It was one of those days where I found myself deep inside the current reading, researching, questioning, pulling apart what I thought I knew. That’s when a piece of my bloodline revealed itself. A door cracked open in the past. A few years ago, or more, I had submitted my DNA and ordered my ancestral records. I was looking for truth specifically, the kind that begins in West Africa.
That’s when I came across the ceremonies. The festivals. The rituals are all rooted in confronting something most people run from: the mystery.
Which mystery? The one with no single name.
The mystery of life.
Of death.
Of what happens after.
Of what lingers and what transforms.
The mystery that is copied, claimed, misused.
The mystery that some try to sell while others try to survive.
In what I found, West African traditions didn’t hide from that mystery.
They celebrated it.
Honored it.
Faced it.
They didn’t just grieve the dead they conversed with the legacy.
They danced with memory.
They treated the unknown not as a threat but as a passage.
Mystery, by its nature, is that which cannot be fully explained.
It moves in silence.
It hums beneath the noise.
It asks us to feel instead of always defining.
Sometimes the greatest mysteries live in the people around us.
The pain they carry.
The attitude they wear.
You don’t always see the story, but the story is always there.
Society, meanwhile, has turned mystery into product.
It lives in movie scripts and Halloween masks.
In horror films and fantasy lore.
They took what was sacred and made it spectacle.
They use the unknown to entertain
While others use it to oppress.
Even poverty, when you look closely, is framed as a mystery.
But it’s not always the lack of money.
It’s the fear of what’s on the other side of understanding.
It’s what we’re willing to confront or avoid.
What I uncovered wasn’t limited to Africa.
So many cultures carry this sacred confrontation of the unknown.
So many societies are driven knowingly or not by this same energy.
The mystery is universal.
Some mysteries are more dangerous than others.
But that doesn’t mean we run.
We were never meant to live in fear of what we don’t yet understand.
Life is already moving through us.
And death, as we were taught to see it, will come.
But between those two?
There is a river of questions.
And we either float unconscious
Or we dive in and swim through them with our eyes wide open.
History is deep.
And real research is spiritual work.
It takes discipline.
It takes stillness.
But most of all, it takes a refusal to accept surface answers.
Because the real story is always beneath.
And when we go beyond what’s visible,
We begin to reclaim what was buried.
Not just in books or traditions
But in ourselves.
That is how we confront the mystery.
By listening.
By seeking.
By never settling for anything less than the truth.