Where Memory Meets Momentum
July 2026
I want to begin with someone I love.
My firstborn son Solwazi was born in July. And from the moment he arrived in this world, before he could speak, before he could walk, he was watching. Taking everything in. Processing. Feeling the room before anyone else in the room knew what the room was feeling.
His whole life has been a teaching to me about what compassion actually is.
Not the sentiment we call compassion. Not the performance of it. The real thing. The kind that is not triggered by a moment but rooted in who a person has chosen to become. Slow. Deliberate. Fair. Making sure everyone around him is treated with dignity. Not because someone is watching. Because his character will not allow otherwise.
He reminds me of Òbàtálá.
Òbàtálá is one of the principal Orisha in Yoruba cosmology. The ancient spiritual tradition of the Yoruba people of West Africa, one of the oldest living spiritual systems on earth. Òbàtálá is the Orisha of creation, of wisdom, of purity, and of moral clarity. He is associated with white. The color of light before it separates into spectrum. Before it becomes anything specific. The source.
Òbàtálá is slow to move. Not because he lacks power. Because he understands that premature action without wisdom causes harm. He waits. He sees. He considers. And when he moves, it is right.
He carries a staff called the ọpa sọrọ. It is carved from a branch and it is spiral. That spiral is not decorative. It is a map. A symbol of the connection between what is above and what is below. Between the sky and the earth. Between ancient knowing and the present moment.
Òbàtálá's spiral staff is not just a symbol. In Yoruba tradition it represents the path of ethical action through time. Every decision a person of character makes leaves a mark on the spiral. The spiral does not move in a straight line because life does not move in a straight line. It curves back. It returns. And each time it returns it arrives at a higher point than where it began. That is what character does. It does not keep you from difficulty. It returns you to yourself after difficulty. Higher than before.
I want to stay with that spiral for a moment.
Because it appears everywhere in the natural world and it is telling us something important about compassion.
Look at the way leaves grow around a stem. They do not grow randomly. They follow a spiral pattern, mathematically precise, known as the Fibonacci sequence. The same sequence appears in sunflowers, in ferns uncurling, in the chambers of a nautilus shell, in the spiral arms of galaxies. Nature keeps returning to this form because it is the most efficient way to distribute resources. The spiral gives to every part of the plant in exact proportion to what that part needs. Nothing hoarded. Nothing wasted. Everything shared.
That is compassion made biological.
And it goes deeper than the visible structure of plants.
Beneath every healthy forest floor, beneath the leaves and the roots and the soil, there exists what scientists now call the Wood Wide Web. A network of mycorrhizal fungi connecting the root systems of trees across entire forests. Through this network trees share carbon, water, and nutrients with each other. And researchers have found that older, established trees preferentially send resources to younger, weaker seedlings. Even seedlings of different species. Even trees they are not directly related to.
The forest does not ask who deserves the nutrients.
It gives to what is struggling.
Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia, spent decades documenting this. She called the older trees Mother Trees. And what she found was that when a Mother Tree is dying, she releases her remaining carbon into the network. She gives everything she has left to the trees around her before she goes.
That is not instinct. That is not random biology.
That is the architecture of compassion. Built into the living world long before human beings had a word for it.
The Yoruba knew this. The Akan knew this. Indigenous traditions across the earth built their understanding of community on exactly this principle. That the strong exist to support the struggling. That individual flourishing is only meaningful when it flows outward. That character, what the Yoruba call iwa pele, gentle good character, is the root from which all genuine compassion grows.
Iwa pele cannot be performed. It cannot be put on for an occasion and taken off when the occasion passes. It is cultivated. Slowly. Through thousands of small choices made when no one is watching. Through the decision, again and again, to treat every person in front of you as worthy of your full attention and your fairest consideration.
My son learned this somehow. Or was born with it. I am not entirely sure which.
But watching him move through the world has taught me that compassion is not a feeling that comes and goes. It is a practice that becomes a nature. The tree does not decide each morning whether to share nutrients with its neighbors. It simply does. Because that is what it has become.
This month I am inviting all of us in this circle to sit with one question.
Not to answer it quickly. Not to journal about it once and move on. To sit with it the way Òbàtálá sits. Unhurried. Seeing everything. Waiting for the truth to become clear.
Where in your life is your compassion coming from? A feeling that moves you in the moment? Or from who you have decided to be across a lifetime?
Because one of those is weather. It comes and goes depending on conditions.
And the other is a tree.
This is what The Ancient Futurist is built on.
The understanding that the most ancient knowledge on earth, held in the traditions of the Yoruba, in the science of the forest, in the spiral of a leaf, in the staff of Òbàtálá, is not behind us.
It is beneath us.
Waiting to feed us the way the Mother Tree feeds the seedlings.
If we are willing to receive it.
Learn. Remember. Transform.
THE WORK
Baobab Leadership Activation™
We are not short on leaders. We are short on leaders who know who they are.
The Baobab is the oldest living tree on earth. It does not survive by growing tall and fast. It survives by growing deep - roots that reach further than any branch, a hollow that holds life, an ecosystem that feeds everything around it simply by being what it is.
Not louder. Not faster.
Deeper.
The Baobab Leadership Activation™ is a 12-week online training course rooted in African ancestral wisdom, ecological intelligence, and embodied leadership. Not information. Formation.
Join the Baobab Leadership Activation
Soulful Joy Wellness & Retreats
Join us in October at Zemi Eco Sanctuary
Soulful Joy is not a retreat. It is a restoration of self.
Over more than a decade, Soulful Joy has become a living practice: breathwork at dawn, movement rooted in ancestral tradition, crystals carried from the hands of family miners in Ethiopia and Jamaica, fire ceremonies, water rituals, and the particular kind of healing that can only happen when people gather in sacred space and give themselves permission to stop performing.
Individuals. Families. Couples. Friends. Leaders. Healers. Those who are learning to breathe again - on purpose, and with intention.
Only a short time till we gather in October. If something in you is stirring - trust that.
Go as far back as you can.
Kwayera
The Ancient Futurist • Global Asé LLC • May 2026 • Strength
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