Return to Water

A Ritual for Remembering | Soulful Disruptor

Before the first word, there is breath.
Before the remembering, there is silence.
Before the silence, there is water.

I call on the ancestors who carried us here.
I call on the memory stored in the bones.
I call on the elements — earth, air, fire, and water —
to guide us back to what cannot be destroyed.

May these words find you in their own time.
May they remind you of what was never lost.
And may we remember together.

Before there were clocks, there were rivers.
Before there were borders, there were stories whispered into dust and breath.
And before the forgetting — there was us.

We used to move in harmony with the Earth.
We knew the moon’s pull on our blood, the rhythm of rains, the language of wind.
We spoke to the water, and the water spoke back.

Now, the world is louder.
Time is broken into deadlines and alarms.
The earth aches under hands that forgot how to bless her.
And yet — the memory is still inside us.
In our bones.
In our blood.
In the water.

One night, under a waning moon, a woman named Ayala sat before her altar.
It wasn’t grand.
A leaf dish from a yard sale. Two incense holders from her daughter — one for the crown, one for the throat.
A music box that played You Are My Sunshine. A pink pot reminding her she was still growing.
A small bowl of water, a conch shell, a candle for purity.
Piece by sacred piece, the altar had gathered itself, remembering what she was too busy to recall.

That night, Ayala heard it — the whisper of water.

"I remember you."

She closed her eyes, and suddenly she was standing at the edge of a vast ocean, waves carrying the voices of her ancestors.
They told her the same thing the Yorùbá have always known:
that Yemoja, the great mother of tides, still governs the pull between womb and water, birth and becoming.
That nothing was ever truly lost.
That the stories are stored in salt.

Ayala cupped her hands, filled them, and drank.

The next day, she began small.
She touched her glass of water before drinking.
She whispered, “I bless this journey. I bless this vessel. May this water return me to myself.”
She let the sunlight touch the rim, imagining ancestors kissing it awake.
It was no longer “hydration.”
It was communion.

And as she slowed, she began to notice other rhythms returning —
the rise and fall of her breath,
the pull of the moon on her moods,
the way her body had been pleading for rest long before she’d listened.

Colonial time had stolen more than hours — it had stolen belonging.
Ayala began to unlearn the clock.
She rose when the sun rose.
She rested when her spirit whispered enough.
She danced barefoot to a beat that was older than language.
And in that rhythm, she remembered her name.

Because names carry power.
Her grandmother used to say, “Your name is not just who you are — it’s what you call back into being.”
Ayala said her name aloud, slow and reverent, until it echoed like prayer.
In that sound, she felt every ancestor who had carried her forward.
In that moment, she knew:
the colonizers renamed bodies, but they couldn’t erase memory.
Every syllable was a seed.

Weeks later, under a new moon, Ayala found herself deep in a remembering she didn’t expect.
She read the creation stories they never taught in school — of Obàtálá descending on a golden chain with soil, a hen, and a palm nut to shape the earth itself.
Of humans formed from clay and divine breath, balanced between light and dark, sun and moon.
Genesis echoed these truths, but this story came first.
Africa came first.
We all carry her in our blood.

Ayala realized then:
we were never separate.
Only scattered.
And now, we are returning.

We begin again — not by rushing, but by remembering.
By touching the water before we drink.
By honoring the sound in our own name.
By choosing rhythm over routine.
By asking different questions of the stories we’ve been told.

This is not perfection.
This is practice.
This is prayer.

Because water is not just life.
It’s lineage.
And when we remember together,
we return.