There are four women I have the privilege of knowing who are everything to me. They are all very different women, but each of them touches me deeply. Each one of them carries knowledge and heart and wisdom and strength that I want inside of me.

They have names they were born with, beautiful names all, but for our purposes here, I will call them, for reasons you will see in this series, Mystic, Counselor, Teacher, and Home. (Most of them read Lace on Race. I know they will know which they are!) All of them possess all four attributes; all four roles in my life, but they also each have a singular talent that makes me want to tap into their spirits and just snuggle in and abide.

I have known them for a while now. I have observed not only how they commune with me, but how they connect with others. I have watched their eyes, I have listened to their words. I have seen them walk. Literally. I have seen them walk and walk and walk.

At our ages, and they are all a bit older than I; for us, at times walking does not come easily. I see the slight grimaces they try to hide. I know when their physical pain, and sometimes, yes, their emotional pain is our unwanted companion on our walks together–and still they choose to walk with me.

I see the hands. The hands. The hands. Washing crystal; underlining passages; making a point.

I see their utter delight when they see me, when they hear me. They think I am brilliant. They are wrong. But I glow knowing that they do. And I try my best, however futilely, to live up to their quiet sparkly confidence and faith in me.

It has taken me months to even to begin to  surrender, fully surrender, to their love. I have had other women who were mentors and teachers. To a woman, each had betrayed trust, and had made it harder to trust my own discernment and to, yes, to be able to lean in—lean into relationship; lean into learning, lean into allowing myself to be changed by them. Months of trusting their intention, in their reliability, in their gentle, quiet, but relentless pursuit of me.

I remembered a pastor who ‘didn’t want to get sucked in’; said at a low point, and leaving me adrift after Robert’s first suicide attempts seventeen years ago.

I remember a mentor I helped by putting her on my phone plan so she could share a discount, who ‘forgot’ to pay, and then told me to ‘grow up’. We lost connection. This was the week after Robert attempted suicide for the last time.

I remember a woman who entreated me to lead, only to side with the dominant culture I was summoned to name and confront. I would later find it was a re-enactment of sorts, of what she felt had happened to her years ago.

I think of the young woman I let into my home, only to have two bounced checks and my desk raided, with my mortgage money gone.

And this. The same pastor who didn’t want to be ‘sucked in’ by me, which led to a contraction where I became a veritable hermit for almost a decade, had a husband who wrote a letter telling me that I was a fraud. That I was not welcome to commune, that I was toxic and would never change. I was a pathogen. I never spoke to his wife about it, not in almost twenty years. I do not want to know if she knew that he came to my house and left that letter. I do not want to know if she agreed with the contents. What I do know is that a part of me became crystallized into a frigid stone, that took almost twenty years to melt.

I tell you these tales of betrayal and loss and risk because I want you to know I have been there. I know how difficult it can be to truly Lean In, with a lifetime of disappointment and betrayal and half portions. I know what it is like to place eggs in baskets only to have them dashed into rocks. I know how hard it is to fully lean into the new. I know how hard it is to trust in the people with whom you have chosen to walk. I know how hard to risk. Even in the service of convictions–often especially in the service of convictions. I get it. I get it.

People think I enjoy risk. I do not. Every failure shouts louder than the times when risk paid off–that’s true of all of us; we remember the negative way more than we remember the positive. It is the negative that gets looped into our heads, that makes us flinch and clench. Risk-averse is my middle name. But some things are more compelling than my fear. I want that to be true for you too.

How hard it can also be to choose to Plant Roots, to make the deliberate choice to stay long enough for concepts and convictions to truly take hold. How hard it can be to envision the work just beneath the soil. It takes nurture to plant roots, along with the discipline of watering and weeding. It is hard to imagine resting under a tree when it is only a sapling. It is hard to imagine shade and succor from the tree when your back is aching to keep it upright, using wire and sticks to shore it up till it can stand upright on its own.

It takes that discipline and vision to Grow Up. Earlier in this talk, I mentioned the mentor who told me to ‘Grow Up!’ when I dared to confront her on her abandoned commitment. That retort, rooted as it was in the defensive and the cynical, is not what we are talking about here. And that difference, truly growing up and into who you are, rather than the immature hot house of the world’s version that makes for sour fruit indeed, will be crucial to your, to our, walk.

Growing Out is the entire point, yes? Choosing to plant, nurturing growth, divesting of whatever it is that could hinder or stunt that growth, sticking around in determination and anticipation, watching the green buds grow orange, and then sharing the fruit and spreading still more seeds–ach.

This is how we do. This is who we are.

We talk a lot about walking at Lace on Race. It has been a potent metaphor for the work we do here singly and together. Now though, another metaphor: that of the orange tree. That orange tree, planted in each us.

When we consider our own individual orange trees, this orchard we have co-created in Lumpy Crossings, how do we imagine it looks like? How did it look before you began your walk? Did you even acknowledge it? Was your conviction about racial justice and or relational ethics which make durable justice possible dormant deep inside hard frozen ground? Was it like my own orange tree, above ground but sickly, or did you feel the stirrings of green straining for air and light and water? When you first felt those stirrings did you run for the watering can and the compost? Or did you turn to other things and allow the green beginnings to turn crumble and fall?

I have been in all of those places. I have seen results when I focused attention to my interior tree. I have kept away from the West Side, because of other, what I felt were more pressing concerns. I have missed the fragrance I myself derailed and discounted when it was trying its best to envelop me.

I have picked an orange and allowed its juice to run down my hands in the peeling, dribble from my chin as I savored, and then neatly packed the rinds and seeds away, not sharing the good fruit, keeping my insights and learning to myself. I myself grew strong, but what about others who also could use an orange slice with their tea?

And I have shared. Finally, I have been full enough and certain and confident in both the tree and my ability to steward it, that I could share.

I have invited others to pick from my tree themselves. I have watched them grate the zest into muffins; have watched them squeeze the last drops. I have watched them boil the rinds with cinnamon and nutmeg and anise and cardamom; all their own spices to make their own creations, so whole houses were filled with fragrance.

I have gone back and watered and pruned and weeded and composted to keep my tree strong. And I have thrown the seeds, wildly, some might say profligately, all over the place. Some didn’t stick, oh, but with so many of you, they went right to your heart, to your soul, and another tree was born.

It is time to nurture our orchard.