welcome, well come to day 55 of a season of peace and day 99 of this ninth turn around the sun on the poetic peace pilgrimage… with 55 vibrating at the frequency of freedom, how holy synchronisiddhi that today is United Nations International Day of Remembrance of Slavery Victims and the Transatlantic Slave Trade honoring the lives of those who died as a result of slavery and who experienced the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade which makes it a perfect moment to feature such a shero as General Moses who is 200 years old this month and in further celebration of women’s herstory month, it is also the 111th anniversary of a terrible fire in the garment district which led to a protest which led to international women workers day…
the slave trade is now universally regarded as one of the worst ever violations of human rights, a violation viscerally felt by Hariette Tubman as a young child born into and victimized by this inhumane institution which early on she began running from and accomplished by walking through thick forests, over rivers and over hills following the North Star until she got to what she learned was a place called Pennsylvania (a so-called “free” state) and she noted: “I had crossed the line. I was ‘free,’ but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land; and my home, after all, was down in Maryland, because my father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters and friends were there. But I was free, and they should be free! I would make a home in the North and bring them there!”
She said it. She meant it. She did it.
again and again, she would return to carry out her sacred mission of freedom for the enslaved…later, she said of her upbringing and of slavery itself: “I grew up like a neglected weed — ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it. I was not happy or content. Every time I saw a white man, I was afraid of being carried away. I had two sisters carried away in a chain gang — one of them left two children. We were always uneasy. . . . I think slavery is the next thing to hell.” her raids into the prison-states of the South led to the freedom of literally hundreds of Black people including her own aged parents, Harriet and Benjamin Ross…
from beginning to end, the life of General Moses was one of resistance and struggle in freedom’s cause, may we be inspired by her life and take up her mission of waging freedom for all our relatives…
