10/20/2025
Indigenous spirituality is a tree.
Its roots, sticks, and leaves may look different,
but each part plays a role in the balance of the whole.
They intertwine beneath and above the soil,
exchanging breath, memory, and nourishment.
This is the spiritual ecology of life itself.
Trying to separate Indigenous or African-diasporic traditions too rigidly
is like trying to separate the root from the branch.
They adapt, merge, and sustain one another
through exchange, migration, and survival.
So how can we truly know one without the other?
Hoodoo sometimes carries Voodoo (know the difference: Vodun; Vodou),
and Voodoo carries Hoodoo.
They are not the same, yet not apart.
They are reflections of one another,
born of the same seed, shaped by different soils.
It is all one, because we are one.
When a tree is struck down,
chopped by colonization,
or rots from the core of forgetting,
the one thing that remains is the roots,
the skeletal remains that testify a sacred tree once stood here.
Those roots, what we now call Hoodoo,
pull the buried wisdom from the soil.
They feed on memory.
They draw from rain, blood, sweat, and prayer.
They are the first to feel when Spirit moves underground.
Without roots, there is no life.
Religions and their systems were never born overnight.
Each began as a seed,
a moment of communion between human and creation.
That seed became a root.
That root became nourishment for nations.
That nourishment became the songs, shrines, and stories
that still bloom today.
When we celebrate Hoodoo Heritage Month in October,
we are not only honoring the roots.
We are celebrating all life —
all things that represent who we are.
Everyone should honor roots, because without them
there would be no leaf or stick, no nourishment, no vegetable, no fruit.
Even when a seed is sown into a mother,
that seed must take root in her fertile soil.
So when we speak of tradition,
we are speaking of the Tree.
When we work the roots,
we are working the remembrance.
When we honor the branches,
we are honoring the reach of the ancestors.
And when we breathe under its shade,
we are part of the living ecology of Spirit.
