make us some real good something to drink. The blues is our encyclopedia and no matter

who tries to copy us, only we know the real meaning of these songs. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

I want you to think about on today your own song. What do your blues sound like? What is the story

they tell? Not only the story of your individual life, but your

intergenerational life, your ancestral life. What are the stories that led to your story? What is the

story of your yesterday? What is the story you are creating today? And what do you hope will be the imprint, the prophetic mandate for your story on tomorrow?

And so as we think about the narratives, our stories, and consider the blues, I thought that poem was perfect because our topic on today is healing emotional pain, healing emotional pain.

And heartache and heartbreak are real. They can be devastating. They can shift us and turn

our worlds upside down. We feel it deeply. And a part of the feeling it is

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