Tag: connection

InterPlanetary

Last week, during one of our morning family fireside chats, I asked the question, What’s a fond memory from your childhood? My youngest daughter chimed in first. She recalled a time when she was much younger and wasn’t feeling well. She was sad about something. I asked her the type of question only a parent who still believes in magic might ask…

“Do you want to leave this planet?”

She said yes, so I proceeded tolifted her up, turned her upside down, planted her little feet on the ceiling, and walked her across, one step at a time. When I asked if she was ready to return to Earth, she said yes again and just like that, she felt better. The truth is, I didn’t remember that specific incident at all. But I do know that I’ve walked every one of my children, nieces, and nephews across some available ceiling at one time or another. Kitchen ceilings. Living room ceilings. Hallway ceilings. Bedroom ceilings. Wherever gravity could be temporarily renegotiated.

That parent-child exchange wasn’t merely about play alone. It was about perspective. Dr. Wayne Dyer use to say, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at, change.” More often than not, that change makes the change. Sometimes the world feels unbearable not because it is, but because we’re seeing it from the same angle over and over again. Same floor. Same ceiling. Same weight. Same worries pressing down. A small shift, just enough to invert the view, can remind us that what feels permanent might only be positional. When you’re upside down, the rules change. The ceiling becomes a road. The weight in your chest loosens. You’re no longer stuck, you’re traveling. That’s what my daughter remembered. Not sickness. Not sadness but motion, care, imagination at work, and much needed relief.

Perhaps that’s the quiet calling of this season. We’re living in a time when many people are carrying more than they can articulate. Grief without language. Fear without clear edges. Responsibilities stacked so high they feel endless. Some are so weighed down they’re not just asking to leave the planet, they are checking out in not so good ways. Ways that can be avoided if we dare to care beyond a thought.

What if our task right now isn’t to fix everything? What if it’s simply to help one another change altitude? To lift someone gently. To offer a momentary escape, not necessarily from reality, but from its heaviness. To say, “Let me help you with this for a second. Let me show you another way to see it.” You don’t need rockets for that. Just presence, care, and the willingness to look a little silly while carrying someone upside down through a hard moment. A change in perspective doesn’t erase pain but it can loosen its grip. Sometimes, that’s enough to help someone feel better. It can be just enough to help them return to Earth a little more ready to move forward. That’s interplanetary work; real space travel that acknowledges the space between us as connection. No doubt, we could all use a little more of that right now.

Cosmic Conduit

From childhood, the red clay of Alabama has been more than dusty earth beneath my feet — it’s been companion, witness, keeper, and quiet participant in this life’s southern screenplay. Those deep, iron-rich hues tell tales far older than roads, houses, or city outlines. This clay, saturated by millennia, holds within it the memory of those who walked, worked, sweated, prayed, and bled on it. I recall a professor once telling me, “This Alabama red clay is rich with the blood of your ancestors.” It was then that I began to understand — this soil is not just ruddy dirt; it is charged matter, a living archive.

In the age old folk wisdom of the South, particularly in the African American tradition, earth is not a passive object or substance. Clay and soil have long been used as vessels for intention — for grounding, for protection, for healing, cleansing, and for calling forth what is unseen. The red clay in particular, with its rich iron content, acts almost like a spiritual conductor, transmitting energy between the seen and unseen worlds. It anchors prayers, catches tears, and carries whispers into the earth’s core. But its power extends beyond the personal or mystical — it is cosmic. Science teaches us that the same iron oxide that reddens Alabama clay also exists in places like Morocco, Tehran, Nigeria, Kenya, and yes on the surface of Mars, giving the planet its scarlet glow. There’s something poetic in that: this humble dirt is a terrestrial mirror of a celestial body, connecting us to the wider universe. How we walk should not be common because what we walk upon is not ordinary — it is stardust, drawn down to earth, thickened and spread by time and memory.

This allows me to weave this red clay into my work not as a symbol of something superstitious, but as a tangible metaphor for what binds us all: dust to dust, earth to star, ascendant to descendant. It’s a reminder that our faith traditions, though varied, often share this same foundational truth — that life is cyclical, that spirit moves through matter, and that the earth itself is a key element in the divine story. I have come to see red clay as a sacred material. It quietly affirms what so many faiths already teach — that we are intimately connected to both the earth and the heavens. We are tethered to power. May each step we take upon this hallowed ground remind us of our origin story, our resilience, our rootedness, and our inevitable rising.