Japan?!

much on my mind
I awake from a dream on a huge ship as it sailed into port in Japan, ,and it is as i was overwhelmed with emotion : i felt myself home and embraced, and was waving to people on the mountainsides. it is like they were all mixed or i was seeing more melanin..]} the dream was its own scenes on that ship but i dont remember much, struggling to remember as i type. there was also a male in some kind of relationship with me, i could not tell if it was business or pleasure, but it was a bit competitive...there was a scene where we were driving/racing down the road and we both took different lanes to move around a slow car but traffic stopped behind a barge ahead and my car got their first ; the sense of that is where i got the competition from> i feel now it was jason...tut tut

//

"Grand Melise!!"

I wake up to a text and that is the opener. Never been called that before. One of my amusements of life are the names people give me..

and I know i sleep and dream soundly far and deeply because texts arrive and i never hear their beeps but when i am awake, i can almost hear the sound from a room or two away. further than that and nothing. it is merely two feet if that away from my bed.


//

and this too comes to mind:
people dont like me cause i talk the truth. as neal said this week: "sht is sht and sugar is sugar and i dont call sht sugar" but i wake more immediately to the thought of someone who has promised to talk to me and call me for a good month or more now. a big ceo in the dance, and i have no idea why or how he took interest when our mutual friend talked to him about me, but he stopped him and said, "i want to meet her; no need to tell me more". man sent his number with instructions. i have phoned. he tells me he would call me back that day. he didnt. i left it alone. tried again like three weeks later no response. as i am trying to do and be a new thing with new attitudes i tried a third time last week with texts. no answer. but he tells the mutual friend, i got her, it will happen and i wake up this morning thinking what shit is that? what all the posing and psyching...what is it when we were young we would make short upper body jabs as if we were going to wheel on somebody but we were just playing only wanting to see them flinch...if you about something real and you respect others are on something real who has time to play all this time lag? nobody. you a ceo yo have time to not do when things need to be done, or to play with folk it it not your intention to play with folk? That. the set of bullshit that passes for normal social and business chess, parlance, and position. you really think i can meet this person with an open mind and heart now? and i wonder is it me. am i too ny mafia stand upness/ we dont do the middle muddle. fk .be clear and be definitive. and moreso, be immediate. dont no body put off shit up there. for later. you ever see that in a mafia movie? we go hit em up next week. or the don keeps calling and you ignore the calls? right. people on shit. people be on shit right thru. but they vex with you when you call they name

one more month for this 2013 eros. that was supposed to be an epic year. that really was indeed an epic year. and it was not as bad as I made it to be though my heart was broken and my intentions churned, i survived it. and promises made to me are still intact, so the person cant be all that bad afterall, eh?  yeah. but i want more. i deserve more. i deserve it all. but i will take a quarter portion.. but i am learning to let go . take my hands off and it is true. i see it in life. my hands are pristine. they sent me so. and my job is to maintain and keep it so. my hands are to remain clean and no iniquity am i to do. ever. i was trying to poise for a takeover and low and behold, the person has maintained their extension. so maybe i imagine enemies when they are not there? my phantoms? yeah right? life is far more complex darling. your gift giver will be your back stabber. be aware. 2013 was surely the year of schemes against me. from big ministries to warm bodies, and it is still happening. some man now in the garage keep telling me how my people doing me things and not to eat they food for they jealous and trying to destroy me...only so i can run into his house, and land, he promise me deed...and inevitable arms...'and how i need guidance'..i dont doubt the last part/ i have searched high and low, male and female for it, but when i think i get it, i just have to watch in amazement and say but you more incompetent and ineffectual than i am" has never failed. but we tarry on. we tarry on

why japan?

//

i end this writing knowing and feeling so much more was in last night's travels, slumber and thoughts but it is lost to me at this moment.  the ship ride and sail. conversations. lessons..

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here is another revelation. something i think i see right through
I write a lot when doing business, strategizing and brainstorming with people. I write a lot even when in those processes with and by myself. I am reading these functional illiterates in this country trinidad: I write too much for them to read. they seem to try to take short cuts and glance my stuff only to come ask me stupid questions, and for answers already stated. it is like I am coming with too much for them to process. that has happened consistently

Sleeping Visions, Revelations and the Cycle of Things

"Venetian Violet"

amazing things happen to me and i wonder if it happens to others:

like sleeping and my eyes are closed but people and faces appear and morph into a catalog-none of them i know- but all real faces. i wonder if i make them up ? if they are people i have known? seen? I wonder how my brain does that effortlessly: just conjures and shows people who have neither name nor context that i can state, but are here/in vision. the other thing that happens is i can have a film play out in my mind's eye as well; also effortlessly and no it is not my intent to make a film in my head. and then the other thing are revelations, answers, clarity to situations in my life, that perplex me that i am processing. sometimes it happens long, decades, lifetimes after the fact, sometimes it is fairly immediate. but i had two this morning. well, one revelation and a question on the possibility of a second...but this morning I realized:

chase saw me, wanted the life he thought my appearance represented, and commenced a program and statements that he wanted a life with me, but the revelation is that life and all it represents is not him, is as far from him as opposites, and so it was all a farce. yes i have said farce before but i did not have the middle, the explanation, the human compassion of understanding, if that is what it is - he said he lied enough, and wish not to anymore...but he is a liar and was lying to me from the beginning...to have the life with me he wants you cant be a taker, you have to be a giver, a matcher, a sharer, first to begin he had nothing to share and his whole life MO and motivation because he has never had anything is to take, use and abscond. and though all i wanted from him was love, affection and sex, the former two seemed to be entirely out of his psychological emotional whereabouts and the latter, inconvenient. when his people tried to chop him up that is what they called him, a user, he repeated to me. I always wondered why: because of his behavior towards them or their knowledge of his approach to me...i know he did say "i was doing what i had to" and always wondered what that meant-- that man is almost criminal, a classic sociopsychopath. the good thing I noticed since from earlier this week is that i seem to be freed or in that process of releasing all what i did for him from which he benefited: the money, the support, the calling in networks and contacts to change his life reality...and as I write it I realize it to be the magnanimous acts that it was; it is exactly acts of that end and altitude I wish for myself to turn my life around that somehow seem to be frustrated, nonexistent and absent the characters of such generosity, but nevertheless, i seem to be releasing it. as small ting no less. What is TT$30K but a mere US$ five thousand. Small thing in the scheme of my life. And more than he has ever known.

It does raise questions though :: Like now i wonder how is it that a chocolate black woman had money enough to buy a twelve acre spread but one of her sons is so bereft and has been so poor that he speaks of having nothing, always struggling all his life> from young?

the other thing he does is separate people even when and while he appears to put them together, but he does, who and what in which context all for his self interest. he tells me his cousin was in jail for some fraud attempt and tells me he does not know why he was telling me that--well  it was probably to diminish his cousin in my eyes who i was attracted to; to make himself seem more rosy? i dont know i wish not to belabor the whole thing or make these snatches of insight be more than they appear: momentary pictures of explanations so i dont have to be so perplexed -- this process of understanding human nature and what really occurred between two people, that really wasnt, really didnt, and involved far more than those two

the other possible revelation i had was to wonder if the source of my challenges of the womb started when i was young at home, in family context...another manifestation of dysfunction. the badgering of the female form, the warnings to not come home with a belly as my mother once did..and what did that to me early. we put a lot of things on the innocent, but for our own guilt and folly and then they pay for it for the rest of their natural and sometimes supernatural lives.

little by little i am figuring this thing out,  in cycles, in time, as links and connections appear

and to the bane of living:
i wake up this morning entirely annoyed as it has been a growing sensitivity to wanting to kill the fan, i guess by my cleaning it regularly one of the blades hits the back frame or top or something and it has been nagging at me to the point this morning i switched it off, vowing to use the floor a/c- it is supposed to clean and filter the air anyway and to see the dust that coats the fan almost as soon as it is clean= we have no idea the filth we breathe , the extent of the pollution in the environment

and as I rose out of bed, I saw my homemade diary on the floor, with the cover as ArtPost Trinidad Venetian Violet- it has been there since Sunday waiting for a meeting, i would have taken it to share some plans and sketches, but i just packed it up and replaced it to its corners, people are a trip. so important and busy; so over subscribed.  it is one storyline that i believe i am totally over - the endless waiting to move forward in one program or another. and so nothing gets done and your /my personal agenda languishes often into nothing where it started

trying to work with people on the whole is trying; for the challenge of finding like minds, mirrored patterns, matched value systems and symbiotic characteristics to alleviate conflict. it appears it is hard for people to corral their brain, to listen, to exact what they stated as agreed upon plans or intents, or in just expecting them to be honest is a reality warp. another cousin of a possible business partner told him he is the only one of pure interest among five men or so. so where does one go with that? in what den of thieves, fowl and foxes?

i am just seeing the life and trying to make senses

but this post would not be authentic if i did not tell you that i lie in bed at times and am totally puzzled why my life is as it is. why it is so hard for me to have a life of love and sex, with decent human beings, caring and competent partners, avoiding all those who wish to consume, destroy or besmirch me/ why something so simple is so difficult and elusive. i regularly feel sad for myself. Not to be living on my own, in my own space, where i can feel my own vibrations, my self, do as I please, enjoy my environment. Where I can live where others are not affecting my peace of mind or impacting, denuding or limiting my quality of life

But in the sleep and as i rouse, i am constantly beseeching, praying, reaching, begging for myself, my health, my womb, my sanity, my wellbeing, to be saved, to be delivered, for magic solutions and mystic persons to resolve for me my myriad challenges. I do believe I deserve them

anyway, let me end this first morning rant. I am learning some things: not every eruption is for fb, so this wont be posted there

Partners, Armies, Sentries and Centurions

as always, an overactive brain disturbs my sleep and rest and almost always starting from sleep and slumber disrupted with the necessity of a bathroom break. bathroom breaks while sleeping, something about that is contrary and irony.

but i would swear, i believe, i have no other inference but that I just encountered two angels during my sleep and instead of me trying to claim and remember, and see what i was experiencing, who they might be, i was more enthralled and surprised as a kid at a circus or the zoo, to see some creature or feat totally unexpected...but the one that captured me was a man somehow occurring as a woman, like maybe a transvestite, but he was in full roman warrior regalia: the breast plate, the shingles over the shoulder down the arm, midway, and the skirt of sword blades and shifted and opened like a pleat when he walked, and he was doing just that, walking as if on the road in tortuga coming into the yard, or toward me but closer. as if. in my memory as I am constructing and trying to make sense of it now, it would appear that there was another warrior entity person to my left. and in the dream, i was me, telling myself, wow, you see that, look at that, who and what is that. then zoop, i awake, bathroom, and even as i got up opening my door, I was struggling to capture where i just was, who was that, and what to make of it. but as I try, i surmise, they could have been me and my partner, or they were separate warrior angels come to take sentry in the battle commencing. but a big powerful element were women being men or men being women, or maybe just shaman who morph to suit the battleground and opponent..like "witch wombmyn high on holy water" kind of thing...or maybe the were members of the holies. whomever they are, they came. I just had a visitation. and it is empowering, emboldening. and some things come to me in greater focus, strategy and clarity-- above all...i get greater instruction of "Serviceable Use"... it is like the instruction says, if i am going to amass you an army, you will take it to the service of others about you, others laboring unrecognized in the vineyard, just as you, others who too need to be made whole. but I also see they are come to preserve me against enemies, and even the same ones who would be serviced.

But it was calmly wild. it would be more wild if i had been able to capture them more clearly. it does not pay to be excitable/ like a kid. but it is that innocence that has been my undoing, and still, yet, and abiding, my salvation

i am poised to return first time in five months. and i am not going alone. praises.. and i am not to go empty-handed. salt blue

the power humbles me. that
the other thing that came out to me too is that the very thing they lay down for you becomes your stepping stone. then i realize the stone rejected becomes the corner stone and belfry, the spires and the whole building. the person dismissed is the person who rallies. sell me down the river and watch me sail back upstream in a yacht. come to save your ass in riding flood waters. something so.

i am housed and covered/
and all this because one soul decided to journey with me
make somebody strong y'all. your pot and port of gold might be right there

"Wombmyn DeLighted with Her Disasters" Sandra Cisneros and Me

“I’m a witch woman high
on tobacco and holy water.

I’m a woman delighted with her disasters.
They give me something to do.

A profession of sorts.

Keeps me industrious
and of some serviceable use."

— from "Night Madness Poem" by Sandra Cisneros

Ernesto Mercer History/ Brazil's "We are all mixed up" African Malungus and American Melungeons

• We've ALWAYS known THIS. It's been written about forever. Except this story STILL doesn't get it right. Melungeons, from Malungu, Kimubundu (from Angola) ie those folks & others who arrived in 1619 at Point Comfort. & those that followed. That's why they spoke Portuguese & Kimbundu...same folks that made the Candomble Angola in Brazil. In Brazil the word is Melongo. It has many meanings. The most relevant is my "shipmate" as in Melongo in Brazil. Also "a spirit from the bottom of the Kalunga" ( the ocean, & the realm of death). Also a title in the old Mbunudu kingdoms that gave the bearer of the sacred malungu objects spiritual & temporal power that included the founding of lineages. Bantu men of the foundation generation were prize husbands. They created cattle culture in the US, they were great farmers. Many were indentured servants & became free after their indentures. & often married white indentures as Bantu men outnumbered Bantu women. They also married Virginia native women. They called themselves Malungu. During the time of the "Black Codes" hamlets could be fined for harboring Melungeons. They began to move across the Cumberland Gap. Into Tennessee. Obama, through his "white" mother is a descendant of a famous Bantu Malungu Soldier. Historians have been telling folks this forever. Lol, so have I. Not all descendents passed on into "Whiteness." A lot of us don't need the DNA either. We know who we were & are. That's one reason why I'm a Tata Nkisi. Why one nickname is Mista Malungu. & my motto is Malungu since 1619. I wrote a poem called "Nativity" about all of this. It's in my notes.

  
  

  
  

  
  

  DNA Study Solves Mystery Of Mysterious Mixed-Race People

  www.huffingtonpost.com
  

  NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- For years, varied and sometimes wild claims have been made about the origins of a group of dark-skinned Appalachian residents once known derisively as the Melungeons. Some speculated they were descended from Portuguese explorers, or perhaps from Turkish slaves or Gypsies.

  
  

  
  

  • Ernesto Mercer http://www.eclectica.org/v5n3/hashaw.html

    
    

    
    

    MALUNGU: The African Origin of the American Melungeons - Tim Hashaw - Eclectica Magazine v5n3

    www.eclectica.org
    

    Miscellaneous by Tim Hashaw , Eclectica Magazine v5n3

    
    
  • Ernesto Mercer: Lol & a whole lot of us old timers still live around the watershed of the Chesapeake, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, & the Carolinas as Black folks! This is our "Old Country."

    
    
  • Adisa Novah Moswen-Harkless: so true.. Malungu is what I heard a lot say in Bahia..

    
    
  • Ernesto Mercer: http://books.google.com/books?id=2zh5AAAAMAAJ...
    

    
    

    The Birth of Black America

    books.google.com
    

    The voyage that shaped early America was neither that of the Susan Constant in 1...See more

    
    
  • Ernesto Mercer:  http://books.google.com/books?id=88XKOocy4vIC...
    

    
    

    Children of Perdition

    books.google.com
    

    Some oppressed groups fought with guns, some fought in court, some exercised civ...See more
  • Ernesto Mercer: 7 rivers south, finishing some writing about the Old Country. Been writing about Malungus & going to their places for the last 10 years.

    
    
  • Teníadé Toni Broughton: The side of my family from VA are of this genetic makeup and some scientists took samples of their DNA for some kind of Melungeon study.

    
    
  • Tara Bianca Candido: you know what this means about Elvis...

    Brazilian racial mythology "we are all mixed" US racial mythology esp white... "we aren't mixed"
    

    
    
  • Ernesto Mercer: Elvis, Abraham Lincoln, lol...Going back to Carter G. Woodson & his Negro Presidents...

    
    
  • Xavier Auburn Ave Stanford Ernesto Mercer Wait you mean to tell me this dosent trace back to the holy grail, and knights templar? Sorry I had too lol

    
    
  • Ernesto Mercer Xavier Auburn Ave Stanford: Believe it or not, it REALLY does involve the true inspiration of the "Flying Dutchman"... I'd comment on everything else above, but then I'd have to kill you...but the Dutchman thing: square biz.

    
    
  • Maven Huggins i either read or believed when i came to know of this clan that Abraham Lincoln might be...bizarre yes, but still believe it

    
    
  • Kenneth Carroll Joel Dias-Porter just gave me the whole Melungeon/Abraham Lincoln story.

    
    
  • Ernesto Mercer Malungus are more interesting.

    
    
  • Maven Huggins glad to know i was not making it up, but he has that/their face. and i always always all my life, felt he looked "odd" -- this is what/how i learned why

    
    
  • Arletha Okiki Ola Williams I read it was 1526 with the Spanish? Did you ever hear that 
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  • 
    Ernesto Mercer : De Soto invaded the Southeast from La Florida. The Spaniards 
    plundered then marched back south & consolidated their Mexican Empire including the Southwest. From Georgia, north they could never gain purchase. The 1526 incident was just that. an incident. Shipwreck, disease & a mutiny of Africans who may or may not have been slaves, nor capitves. ( "Pirates of the Caribbean" got that right: lots of Africans sailed as crew on traders & freebooters (pirates). The 1526 castaways appear to have died out. Europeans & Africans. They are thought to be the source of plague which among other things helped to cause the fall of the Mississippian Great Chiefdoms of the Southeast. The Spaniards attempted to colonize the Chesapeake decades before the English.They kidnapped a young man of high standing, took him to Cuba where they thought that they had him under control. He led them back to his country called Ajakan. The Spaniards built a fort & mission. The ships sailed away. Whereupon said young man led his people to kill all the Spaniards. Native Americans of the Chesapeake region HATED the Spaniards. They drove them off every expedition. The Spanish gave up & gave the British, Dutch & Swedish the opening to settle the Chesapeake & Delaware Bays & the Hudson River. They got their footholds precisely because they WERE NOT Spanish speakers. & all enemies of Spain. All of the Africans, from those who came to Jamestown, to those who built the Wall on Wall Street in Manhattan, etc were Bantus. Many former soldiers captured in the Portuguese wars with Nzinga, or the years that the Dutch seized ports from the Portuguese & were allied with the Mani Kongos. The Malungus who arrived in 1619 & thereafter are "the Charter Generation" of the African Americans. The left their mark in the customs, language, spirituality & arts of the region. As other groups came in they built on the experience of the Malungus. & as Portuguese was a major language spoken in the Kongo & Mbundu kingdoms, that's where the Portuguese part of the Melungeons comes from. & is one reason why Af Am names contain so many variations of Antonio, the great Saint of the Kongo & center of Kimpa Vita, Dona Beatriz's Kongolese Christianity...but that's another story...& another one deeply bound up with Palo.
    
    

    • Kendra Hamilton I want to take your Af Am history course, cousin.

       Those people, 200 years later, were Gullahs (Ngolas or Angolans).
    • Arletha Okiki Ola Williams Omg! You wrote a dissertation your response! Historyman! it! Ok so what I've read talks about some early "Congo based" practices after the 1526 revolt when those Africans ran away to the great dismal swamp area in SC. So not "Palo" but Congo derived practices that later came in

       also those Africans were said to have gone to St. Augustine/Fort Mose as well. I've seen a lot that says they didn't die out, but flourished in SC and FL.
      
      
      

      • Ernesto Mercer : Stono, or Cato's Rebellion led by "Congo Jimi" was a completely West Central African military campaign. The black triangular flags, the strategies & the tactics: there area couple of great articles & books about this. It's start date September 9, 1739 was a major Konoglese Feast Day for the Virgin Mary in the Kongolese Church who had taken on the role of many of the female bakisi. It was a date all the rebels would know. The majority of the West Central African men shipped into the Trade were soldiers. Many of them from Ndongo, after it's fall. In particular they were Nzinga's soldiers, the ones who fell defending her retreat to Matamba. In the early years of US colonial settlement Kongos & Ngolas were also used as hunters & soldiers in the Virginia militias. Kongo-Ngola soldiers made up a great major element of Bacon's Rebellion. As a matter of fact, they were the very last to surrender, long after the whites had. Stono was a major reason for the end of the muster of African Soldiers. & was a reaction to the official beginning of the codification of slavery as an institution. It is said that some rebels made it to their goal: Fort Mose ( Fort Moses) which was set up by the Spanish to undermine the British slave colonies north of Florida. & also to begin the long interweaving of Blacks & Seminoles.

         

         & while it isn't Palo per se, at that time neither was Palo. Palo is a reorganization of the Bantu practices in Cuba, not only of the Cabildo traditions of Habana & Matanzas, but of the Palenque & family traditions of Eastern Cuba. A tradition that began in the 1600s. A reorganization done on purpose done in the late 1880's early 1900's. Kendra, yes, these Ngolas, become Gullahs. The closest thing to pre-Palo Nkisi Malongo is the Praise House tradition. To this day the similarities are striking & noted by Cuban scholars since the late 70's & early 80's, especially in East Cuba ( Joel James Figueroa, Jose Millet). I can't say much about it, but I can say that a person initiated into a Praise House through Seeking & Finding would recognize the initiation rites of many lines of Palo. The root of all Bantu spiritual systems in the Americas is Nkisi Malongo.

        
        
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