The Deepest Sense of Purpose

It all started last year. As a rising senior trying to graduate, I was checking Howard's site religiously. On one such e-pilgrimage, I saw it. Howard in Kemet. The photos, and the expressions of joy, awe, focus, and enlightenment...the temples, the mdw ntr (hieroglyphics)... plus, the fantabulous Dr. Carr! I was infatuated with the whole thing, and whined to my friends about wishing to go.



Fast forward some months, to a monthly meeting with my honors program. Evie Hightower stood up and said, "I went to Kemet and I couldn't even begin to tell you what it was like. It was life changing." She went on and on, but what stayed with me was the glow in her face as she spoke. It was the spirit of the things she could not put into words.

I decided right there. I'm going next year.

So as I sat on the bus in Cairo, on the way to the Citadel and the hotel I reflected. I thought of my parents, of sacrifice, of the final senior year push to graduation, of it's how much to expedite a passport?! I thought of my whole church praying on safe travels for Angi, Brittani, and me. And I realized this trip was bigger than me. I thought of those before and after me, and on my first blog, wrote:

I have a responsibility to have an experience full enough for all of us to share.

On this trip, I felt fulfilled for the first time in a long time. I felt the deepest sense of purpose. Before this trip my sense of purpose was limited to myself and my family. It was simply to do my best, make my family proud, give my siblings a good example and, as Umi Says (via Mos Def), "shine my light on the world." But being in Kemet, seeing how these beautiful black people took that sense of purpose and surpassed anything the world had ever seen, on every level of human life, I felt so humble and so very powerful at the same time.

I will never forget this.

Although my trip was abbreviated, it was still so much. We turned our minds inside out with talks of God and how He/She/It is conceptualized and manifested. We dove into oceans of imagination wondering how much we still don't know about Kemet, and how much we've lost in the politics and filters of translation. We held on to each other while trekking through millenia of knowledge, meeting long lost cousins and uber-great uncles through the legacies they left us.


From an ancient river that flows against gravity itself, to the (increasingly nonsensical) temporal context I find myself in, one thing has resonated above all else: our potential (collective and individual) for all things is infinite. The real question is, what will our legacy be?

PS.....Thanks for rollin' with us =)