A Dedication to the Ancestors

I Build This For You.                                                                                               

 Yesterday, I lost someone special to me, an aunt, that was like a second mother. Her daughter, my cousin and I grew up together, we are more like sisters. We talk everyday and I feel the pain she is feeling in my chest, this is what has inspired something that has been long overdue... a dedication. 

Before there was a business, there was a bloodline. Before there was a brand, there were hands. Hands that stirred pots, crossed thresholds, laid roots, and prayed over children who didn't yet know they were being made into something. I know now. I know now what was being built in me.

The Women Before Me                                                                                                       

 I did not come from nothing. I come from women who knew the land. Women who understood that the earth holds memory  that what you bury comes back, that what you speak over a thing shapes it, that a candle lit with intention is never just a candle. They may not have called it hoodoo. They may have called it prayer, or knowing, or just the way things are done. But the current ran through them, and it runs through me.

I come from grandmothers whose names I speak at my altar. Women who survived things that were never given names, who kept their families fed and their households standing when the world gave them every reason to fold. They did not fold. And so I do not fold. That is not my inheritance. Getting back up, that is my inheritance.

The Cherokee blood I've been learning to claim, the African roots that were never lost even when they tried to sever them,  all of it lives in my hands when I work. All of it is present every time I light a light, every time I sit down to build something from nothing. I am not self-made. I am ancestor made.

For Her

And then there is her. The aunt who was a second mother. The one whose house in the summer meant cousins and noise and safety and love that didn't have to be earned. I can still feel what it meant to be there,  to be a child under her roof and know, without words, that you were held.  She taught me things she didn't know she was teaching me. How a woman can be the axis of a family. How love shows up in small, practical, consistent ways. How home isn't always the house you were born in  sometimes it's the house that chose you too. She has crossed the veil now. She has joined the grandmothers. And I want her to know: I saw you. I felt you. I carry you.

The Dedication

So here  at this altar, in these words, before my community and my ancestors as witnesses  I lay this work at your feet. Third Generation Conjure.  Every candle I've burned for a client,  every word I've written, every course I'll teach, every door I will open.  I dedicate it to the lineage. This is not just a business. It is an offering.

You sent me here with gifts I am only beginning to fully understand. You pressed them into my palms through kitchens and summers and bloodlines and roots. You made me a  practitioner, not by accident, but by design. And now I am building, in plain sight, what you built quietly in the dark.

I will not waste it. I will not shrink it. I will not let fear make me small when you made me to be otherwise. I build this for you. Every client I serve is a prayer in your name. Every skill I develop is a candle I light at your altar. Every generation that comes after me will know your names because I refuse to let them be forgotten.

A Word to My Community
If you are here, in this space, walking this path, you did not stumble here by accident either. Your ancestors have opinions about your life. They are invested in your becoming. They have been arranging things, opening doors, whispering directions that you may have written off as intuition or luck or coincidence. It is none of those things. It is them.           

Honor them. Learn their names. Speak them out loud. Set a glass of water. Light a candle. Tell them what you're building. Because when you do the work in alignment with your lineage, something shifts. Doors don't just open, they were already open, waiting for you to look up. That is what this community is for. To remember together. To root down so we can rise. To my aunt. To my grandmothers. To the ones whose names I know and the ones I'm still learning. I see you. I feel you. I am because you were. This is yours.

— Sade
Third Generation Conjure