Ki Notes

Week 10. Women on the Threshold The house is quiet this morning, the way it is before the grandchildren wake. The same kitchen, the same window, the same cup of tea going cold while I write. Nothing here has changed. And yet I can see all of it — the light through the glass, the green outside, the gold pooling on the table — as if someone reached over and turned the color back on. That is the only way I know I am through the gate. Not because the world rearranged itself. Beca

Week 9. I Can See In Color. Women On The Threshold “Were you silent, or were you silenced?” — Oprah Winfrey, to Meghan Markle Oprah asked Meghan Markle that question, and it has been repeated so often because it lands somewhere tender in almost all of us. We turn it over and wonder which one was true. For me, it was both. The silencing came first. I was a child the year Dr. King was assassinated, and my school asked us to write what we felt. My essay was chosen to be read at

WEEK 8: I can see in color. Women on the threshold I went to a Juneteenth celebration last weekend. I am an introverted, solitary person. Being in a crowd that size, I naturally draw inward. To stay in a space like that, I have to pull from my inner reserves — otherwise I retreat. I wanted to be there. I just had to manage my energy. So I walked every row, occasionally stopping at vendors booths. I listened to the DJ while watching people dance — groups of friends, couples, f

Week 5: I Can See In Color: Women On The Threshold by; M. Hakikah Shamsideen N’tozake. (en-toe-ZAH-kay) It is a Zulu name — famously carried by the playwright and poet Ntozake Shange. It means “she who comes with her own things.” I have been thinking about that name. About what it means to come with your own things — not borrowed or assigned things, not the things someone handed you along with a title or an expectation. Your own things. The ones that were yours before anyone

The Love That Space Demands Week Three — I Can See In Color: Women on the Threshold M. Hakikah Shamsideen I am in a clearing. I have come out of the forest — years of it, decades of it — and I am standing in a wide open field. North, South, East, West. All directions available. All of them waiting for me to make a move. Right now, I am just here. It almost feels lonely. Except that I know God is in this space too. If the first weeks were black, white and blue — void, reckonin

The minute I stepped outside my front door, I stopped being a private citizen. A congregant on the corner. A familiar face at the bus stop. A phone call before 8 am. It didn’t matter that I was tired. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t had breakfast or that my mind was still somewhere between sleep and the day ahead. The moment I crossed that threshold, I belonged to everyone else. I answered to many names in those years. Daughter. Mother. Friend. Caregiver. Leader of Women. The