This is a recording I made yesterday morning as soon as I woke up. The full moon rung me ragged and sleep slipped away from me all night, and yet I still had to face the day. I thought about how humming is not only therapeutic and/or spiritual, but it’s also ancestral. The elders would hum and sing to get through the day regardless of their mood, and for some reason “I Lied To You” dropped in my spirit. It’s sorrow, it’s passionate, it’s raw and real. It’s magical as it transports us through hundreds of years of music’s existence. It’s holy as the harmony of hums lifts us higher and higher to the heavens. What started off as one lost young man’s testimony ended with him finding himself in a slow, engulfing fire burning away at the lies and letting the truth remain.
I’m sure I‘ll write a poem about it at some point.
(Yes, I’ve seen “Sinners”. No, I don’t have a desire to leave a long review about the film. I’ll leave that to the film critics and scholars.)
The reason why I believe that “I Lied to You” from Sinners hits me so hard is because I recognize the lies that I’ve told myself (and am probably still telling) in order to get by and still be loved from people that don’t even love themselves. This full moon in Scorpio is so intense due to the fact that it requires you to “tell the truth and shame the devil”; telling the whole truth about yourself and call out the devilish part of you that remains in shadowy shame.
After sharing my thoughts and experiences surrounding Mother’s Day yesterday, it dawned on me how much of myself (even the parts of me I didn’t know) I hid from my parents, especially my mother. I believe that for Sammie in Sinners, singing the blues wasn’t just in the name of desiring to sin or in the name of teenage angst/rebellion, but because it chose him. Like John Lee Hooker, another Blues legend, said in his song “Boogie Chillun”, “it’s in him and it got to come out”. Blues is an ancestral and deeply personal music genre to black peoples and black musicians as a whole hold a sacred calling, dare I say a mediumship, to be able to translate messages through music. Sammie wasn’t just conjuring up the ancestors by singing the blues during that infamous dancing scene in Sinners, he was building a bridge between the Divine and the Earth by speaking his truth. Divinity responds to authenticity and truth-telling. Rennick, despite his seemingly pure intention, only saw the display of power that Sammie wasn’t aware of, which then resulted in the vampiric bloodbath that followed.
I notice that when I operate more in what’s true to me (REVE(A)LED, writing, going to therapy, traveling, trying new things) is when the Divine responds back to me not simply with rewards but answers to the lifelong prayer I’m still praying: who am I meant to be in this lifetime? It is when I take those truth-telling steps that the Earth shakes in response. “The truth hurts…”, as Sammie eloquently pointed out, but the lies we live leave us with a different pain. While it may appear numb, it’s marrow deep, and I hope that as time goes on,
people decide to relinquish themselves of it, including me.
Choosing to burn as opposed to being burdened.
Besides, I’ve grown quite fond to the smell of smoke… 🌬️
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