What does your name mean?

My name is Naomi. That name means pleasure, pleasantness, joy, God’s delight. There is a moan in my name. I m o a n. A chorus of spirits making themselves known. In five hours on the north side of Chicago I slid out of a woman named Vickie during the first days of spring and she looked at me with joyful eyes and imbued me with the name of her late mother. Naomi, my namesake, Naomi my grandmother who took pleasure and made it her business from the cotton plantations of Yazoo, Mississippi to project buildings on the south side of Chicago. She made music on her body, playing hambone, drumming on her mouth, her thighs, remembering herself home and someplace else. I do that too, remember and provoke myself into the future. Like my mother and her mother, I have learned how to feast on joy especially in the midst of insurmountable horror and the weightiness of grief.

This is a litany of congregation bent on knowing pleasure. This a place of refuge of revival where together we might uncover forbidden bits of ourselves and hold those up and say this holy, this is necessary, this is mine all mine. My prayer is that by gathering here, we will collectively nourish the source of our own nectar and make ritual out of pleasure-centered retreat.

Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.