Welcoming Spirit Home: Ancient African Teachings to Celebrate Children and Community

Welcoming Spirit Home: Ancient African Teachings to Celebrate Children and Community by Sobonfu Some (1999). Novato, CA: New World Library. 141 pp. ISBN: 1-57731-009-8. Welcoming Spirit Home is a book that anyone interested in birth, children, or the fostering of non-violent, compassionate societies is likely to want to read. Start to finish. In one sitting. In this warm and majestically written little book (a mere 5 by 7 inches, and only 140 pages in length), Sobonfu Some brings to life the importance of an entire community's celebrating the significance of the processes of a baby's conception, a woman's pregnancy, life in the womb, the mother and child's birth, and their bond and development as souls, in the context of their family and community-at-large. Sobonfu speaks with the natural ease of a woman born and raised in a well-functioning, bonded culture. For such a slender book, she shares a great deal of the ancient wisdom of her Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso, a tiny land-locked country in Western Africa. This is where Sobonfu lived until she was "chosen" as a wife for Malidoma Some, an older man from a nearby tribe who was already living and teaching in America. Plunked down in a strange culture, not knowing the language, Sobonfu bore the shock of all immigrants, but especially because she had never before been outside her tribal village. In the subsequent years, she learned fluent English and, like Malidoma, took her place as one of only a handful of Africans who have continued to live with one foot in the modern technological culture of the U.S. and the other in their native land. She regularly returns to her village for spiritual sustenance and familial ties. It is this unique blend of outside observer of Western culture and modern Westernized woman who works hard at maintaining her deepest traditional values that makes Sobonfu's wisdom so special. Although she has not yet had children, she is the bearer of much knowledge that many in the West are thirsty for. Sobonfu articulates a basic tenet of her tribe: At the heart of a healthy community lies the importance of spirit, elders, children, ritual, gift giving, ancestors, responsibility and accountability. These fundamentals must be understood and valued, and they must be nurtured and balanced for the well-being of the community. In Africa it is known that the elders are the vision and wisdom keepers, children ensure the survival of the villages and tribe, and rituals feed the soul. Welcoming Spirit Home gives us rituals to ponder that make sense, and Sobonfu describes them vividly, so that we might make use of them in creating meaningful ritual of our own. She makes clear the practical importance of ritual to our daily lives, and especially to the rearing of a child. This book focuses on living deeply connected to our body, mind, the earth, our ancestors, and our community. Sobonfu discusses birth, not as a nine-month medical process that culminates with the severing of the umbilical cord, but as a healthy and vital process beginning before physical conception and continuing long after "delivery. " It is not to be feared but respected and entered into with optimism and profound trust. For the Dagara people, a baby's soul makes a conscious choice to enter the world in a body and to come to a particular mother and father. "Pregnancy should be seen as the inauguration of an important person, a VIP, stepping into a job that will bring much goodness to the world, she writes. " The significance of the physical, psychological and spiritual aspects of all stages of development are described, including pre-conception, physical conception, pregnancy, prenatal, birth and postpartum. The "spiritual pregnancy" begins when a woman has her first sense of a child's presence in dream or waking life. The analogies Sobonfu draws between her tribe and our modern way of life make her easy to understand. In the section titled Preconception she writes, Most of us would go through a lot of trouble to clean or redecorate our homes in an attempt to make them beautiful if we were told that the president of the U. …