Bless You Who Set Our People Free

For healers, hope dealers, and child caregivers and educators

photo by Jaiya John

Serenity for you today, dear soul. I recently wrote and shared this poem as a part of a keynote message for a large audience of professionals who serve children and families in early childhood. I pray it feeds you good and well. As we say in the Pueblos of New Mexico, Eat plenty.

BLESS YOU WHO SET OUR PEOPLE FREE

My soul. My soul today is in the desert. I am an orphan. In the land of my birth. La tierra de encantamiento. Nuevo Mexico. I am in the desert and I am wandering. I am so alone. My skin is burning in the summer sun. I am so thirsty. I pray for water. Agua pura. I grow delirious. I am about to collapse. And then. And then. I see you. I see all of you. I see each of you. I see children who have grown to become sanctuaries for children. Safe spaces, gardens, greenhouses, shelters, head starts, teachers, care givers, examples, role models, mentors, hope dealers for children. I see women draped in turquoise and silver shining in that bright sun. You are singing ancestor songs. You dance barefoot on the red dirt. I see men, caballeros, weaving freedom from the strands of agave. I see souls turning the soil, painting the sky, in sweat lodges and on mesa tops, in ceremony, swimming in Spirit. I smell piñon roasting. And green chile roasting. Rojo y verde. I smell fry bread. The aromas send me into a dream. Dreamcatcher catches me. I see each of you. Your hands in the New Mexican clay, shaping traditional Pueblo pottery. It glistens black like obsidian. Indigenous stories dance forth from the pottery. I, orphan child, am the pottery you shape. You call to me. You say, child, come this way. I am so thirsty. I feel something moving through my body, something electric that feels like lightning in a New Mexican storm. In my body, the lightning feels like the spices of togetherness, like belonging, like familia, like home. You keep calling to me, come this way, mi’jo. I come to you. I am afraid, for I have been so alone. But I feel your Love and it feels like sanctuary, like a place that will not hurt me, like eyes that see my beauty, like hearts that feel my sacredness. Your Love feels like, like Life.

I see your own childhood memories dancing above your head like a piñata filled with happiness. I come to you. I risk my life. I let my life fall into your hands. You open your arms to me. I feel the warmth of your heart like a summer sun. And then. And then. You carry me. I sleep deep. I wake. You have brought me to a freshwater well in that desert. You say, drink. I believe in you. I trust you. I dare to open and drink. The prayers of my soul explode inside my body. I have, I have, Hope. I am new. You, each of you, you children who remember childhood, you make all things new. A voice like thunder speaks to me. It says, now is the time for the ones who are care for children, for the people, for the pueblo, it is time for My sacred medicine people to remember who they are. And with this thunder commandment rivering through my soul, I feel everything open and words come through, like prayers. And the words, these sweet, sweet medicine words, are for you. You who cradled me in the desert in my childhood, so I could Love you now in the tenderness of your life. The words, life a flash flood racing through desperate, dry arroyos, begin like this:

You. You caretaker. You cycle breaker. You Love maker. You care for all of this. You care for the programs and the buildings and the resources. You care for your work family. You care for your colleagues who care for the children. You care for the children and families and communities. You are the bloom in the neighborhood. The light in the streets. The bringer of medicine, and honor, and dignity. You make this great miracle, this medicine wheel go round. You care for the imperfect law that becomes imperfect policy that becomes soulful practice that becomes salvation culture. You care for the system and your duties and obligations. You care for the daily clock and your employment and your bills and your health care. You care for your own families and children and country. You care and care and care for our humanity. You are a great sponge of caring. Absorbing all of our collective hurt and hope and harm and hell and heaven. All of our moods and feelings and flowings and flowerings. All of our prayers and despair and songs and sorrow. You absorb and internalize and soak into your bones and marrow and blood and body, all that we are. All of our aches and yearning and trauma and romance and dreams and darings.

The question is, dear soul. What does all this caring cost you? And who is keeping count of the toll? And how supported are you by this vast web of life that you care for, how supported are you in your caring for you. And who knows the secret hurts you hold and the magical chants for rest and renewal you are still trying to decipher? And who can share with you all that you feel and who will walk with you over your tender terrain of heart? Your empathic valleys and mourning meadows and tall, towering cliffs of anxiety and who will reach with you for those light, white clouds of peace you so dearly need. And who will bleed. Who will bleed with you. And who will wail with you when you absolutely have to wail. And who will help with all the paperwork, the mountains of paperwork that never shrink. Who will release you from being a paperworker so that you can be a soul worker, a midwife, a gardener, a planter of seeds, a harvester, a wisdom keeper, an elder, teacher, mentor, guide, listener, oh, you sweet listener of souls.

And who will brew tea for you and pour tea for you and sit with you and sip tea with you and who will look into your eyes and see the truth of how you are doing beneath the surface of the caring replies you give to the question of how you are doing. Who will beckon the child you still are and put a Loving arm around the child you still are and hug you until you cry it all out. Who will smile at the pool, no, the lakes of tears you leave on the floor and who will recite with you the scroll of all the children you care for, the children who have been lost and the children who have been found. And who will sanctify this work you do and lift up to the sky of admiration this work you do and who will call you noble and treat your calling as noble and whisper in your heart when it hurts that all this that you give yourself to is worth the pain and labor.

And who will kick the jukebox that is your spirit when it will not play your favorite songs anymore. Who will jolt your jukebox into joy and who will dance with you to the music of your soul and who will weep, my god who will weep with you and who will sit by the fire and tell stories with you of this mystic, magic, miraculous thing you do, this weaving you do of vulnerable strands of child souls and child hearts and child minds, this sweetgrass weaving you do of dehumanized, marginalized, stigmatized families who only want a crumb of dignity, but who deserve the whole cake of dignity. And who will bake this cake with you, who will bury themselves with you in the flour of resistance to the status quo and the endless cages of conformity and supremacy and caste and oppression. Who will get all the way dirty with you and spill the milk of bureaucracy all over the kitchen floor and laugh at it and never clean it up. And when they come for the children and the families and the communities, who will root with you deeper into your faith, into your spiritual earth, into your songs and stories that begin with Love and journey through Love and end with Love.

Who will decide that your leaves of absence shall from this day forward be called leaves of presence. So that you can go and be with yourself. And be with your people. Presence, so you can begin to remember who you are. Who will Love you enough today to sit and write Love letters to you and leave them on your desk and post them in the hallways and recite them at the staff meetings and leave them on the window of your car and slide them into the pocket of your jacket, who will break open their own heart enough to write with the onyx ink of their holy words and say, I just want to say that I Love you for who you are and how you persist in this caretaking mist despite your imperfections and how you trudge on in service to these nubile lives despite your fears that you won’t get it right and how you give flight to the kite that is a child even when your system won’t give you any string, any sand of beach to run across and catch the wind, won’t give you any wind, any ocean, water, any sky so blue and hope so big to drench your doubt in hallelujah waters. Oh you precious sons and souls and daughters.

And I just want to say that I Love you for doing what you do any way. Every day. And I admire your unbelievable determination to heal yourself from your own childhood wounds and the ways you were abandoned and betrayed and violated and erased and silenced and ridiculed and yet here you are still unspooled, unclenched, open hearted like a rose in spring and still you sing and still you serve and still you advocate. You are the most persistent water I have ever known. The way you drip from trees and leaves and eaves and dry places that have forgotten mercy. Mercy, you are a drought ender. A blender that stirs the silt of complacency. You are a hope dilater. A seer of souls beneath their beaten down identities. You revolutionary rage for freedom. You barefoot dancer, naked of resources but still rich in passion. You storyteller who leaves behind the hurtful myths and dares new words. You cliffs of awe and wonderment. You levitator of our young drums. You uncelebrated, underappreciated, underestimated warrior of grace. You maple sweetener of a lonely toddler space.

I, your spirit child, just want to write you this letter today and I pray it will soothe the bruise that plagues your heart and I pray my words will caffeinate your afternoon malaise and energize your weary days and lift the cataract from your years of haze. I am your spirit child now and I am hugging you with my little tortilla-fed brown body and reassuring you that you’re going to be alright. You take such good care of me and now it is time that you care for you. I hope you will gather with your childcare kin here with you today and conspire with each other on how you can heal not just the children and families, but the very ways you do this work. So you can heal yourselves.

I am your spirit child and I have come from across the centuries to let you know that your ancestors, la gente, tu pueblo, tus abuelas y abuelos, are proud of you for the way each day you die and birth yourself again and grow. They tell me stories about how they watch you waver, wander, wonder but yet always find your way back to the purity of your cause. They applaud you from their world of light, they watch over you as you sleep at night. Can you feel your people in your heart? They are crying and singing to you. They are saying, we may have crossed many oceans, rivers, and lands, may have endured the whip from hateful hands, picked cotton, cabbage, cane, or corn. As long as you, my child, pick freedom, freedom for el pueblo y los ninos y las familias and those who forgot their power, we gon’ be alright.

Look at you, you bold, brilliant, becoming thing. You crystalline lens of sun, starting warming fires for children like me as we shiver in the cold. You are the kindness of legends told. You are our chocolate cake for dinner, our waffles for lunch. Our supersheroes and heroes capeless and concentrating your powers on our trembling circumstance. You hypnotic calming trance. You are the breeze that helps us solve our windless quandary. You lift us up like a great gust lifts a line of laundry. You escape artist showing us your magic tricks. You pull rabbits out of hats, then pull futures out of jeopardy and that’s… you making it do what it do regardless the nonsense coming through.

I am pouring out my heart to you because I have seen you go hungry for lack of affirmation, validation, appreciation, celebration. I have come with pots of posole and a ladle the size of language. Please open and let me feed you. Your self care and mutual care muscles are atrophied and emaciated. I want you to learn the part of reciprocity that has to do with you letting yourself be blessed. You don’t have to say yes to everyone and everything. No is a superpower too, a spirit that is always Loving you. Can you be still? I can teach you. I’ve had a lot of time in solitude. And I know a secret, my childcare friend. Stillness opens doors inside your soul that lets a great black bird called Clarity come through. Stillness lets you see yourself, maybe for the very first time. Stillness sharpens your discernment tool. It polishes your musical instrument so that when you sing, it sounds like your song and not the notes of conformity. Stillness introduces you to the parts of you that don’t get to come out and play in this life of grind. Stillness washes away the voices many that have swamped you all your life and kept you from learning the voice that is your own. Stillness is your very own personal throne of rootedness. It is a magic wand that turns you into a powerful tree. Stillness can set you free.

Here we are in the desert, precious ones. Beneath this tremendous sun. I have prayers for you. I pray that when bad spirit comes and threatens to break apart the basket that is your teamwork, you do not panic, despair, or flee. No, you come together even more. You tighten the sweetgrass weaving. You burn some sage and sing some songs and dance like you dance when your heart floods with joy. For, only Love can lift you up, and lift you out, and lift you into a brighter story. A legend where children have a chance to grow into tall trees and a better forest than the one we left them. So, my precious soul servant, sacred sanctuary for a child like me, I pray this day you can open wide enough and feel deep enough to receive and carry forever my medicine word, which is childhood, which is every child’s dream and prayer, which is life, which is life, which is you. In Love. In all this endless, aching, awesome Love.

Jaiya John
April 25, 2025

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