September is a weekly podcast for Loveships. It explores the tools and technologies that build and sustain life-changing love relationships. Hosted by writer and facilitator Alexis Pauline Gumbs and artist and entrepreneur Sangodare Wallace, this intimate show draws on their 17-year partnership built on the premise of Loveship as a spiritual practice and Loveship as a resource in community.
From conflict and contrast, responsibility and repair, to emotional intimacy and navigating the ever-changing seasons of life, Alexis and Sangodare share insights that nurture not only couples but also families, friends, and communities.
Tune in each week for heartfelt conversations that honor relationships as sacred ground—an offering to ourselves, our people, our ancestors, and spirit.
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On this episode hosts Alexis and Sangodare introduce the loveship pillar practice “All Aboard,” describing relationship as a sacred container where all ages, parts, and messy or activated versions of self are welcome. They define ‘homefulness’ and offer journal prompts to help you discern what you’re inviting into your intimate space and what you’re letting go of. They offer 3 North Stars and close out announcing the Durham revival gathering on Sept. 13 at 11:00 AM at Northstar Church of the Arts.
You can also send us a tax-deductible donation via “text to give." Send a text to this number: 53-555. All you have to put in your message is “September.” Then press send. You will get a text back from Black Feminist Film School which is helping us make this and all our production more sustainable for us and consistent for you.
Because love is living with purpose, join us for our second Chrysalis Cohort this September! More info here:https://www.blackfeministfilmschool.com/offers/oKhBLdfo
Hi, I'm Alexis Pauline Gums. And I'm Shango Dari Wallace. And this is September, a podcast for love ships.
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We're two lovebirds who decided to intentionally create a love ship and share the insights we gather with the world.
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For the past 17 years, we've been relating to our love ship as a sacred space for spiritual practice.
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This podcast is our space to reflect on the insights we've found and been given with you.
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Whether romantic, platonic, or somewhere in between, okay, situationships, every bond has the potential to become an offering to a higher vibration for the world. One choice, one act of care, one repair at a time.
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So, if you're ready to think expansively about love, community, and spirit, you're in the right place. So glad you're here. Ahoy there, Captain Shango Dare, who makes our home better and more beautiful every week and especially when I go out of town.
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Hey there, Captain Alexis, who always makes sure we pay the mortgage and therefore feel ease in relationship to our sustaining our actual physical home.
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And to keep it in balance, I'm also the one who often does not want to leave our home for days and has to be bribed out with French fries.
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And I'm the one whose house organization process can take up whole rooms. We ain't really just the whole house.
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And so we are two homeful beings who are also in process. And we are exactly as lovable as you. Today we dedicate to Michelle Lanier, dear sister and friend, womanist cartographer, and genius.
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Yes, Michelle is a filmmaker, producer, a brilliant artist, somebody that has so supported our creative work. Michelle actually is the one member of Black Feminist Film School's advisory board, actually.
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Oh, really?
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Yeah. I asked her one day.
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Oh.
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At a museum, in fact. Indeed. And it just so happens that Michelle was just honored with the Museum Leadership Award from the Association of African American Museums. Woo woo cheering you on. Michelle is a coiner of terms. She coined the term woman as cartography and also Afro-Carolina to describe the beautiful blackness of our region.
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Yes, Michelle is somebody that we think of when we think of like homefulness and hospitality with that beautiful ocean energy that she moves with, uh, the adornment practices, whether it's her own physical adornment or how she creates space and ceremony for us. It's like, to me, in her role as the director of North Carolina Historical Sites, is like she's the hospitality for the state. You know what I'm saying?
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And makes us at home with our whole lineage. She has been doing this deep research on Harriet Jacobs and created a beautiful pilgrimage for so many of us to actually see the place that Harriet Jacobs escaped from, but also the lengths that she went to in order to create homefulness and freedom on her own terms.
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Yeah. And when I'm growing through something challenging, sometimes even Michelle is like we can call each other and, you know, tap into, you know, our spiritual superpowers. She's an elder and a teacher for me in so many ways. And I'm grateful for the ways that she even gives me um validation and opportunities to practice my leadership and my tuning in and yeah, facility withholding space for someone. So grateful for her.
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Also the parent of one of our amazing community members, Eden. Shout out to Eden. And yeah, we love you, Michelle, and appreciate your ongoing creativity from the Museum Leadership Award to the art installation toilet in your yard the day that I met you. You always find ways to honor our people, especially black women. Yeah.
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And I I love when I run across the Usher pin that Michelle made for us.
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That beautiful service that she created at the Furious Flower Poetry Conference where we got to be on the USH board.
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That's right.
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Michelle, we love you.
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All right, listeners. This is your reminder to dedicate your participation in this podcast to someone who helps you to feel homeful and connected. Maybe someone who inspires the way that you think about space, time, transformation, tradition. Or just whoever's on your heart and mind. Okay. Dedication launched. Ready to get into the heart of it? Let's grow. And guess what? It's still September.
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So every week we have a technology for you from our journey and our teachers with North Stars that can guide you as you navigate your own row, row, row, your boat, dance of relationship as spiritual practice. And on today, we just dropped by to remind you you can make a home on this ship.
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Mm-hmm. So the love ship pillar practice that we want to talk about today is called all aboard. All aboard. Those of you who've been listening for a while know that when we talk about love ship, relationship is spiritual practice, we love riffing off the metaphor of an actual ship in the ocean. And all aboard means all of you gets to come aboard and be at home in the relationship. All your ages, all your parts, all the versions of you, all the growing that's happening, the messy parts and the parts that are regulated and the parts that could be activated.
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Yeah, the love ship gets to be a container where all of those parts are welcome. They're considered, you know, they're we hold in space for each and all the versions of you. And we make room for one another in the love ship container, in the love ship sacred space to move through whatever those parts of you, those areas of you are experiencing. That's really a gift, a gift that I get to give in my love ship and my other relationships, and a gift that I get to receive. That's a homefulness.
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Yeah. And homefulness is not just the situation of having accommodations. Yeah. Or just, you know, physically being at home or in in private space. It really is the intentional and ongoing creation of conditions that allow us and the people we're in relationship with to feel at home enough to be fully present.
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Yeah, that's right. I feel like, you know, when I'm traveling, especially when I'm intentionally going on a retreat or um, you know, going somewhere for spiritual practice, there are lots of things that, you know, are necessary for me to have the sort of psychological safety and the homefulness to do the work that I'm there to do. Like for me, cleanliness really matters. Neatness matters. If I'm like jumping at spiders crawling everywhere, you know, like that that's not creating the peace and ease that I've gone away to experience. So that clear space really helps me have a clear mind. It's it's really essential and necessary for me in particular. Might not be the case for everybody, but that's something I need. And that's something that Alexis, you know, you've come to honor and respect and hold for me. Like you'll go somewhere and be like, no, baby, I had a wonderful time. It was fine, but it's it's not standard. Right. It's not a place for you, bagging.
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Yeah. Yeah. And I think that you may know for yourself, listener, what is it that allows you to feel at home? I feel like process helps me feel at home. I remember the first time I came into my friend Janelle's dorm room and she was vacuuming. For some reason I felt so at home because it wasn't like, oh, this space is perfectly clean and everything is ready. And you, Alexis, have to be perfectly appropriate to some idea in here. It was like, oh no, she's in process. And that's what happens at home. We continue to make it. And so what makes homefulness for each of us can be different?
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Yes, it can be different. And I think that that physical environment, like you're speaking to, is also connected to a relational environment. Like just like a room can be prepared to receive me, a relationship or a gathering can be prepared to receive the whole purpose. Like we can be intentional about that. Um, you know, so the hospitality is not just the food, the lodging, the customer service, which for me are very important. Um, it's also that the emotional vibes, the psychological vibes, you know, um created by the people that are holding space.
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Yeah. So the home holds us on our journey. And so it really resonates for us to think about this idea of a ship, even though we don't live in a houseboat. But our sacred text for today comes from Lucille Clifton, who has a beautiful poem called Blessing the Boats, which says, May the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear. May you kiss the wind, then turn from it, certain that it will love your back. May you open your eyes to water, water waving forever, and may you, in your innocence, sail through this to that. Yeah. I love that. What I love about this blessing is that it really holds our idea of all aboard, homefulness. You get to sail through this to that. So however you showed up, the this of this day, this moment, this stage in your evolutionary journey, this part of your Chiron return or Saturn return or whoever's returning. This is a space that can hold you as you move through this to whatever is next on your journey. That for me is the epitome of homefulness.
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Yeah. Homefulness, all aboard. Somebody's having a tantrum. The goal is not for the other person to tantrum back. I could tantrum even better.
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It's not a dance battle.
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Yeah, but the the the container, we want the container to hold enough safety, ease, flow. Like I'm rocking back and forth in my body so that we can move through. We can move through past reaction. We can have access to breath. We can identify what happened, what was the trigger, and understand the healing that we are moving through, which might not, you know, get resolved immediately. And that that doesn't even have to be the goal that we're gonna resolve it immediately, but the goal of having the space to hold, having the space for healing. Um and sometimes the gift is really just having a deeper awareness, like, oh, you were really activated when I said that. Like that can be priceless. Like, oh, you're not you're not hiding the way you feel about that anymore. Now you really, you letting me know that, you know, this is a issue. And I think all of that makes hospitality uh and homefulness more accessible. It's yeah.
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Yeah, I I think that that's that's right. It's part of a standard of a definition of home, right? Home is the place where you don't have to have it all together. And, you know, I've been in my writing practice right now, I'm writing about my dad when he was a kid and his relationship to education. And I realized that the distinction of home was for him, he felt as a black kid in a predominantly white school, outside of home, anything could be used against him. Anything that he said, anything that he did, if he left something lying somewhere, whatever, like he had to keep it all together very, very literally and also emotionally. And home is the place where we don't have to have it all together.
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Yeah.
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We're still being intentional about the vibration and energy we want in this space, but there's not that thought that something's gonna be used against me if I'm not hyper-vigilant and attending to every detail, right? Home is the place where we can take that armor off and understand that we can be met as we are.
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Yeah, it makes me think about that song by napalm, home is in the body. Home, you don't have to carry y'all. You know this one, right?
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Oh, yeah. Naipalm from Um is in the Body. Hiatus Coyote. Coyote is so, so beautiful.
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Y'all to look that up. It's N-A-I palm. I can't remember how you spell the palm part. Anyway.
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I think it's P-A-L-M. That makes sense. From Hiatus Coyote.
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Anyway. Um, right. Yeah. So, okay, so in movement and community, one of the things that I love that I've seen in the last five, 10 years is this intentional role in our spaces. You know, in some spaces it's called care bears, where there's somebody that's holding that space for when somebody's activated or triggered or having a, you know, a heavy emotional moment. I know Brown Boy Project, shout out to Matisse, hey, um, you know, uses care bears. And I love that, that we can be even more intentional about valuing the people that have that muscle, that you can tantrum, I won't tantrum back, superpower. And like, you know, the people and the practices that support us to provide care um rather than assuming that care is just gonna happen.
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Mm-hmm.
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Mm-hmm. Space to move through.
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Like, you gotta facilitate that. Yeah.
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I remember the first day that I met Michelle, she was inviting me to be part of an art installation, and we were responding to some scary and and horrible stuff that was demonizing survivors of sexual violence, black women, survivors in our community. And I came to Michelle's yard, and it was just like in the midst of my trigger and trauma, it was this space where, you know, our friend Nikki was singing a song about Lard and all the things you could do with Lard. It was kind of a scandalous song. Lard is lubrication. Anyway, um, you know, and Michelle's kid Eden was there running around like the blessing of a fairy that they have always been. And I was just meeting them, but I felt like I could be met as who I was. So homefulness is is something that is possible in any instance. And I think it's a beautiful part of the love shift, love ship practice to be able to attune and distinguish what that is for us. As we experience it, we can create it.
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Yeah. I mean, I think I would love to extend the invitation. You know, if you got a journal practice or if you just want to think to yourself, like reflect for yourself, what tells your nervous system that you're welcome here or in a particular space? And what tells somebody else that they're welcome with you and in your space?
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Mm-hmm.
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You know? And consider this could be a really good journal prompt. Which parts of myself do I still believe have to stay outside before I can come aboard? That really hits. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think about at North Star, Kamakshi is facilitating in the Sunday services through this process of creating a home that can house our homeless. And it's so cool because every service is a different part of the house. And that's exactly what we're talking about: a homefulness that has space for all of who we are. And some of it has to do with unlearning our ideas of home, which might have to do with the homes we grew up in, certain spaces that we've lived in or been educated in, where um we didn't feel that all of us was welcome.
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Yeah. All aboard. All aboard. Okay. All of you is welcome here.
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Anyway, I'm gonna work on that. Yes. Our first North Star, make room for the whole person. All of our ages, parts, and versions need somewhere they can be acknowledged and held with love and care.
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Mm-hmm.
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Our second North Star is care is infrastructure. Come on, Yashnamaya Padamsi. The physical and relational environment we create can help people feel safe enough to be present, to breathe, and notice what is happening inside them.
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Our third North Star.
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You don't have to resolve everything to receive the gift. Sometimes the healing comes later. Just the awareness of what was triggered and what needs care is already a very valuable part of the journey.
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That's right. Okay, do we have any announcements?
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Well, we are in the second to last episode of our first season. Our first full season. We're so excited. And if you want to join the journey and become a patron of this podcast, we would love and appreciate that. There's details in the show notes.
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Yes, and we will be having a revival gathering in Durham on Sunday, September 13th at 11 a.m. at North Star Church of the Arts. Everyone's invited. Okay.
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Well, until next time, Farewell. Thank you so much for listening to the September podcast. If this conversation spoke to you, we'd love for you to share it with someone who might need it. And don't forget to leave us a question to cover on an episode and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It really helps more people find the show. Until next week, stay in the ship as an offering for yourself, your community, and our collective spirit.
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