Returning to Spirit
I was sitting with a Black elder, born in the late 1950s and raised in Mississippi, a woman who had lived through segregation, come of age in the shadow of Emmett Till’s lynching, and survived the brutality of Jim Crow. A woman whose body and life experiences embody the knowledge of what it means to exist under a fascist regime. I asked her what she believed it would take to survive the times we are in. She carried a lifetime of wisdom, but what struck me most were her words:
“Trump is making people have all this fear, and it’s going to send them back to church because they need to be on their knees. They’re going to have to pray. They’ll have to know something. I don’t care what it is—Buddha, whatever—it doesn’t matter. You will need to do something. You will need to meditate. People need that already, but especially in these dark times. We have to remember we can rely on something beyond ourselves because everybody is walking around thinking, ‘I gotta fix it. I gotta do that,’ when really, they need to relax, seek God and reflect to lead our next steps.”
Her words stayed with me. I carried them out of that conversation, letting them settle into the spaces where worry lived in my own body. Because she was right. We have reached a point where we are so consumed with the material world, so self-absorbed, that we have lost sight of what truly matters.
We have forgotten who we are.
Somewhere along the way, we became disconnected from the very thing meant to sustain us—the thing meant to remind us that we belong to one another. That we are not separate. That our existence is not transactional, nor is it defined by power, wealth, or status.
Our existence is sacred.
Yet, we live in a world that has pulled us so far from that knowing.
You can see it in how we live, how we consume, how we fight to accumulate more rather than tend to each other. You can see it in the way society prioritizes material wealth over spiritual wealth, individualism over community, extraction over reciprocity. You can see it in the way we move, heads down, scrolling, eyes weary from looking at screens that show us curated lives but rarely invite us to live.
And yet, there is something in us that knows the truth. Something in us that aches for belonging, for something greater.
Faith is not just about religion.
It is about connection to something deeper, something beyond the structures that tell us who we should be. It is about believing that things must be better. However we find our way to it through Christianity, Buddhism, Baha’i, Islam, Judaism, African spirituality, Indigenous traditions, ancestral practices, or the wisdom of the natural world—faith is the remembering that we are part of something vast, eternal, and sacred. Faith calls us back to ourselves.
It reminds us that we are not just bodies moving through capitalism’s machine, not just cogs in a system designed to keep us distracted, depleted, and striving for something outside of ourselves. Faith reminds us that we are whole, that we belong, and that we are already enough.
But this world is designed to make us forget.
Because the further we are from Spirit, the easier we are to control. The easier it is to convince us that our worth is tied to productivity, wealth, or success within systems that were never built for our survival. The further we are from Spirit, the more we internalize fear. The more we justify greed. The more we accept injustice because we’ve been conditioned to believe that some people simply deserve more than others.
But let’s ask the hard questions:
Is that really your money? Is that really your power? Or is it stolen?
If we trace the roots of wealth, access, and power, we see a history of theft of land, of labor, of lives. We see how some have been granted ease and abundance while others have been forced into cycles of struggle. We see how the illusion of meritocracy keeps people from questioning their privilege, their entitlement, their attachment to a system that benefits them at the cost of others.
And the moment we start asking these questions, things start to unravel.
Identity, power, belonging it all gets called into question. That unraveling is terrifying for many. But it is necessary for healing. Faith asks us to release the illusion of separation. It asks us to let go of the attachments that keep us bound to greed, to accumulation, to the belief that we must hoard resources in order to be safe. True faith—true connection to Spirit, to the Creator of life demands that we interrogate our privilege. It asks us to examine the ways we benefit from systems of harm. It asks us to dismantle the ways we have been conditioned to justify injustice.
It requires deep humility.
It requires understanding that we are owed nothing more than what we are willing to give in return.
It requires understanding that wealth is not about accumulation…it is about connection, the circulation of resources, the power of care, and making sure everyone is resourced & have what they need to thrive.
There is a deep crisis within our collective soul right now.
People are lost, disconnected, unsure of what to believe in. We see it in the loneliness epidemic, in how we dehumanize and devalue each other, in the mental health crisis, in the collective anxiety simmering beneath the surface of our day-to-day lives.
And yet, Spirit is always waiting for us to return. The way back is through connection. Through remembrance. Through faith. It is through being in relationship with ourselves, with our communities, with the earth, with whatever higher power we name as sacred. The systems we live under are not built for our healing and survival.
But we are.
We have the power to remember. To return to love, to justice, to the truth that none of us are free unless all of us are free.
And so I ask:
What are you doing to remember?
Are you sitting with discomfort? Are you questioning what you were taught to believe about power, wealth, and worth? Are you tending to your spirit? Are you making space for the divine in your daily life? Faith is not passive. It is not just something we hold in our hearts. It is something we live and choose.
I think back to that elder—the way she held her faith, not as something soft, but as something steadfast and immovable. Strong enough to survive. Strong enough to guide her through segregation, through Jim Crow, through the ever-shifting landscapes of oppression.
Maybe she’s right.
Maybe we will find our way back.
Maybe the fear shaking people awake right now is the beginning of remembering.
Maybe the return has already begun.
Welcome to Whole with Joy!
I’m so glad you’re here. I truly hope this reflection has offered you something positive or perhaps something to consider. I’d love to hear your thoughts and any feedback you may have, so please feel free to share in the comments.
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