Preface to the Blueprint:
Imagine the place you want the world to be.
Imagine a space that is more than a dream.
We are inviting you into a world we’ve been dreaming into being; a world that began on the pages of Once Upon a Kwanzaa and now stretches beyond illustration into lived imagination. While our book is an illustrated text, meant for readers of all ages, the principles it holds are not contained by genre or page. For us, Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba, and Imani are a map, a blueprint, a living practice of liberation that allows for us to taste, to see, to breathe, to feel, and inhabit a world that is abundant, cared-for, and interconnected.
What we are offering here is an invitation to step into the blueprint and recognize that the liberation within this world is available and possible to create.
-Sidney & Nyasha
Invocation: The Call to Dream
UMOJA
Sidney: Umoja rises with the sun, breaking through the blue stardust and purple galaxies of Dawn.
Nyasha: We rise not to clocks, but to the pulse of the earth, the rhythm of water, the blessing of the sun on our skin.
Sidney: Angels, Ancestors, and Orishas, Loa, herald in the Day with birds descended from long lines of nest holders whose homes and hearths rest in the branches of citrus groves and grandmother trees.
Nyasha: The hum of bees in the air carries the sweetness of mango blossoms and the earthy smoke of cooking fires along with the laughter of children spilling into the street.
Sidney: While their birdsongs dance on the wind, grownfolks place guava, plantains, and cassava leaves in baskets of sweetgrass and pine needles. Old hands, wrinkled with wisdom, knead dough, sprinkle salt, crush rosemary, and peel oranges from memory.
Nyasha: The air is honey-thick with song while neighbors call out greetings, porches crowded with grandfathers shelling beans, toddlers tumbling into their laps, cousins crafting, stringing beads into long necklaces of red, green, black, and gold.
Sidney: Young hands set the table with care, pouring libations and passing plates between relatives, neighbors, and strangers-turned-friends.
Nyasha: Morning arrives soft and abundant. The world greets us as kin. This is Umoja; Unity lived as breath, as intimacy, as the grounding of our being.
KUJICHAGULIA
Nyasha: We move into Kujichagulia, Self-Determination.
Sidney: It is the We in each of Us. A freedom nurtured by a past that reimagines the future. A becoming that resides within Us, waiting to grow.
Nyasha: It is grandmothers, whispering the names of Ancestors into young ears, stories that become guiding stars. Those children, then, proclaiming their futures, knowing their community will water those dreams until they bloom.
Sidney: It is the taste of crunchy pickles and cheese, mixed garden greens, foraged mushrooms, and figs shared in the shade of a tree.
Nyasha: Sipping hibiscus tea, tart and bright on the tongue, a drink waking every part of you.
Sidney: It is the beauty of the journey with an unknown destination. Sharing space with water and wishes for the futures that are carried on kite tails, allowing us to sojourn further and fly higher.
Nyasha: Liberated, able to walk the paths of one’s life, choosing your rhythms, expressions, work, and rituals.
Sidney: Each person belongs, with a hymn and a voice that rises, weaving new constellations across the sky.
Nyasha: It is wholeness represented: every person radiant, unapologetic, beloved.
UJIMA
Sidney: The Day continues with Ujima – a recipe book overflowing with Collective Responsibility.
Nyasha: Ujima carries us in our daily labor and laughter. Our joys and sorrows fill baskets side by side with maize, okra, and yams.
Sidney: Nestled in old folks homes where children play and learn with future Ancestors – homegoings become homecomings and wakes become resurrections.
Nyasha: Ujima is the tenderness of many hands holding grief when it comes, rocking each other into healing.
Sidney: Collective responsibility is the circle that holds us: the drumming when we need courage, silence when we need rest, reconciliation when we need recovery.
Nyasha: We feel the cool mud under our feet as we repair the walls of a home, palms pressing wet clay into place. We smell lemongrass, basil, and thyme, hanging to dry from rafters as we conjure together.
Sidney: We taste salt water as we return our Beloveds to the seas and songs of Ancestors, gone and gathered. When grief gives way to gratitude, when loneliness transforms into solidarity, the individual becomes the collective.
Nyasha: Ujima is the sound of voices rising in work songs, of laughter woven into effort, of care thick as stew simmering in the pot.
UJAMAA
Sidney: Ujamaa is the call of mutual aid – covering and caring for the community through Cooperative Economics.
Nyasha: Ujamaa is a hum that echoes off of market stalls; a whiff of cinnamon-infused honey, jars of mango preserves, and freshly cut watermelon slices.
Sidney: Like a mid-afternoon sun, Ujamaa is the Color of earth and Carolina gold. It is the warmth of the sidewalks where gardens bloom from cracks in the concrete.
Nyasha: It is an abundance born of gathering. Learning to live fully with finger tips stained by sweet tobacco and ink, lips sweetened by the taste of sun-warmed salted tomatoes and ripe white peaches. Soft words, baskets of small batches, just enough to share.
Sidney: Ujamaa is the return of land; a recovery and restoration of public parks and private beaches to the waterworkers and land stewards who once gardened them.
Nyasha: Each act of giving and receiving vibrates with gratitude and an acknowledgment of the Ancestors guidance in this flow of abundance.
NIA
Sidney: Nia, Purpose, is the pulse of the afternoon. It is the mint greenery deeply rooted and spreading across gardens of past potentials and future possibilities.
Nyasha: Nia appears in classrooms under trees, recipes whispered, passed down in kitchens, tools carved in workshops, seeds pressed into soil.
Sidney: Every craft comes alive with memory and meaning. To live here is to know why we are here: to tend one another, to tend the earth, to tend our collective dream.
Nyasha: It is play as education, song as ceremony, work as devotion. Purpose here as the collective calling that guides us towards ALL flourishing.
Sidney: A purpose that not only touches, but pushes us to embody the full capacity of our hopes, haunts, and joys.
Nyasha: Nia is work made holy. It is children following butterflies into lessons on ecology. It is The Stories that teach us who we are and who we are becoming.
Sidney: It is the beginning and the end of all things.
Nyasha: Nia is the sun setting on the old world’s ways and worries, a goodbye place that rises to reveal a new world and way forward.
KUUMBA
Nyasha: Kuumba is the freedom to create without limit. It is children running barefoot under the moon, their bodies drumming the ground, their voices rising in ritual songs echoing across the night.
Sidney: It is a coloring book that comes to life filled with magic and miracles that bring gardens back into the world. Lawns become landscapes of wildflowers, habitats beyond the human.
Nyasha: The return of the garden, no greens trimmed into silence; instead wild forests of native flowers, cassava, and apple orchards doubling as playgrounds.
Sidney: Backyards become playgrounds where fences fall and give way to rolling ant hills and snail trails glowing in the rosy light of evening. Where fireflies and mossy paths guide games under the safety of lanterns and porch lights. Every street, a canvas, every field a dance floor, every forest a sanctuary of play.
Nyasha: Creativity tastes like tamarind on the tongue, smells like earth after rain. It feels like the sunset coating our shoulders as we paint, sing, and make while the crickets sing out cheering us on.
Sidney: Kuumba is also the joy of play without expectation. Children build bridges from giant blocks, run screaming and splashing in pools of water, sculpt clay cups in the joy and magic of shaping earth.
Nyasha: Adults dive into pools, dance in circles, paint for themselves alone. Some creations are purposeful, quilts stitched with memory, pottery to hold our food, songs to call the rain.
Sidney: Others are made only because we can: a doodle, a dance, a song hummed for no one but our own spirit.
Nyasha: Both are sacred. Kuumba, not bound by audience, marketplace, or measure. It is the lifeblood of freedom itself.
Sidney: Kuumba is a microphone, a poem, a spell, and a promise to build a world with the freedom of limitless exploration.
IMANI
Nyasha: And when night wraps us, Imani, Faith, holds us close.
Sidney: Imani is the first altar that rests on a grandmother’s dresser, a play auntie’s coffee table, and an elder’s wall of faces. It is the remembering place that returns us to the Ancestors walking in our steps and breathing in our lungs.
Nyasha: Imani is a North Star that illuminates the Earth. A milky way that gazes upon swaying hammocks, hands over pots of roasted crab, and slow-cooked lamb shared in open circles.
Sidney: It is a drinking gourd that calls us to gather in assembly, rippling in water songs, prayers rising like smoke, hands laying blessings on one another.
Nyasha: Faith is held by the birthworkers bringing us into the world and death doulas guiding us home, blessing ceremonies that hold the mother and the child, baths with white roses, chamomile and coconut milk, being wrapped in clean laundry, hands pressing red beans, cotton root, jasmine, and cowries into soft soil in shadow of night’s quiet.
Sidney: It is the compass that points the way before our eyes open and minds understand what lays ahead. It is a bird whose neck reaches back to bring forth something from the past.
Nyasha: A taste like honey stirred into tea, smelling of fresh-washed homes glowing with candles, sounds like elders humming lullabies while children fall asleep under Ancestral skies.
Sidney: Imani is outer space, a Black woman dressed with stardust, strings of planets, and galaxies that revolve in the sky with new worlds and futurist dreams passed down from beyond.
Nyasha: Imani is the circle of life, birth, and return. Faith is abundance rising with the sun, joy carried in the stars, assurance woven into every harvest and every whisper to the moon.
Sidney: Faith is a child’s laughter echoing into tomorrow, gardens blooming from today’s planting, quilted stories stitched by many hands from generations past and those yet to come.
Nyasha: This is the world we are dreaming into.
Sidney: This is the world we are already creating with Ancestral good trouble, through every offering of reverence and care – from the rubble we rise.
