A BIOGRAPHY of
Midnight Seed
I grew up as a student of the Deep South. My particular vision is colored by long miles of cotton fields, southern sleepy towns that meander into the dark midnight, the deep lines of black hands rolling fish in cornmeal dropped gently into hot sizzling grease and the simmering pots of greens boiling in the quiet day of a Saturday.
I am familiar with wooden benches in churches and long slow Sundays. I inherited figs bursting from their skins and peaches dripping with nectar - the gold that is inherited by every southern child as soon as they are able to digest other than mother’s milk. I have been loved inside a cocoon, a black oasis - Greenville - my town, my neighborhood, my church.
After graduating from high school, I was cast into the arms of an all Black women’s college in Atlanta, GA. The first question asked by my professor, “ what is the essence of a woman?” - hung like wet towels on my intellectual landscape . Later, I would find myself in the arms of Ole Miss. I was a poet wrapped in legalese, an oracle hung on paper thin origami, a muse listening through the ear of Fannie Lou Hamer.
You can lose yourself in the labyrinth of life regardless of what age you are. You can get lost immediately after birth as you ascend from the birth canal or later as you turn into a senior version of yourself You can lose yourself in a myriad of ways throughout this thing we call “time”. Certainly, if you embrace the wet blanket of an ideology that you are constrained by a geographical place, constrained by a people based upon race, sex, age, ethnicity, or held captive by a gender definition you may find yourself lost in a labyrinth.
I am soooooooo different in my head and so easily diverted into tributaries of outlandish essences that I surprise myself at the locations at which I arrive. Where am I and how did I get here is my recurring thought. Yet, I think it is only by embracing the unconventional imaginative self of “ I am” that I truly come close to myself. Sooooo, after having wandered in this wilderness called conventional law and finding no resting place for my beingness, except in thematic analytical spiritual revelations, I stood at the door of myself.
I struggled against myself to prove to myself that I am the ideology of that which they call an attorney, while disavowing my understanding of spirit law, oracles, prophetic musings as it opens within the cylinder of life. I can now do nothing but embrace the oracle . You should know that when you hear your soul call, it is not up for discussion. If you choose to discuss it and indulge in hair twirling, you may find worlds crumbling. I don’t think purpose is voluntary - only the acceptance is voluntary. And did I say that purpose is “ a walk in the park” … no purpose is like a tornado, a hurricane, a tsunami … it unearths your “ unauthenticity” ( is that a word?) and strokes the flames of your weaknesses. I have struggled with my gifts and my winding walk has been revolutionary and contentious, mediocre and excellent, a force of liberation and a masquerade of errors.
Purpose will take you to the end of the road and sit your “ass” down for a spell. When you have been stripped - there is you, yourself and purpose. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide and nowhere to run. You come face to face with the knowingness that no one can take anything from you that you don’t give up.
I have been stripped of my licensure - ( for one year) suspended for an error. I feel wronged but then again - not. On a totally different level, outside of the parameters of a judicial body, I know that it is purpose sitting me down at the end of the road - it is purpose that is using the instrumentality of the other. So for the next nine months, I will sit down with purpose in my kitchen and write , speak, perform, teach, listen, cook, forage, astral travel, dream, pray, invoke, chop, dice, slice, take tea, read tea leaves and create an entire world of imaginative power and presence in a cultural world of rhythm and blues, African syncopated mathematical genius and native indigenous plant. When I emerge from this quest, I will no longer walk on my tippy toes in “mind” fields … so afraid that I will offend the powers that seem to lord over me. I will have been made whole by discipline and forged in fire. I feel some kinda way. Yet the more I continue in this walk, the lighter I become on my feet and the stronger my words.
I am Oracle. I deal in the spirit world of laws “ Legal Oracle”, the abundant natural world of Eden “ Midnight Seed”, in the cultural domain of fashion that commands attention and heals “Mystical Threads” , in the invisible world of words as incantations and storytellers as healers “Holy Mojo” in the healing arts of spirit, “Ozeal Spa”, and in the kitchen of mystic mylks, ice creams, apothecary teas, high light foods with electrical charges, " Midnight Seed Mylks/Green Lady. I am not a piece of any one thing but an amalgamation of it all.
I inspire, I image, I analyze and draw corollaries of spiritual directives . I weave oracles from diverse symbols. What I do is not unique… we each have the capacity to do it - I am uniquely me. I just give myself, after having fallen down so many times, the room to breathe and to know and to tell about the birthing of joyful immortality within a person’s story and power in the face of warring factions. The Legal Oracle is the revelation of inspiration. The Legal Oracle is… “ the giving of beauty for ashes - the oil of joy for mourning - the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. “ Isaiah 61:3.
It would take more than time for me to give voice to the prophecy that spirit is the only transformative force underlying every conflict and is encoded as the force of evolution. The thought that everything reflects and holds the DNA of our thoughts ( past, present and future) was in line with all of the research that had transpired in the medical body/mind field and ancient world philosophies/religions such as Metu Neter, the Dogon, Voodon, Adom, Santeria, Yoruba Belief System, Kemetic-Christianity, Islam, Bhagavad-Gita, Judaism, the Sacred Feminine, the medical body/mind field and others. This idea wasn't new but the application groundbreaking.
The unraveling of symbolic metaphors – the unveiling of revelation and the translation of mythological prophecy; and the ever evolving revelation of my power as woman and divine mother - this is my passion, my drive, my life’s adventure.
The Legal Oracle ushers in the return to the quiet space and destroys the illusion of complexity and powerlessness in the face of conflicts – whether law or otherwise and affirms the presence, power and directive of the spirit of the Goddess/ God within each individual. The Legal Oracle is not the practice of law but the living of the law. I believe in fantasy, miracles, magic, spirit and the divine female/motherhood, not to the exclusion of the divine male/fatherhood, as a force for liberation. We each come from the tradition of the storyteller… a belief in the unseen and as such I take my position on the stage of my world as a force of imagination - “Holy Mojo”
So step into my kitchen, come to my design room, relax in my crystal bowl music studio, enjoy the bounty of “Midnight Seed Mylks” in this healing apothecary and experience the prophetic nature of oracles as we weave a new world from the threads of our dreamsworld.
Shall we walk this land that is ours?
Shall we weave our designs?
Shall we call things into being that are unseen?
Shall we reconfigure the world of oppression by our chants?
Yes, we shall
We shall have tea.