The Musings of a Latte Queen: Narratives of Everyday Life

Waking up in the middle of someone else's dream presents you with some options. You can wonder about your role in the story and play it out to the end. You can lament your talents used in the opportunity not your own. You can rage against your time lost in fulfilling someone else's destiny. Or you can do something else. What if the dream had something to do with what you wanted to do, but didn't know it yet? What if it was part of your life purpose and was a journey on the way? What if you had a part to play in the moment and have to be still to see it? I was sitting in my office the other day and this thought occurred to me as I was reading the news. The news that overlaps into other people's existence. Georgia, Alabama, Missouri, Utah, and now Louisiana have made decisions that alter the possibilities of millions of young women with a dream. It was something that had me wonder about purpose, power, and potential. In my faith belief, I hold that ever...

Life has a funny way of bringing you back to where you found yourself in the first place. I have always been writing, every since my father handed me a pencil and a Big Chief Notepad. There was a level of truth in being alone, staring at a blank page with that extra sharp #2 pencil and a world of possibilities at my creation. I have been thinking about those stories in the midst of endless reading and writing 1000 word reflections on this journey through seminary. Story has been and will always be the thing that draws us back to self. Self. That truest part of us, the inner part, that yearns and remembers. For me, that is surrounded by books, all the colorful pens and pencils I can buy, and journals. There is a promise that holds in the unopened stack of Moleskins or that great handmade journal I picked up in my travels. There is something hopeful about it. Life life. Like coming back to self. Even if life's wandering roads made you curious about what else was out t...

I stopped writing everyday. That seems like such a strange thing for a writer to admit. The words on paper came in a different way. Theological studies took up two years of my word counts. Then the cultural shifts in the country, sociopolitical shifts, and the sheer amount of racial hatred that has been spewed since November 2016 - rendered me almost speechless. I tweeted, I posted. But I stopped writing thoughtful pieces. Why? There was a part of me that had a sense of "I told you so" and "What do you want me to say now?" I couldn't reconcile the many times I was told that I was being too political or offending someone because I pointed out the obvious racial tone of the country. I just put the pen down. For a time. What I say now is that we must not be silent. We can not just let the children be victims of a wave of hate. How do we speak and act One way is what I am doing now, I picked back up my pen. And made it start again.

The last time I wrote here, we were in the throws of a primary election and I was making decisions about attending Seminary. The world turned. I walked onto the Seminary campus on my birthday, to inquire about classes and last fall, began the most intensive academic year I have had in quite a long time.  They were right when they said that Seminary was like Med School and Law School with the amount of reading required. I thought it was a bit of an exaggeration. I already had my M.B.A. and that program at the University of Iowa was beyond intense for two full-time years. This was even more so. Like a lot of changes, Seminary turned my life. I became a full-time student with all the excitement of the first time I set foot on a college campus. I attended a moving opening ceremony, met new friends, was challenged in sociocultural situations, did an internships, went to a major conference, wrote more papers, burned the midnight oil, stayed in the library beyond midnight, and ended...

August 1, 2016, Kirkwood MO by Tayé Foster Bradshaw When it is about life, it is personal. Everything is about how one lives. Those fears that drive the maniac fringe to hate someone because of the color of their skin, the gender of their birth or the orientation of their sex, the place where the universe set down their life or the faith with which they guide their soul, it is all personal, it is all about life, and some believe that only a few lives really matter. Over the course of the summer, my family and I have done a bit of travel. We were in Alabama, bringing home my youngest son from his last year of college when my daughter's phone started buzzing with text messages about a mass shooting in Orlando. That event became the beginning of our summer. The next few weeks and month was filled with rhetoric about the black and brown bodies sacrificed. The white fear and fragility that made it about them in a little St. Louis suburb, and the continued definining of w...

My husband just took my son to a pop-up position he has with the National Bar Association Conference taking place in downtown St. Louis. Just yesterday evening, while taking this same son to his orientation, my daughters and I were two cars down from the stop light at 4th and the I-44/55 underpass in downtown St. Louis. We were met with a zooming stream of St. Louis Police Vans careening down the side street and making a circular beeline to the other side of downtown. What was going on? My daughters and I wondered if it was something with NetRoots Nation, also happening near downtown, or was there a protest we didn't know about. What in the World? We learned later that activists temporarily shut down I-40 downtown and disrupted flow to let visitors to the Arch Ground campus know that even in this, Black Lives Matter. This mirrored other protests around the country that are still happening after the murders of Alton Sterling (he was just buried  yesterday) and Philando Castile...

I woke up in the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday, July 6, to reach for my Nebulizer, asthma flare ups and the stifling summer of St. Louis were threathening my slumber. While pulling in the mist into squeezed tight lungs, I turned on my computer to do some mindless three-o-clock in the morning browsing. The book that was sitting on my bed was begging to be read, but I ignored her, as I ignored the pull to watch another episode of my "Mindy Project" marathon. Wishing what I was seeing was not true, I read with horror that yet another unarmed black man was killed while black by the police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This one triggered me in ways that I can only trace back to Michael Brown's murder in August 2014. Perhaps it was that the man was selling CDs, something that my self-made lyrical rapper son does all the time, or the fact that it was outside  store, triggering memories of Staten Island and "loosies" causing NegroEric Garner to endure the ultim...