Wise Black Pearl
Spiritual wisdom, philosophical insight and anecdotal stories for health and wellness, prosperity, purposeful practice and preparation for success. The topics are curated to inform and encourage black men to return to our families lead by example. This podcast will offer suggestions to recognize how uniquely special you are inside. We will explore Superiority, Inferiority, Interiority and other compelling topics.
Hosted by Maceo Z Keeling
Wise Black Pearl
Finding Your Flock: Embracing Your Unique Journey
Have you ever found yourself in the wrong place with the wrong crowd, feeling like a square peg in a round hole? Join us as we unravel the essence of being where you truly belong with people who uplift you. Drawing from personal stories and nuggets of wisdom passed down by my mom and dad, we explore how being in the right environment can transform your life. We'll reflect on the age-old adage "birds of a feather flock together" and how recognizing our ignorance can be the gateway to learning. Inspired by the resilience of Mumbles from "Happy Feet," we'll discuss how early rejection shapes our journey and the power of embracing our unique paths.
As we navigate the meandering paths of individuality and passion, this episode challenges you to listen to your inner voice and pursue what sets your soul on fire, even if it means stepping out of the norm. By examining the themes of self-discovery and inner happiness, you'll be encouraged to recognize the hidden greatness within you, igniting personal growth and a profound shift in how you connect with others. Let this invigorating conversation inspire you to pursue your passions relentlessly, fostering a community where personal development thrives, all while grooving to the spirit of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On!"
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Hello and welcome to Wisdom of the Black Pearl. I invite you to celebrate this day with joy and gladness, because this is a day that was created for you to enjoy good health, wealth and abundance. Hello, my people, welcome to Wisdom of the Black Pearl. You know, it's kind of cool to be in here doing this for the first time. I'm looking forward to sharing some good stuff with you. So thank you for subscribing and thank you for showing up. My commitment to you is to show up in the way that you showed up for me. You know, I just want to say that it's kind of exciting to be doing this and I'm eager to get started. So buckle your seatbelts and let's take a journey, a vicarious trip. It's going to be a great ride on wisdom of the black pearl.
Maceo Z. Keeling:Have you ever found yourself wondering if you were in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing with the right people? Well, today's podcast is going to share with you some opportunities to better evaluate those questions that may be roaming through your mind. Whether it be parenting or hanging out with friends, you need to have sort of a sense of a governor, an idea of what makes sense for you, and the interesting thing is it can only come from you if it's for you. Now, oftentimes you'll hear people say that it's up to you to make the difference in your life. But one thing that I've learned is that no one does it by themselves. It takes a teambble to hit a rock and a rock to hit a boulder to cause an avalanche of thoughts that make you think in ways that you never could think alone. So I invite you to listen to, hopefully learn from, certainly participate in this podcast, the Wisdom of the Black Pearl.
Maceo Z. Keeling:Have you ever wondered why old people say the stuff that they say? You know, birds of a feather flock together. You know a tree by the fruit it bears Lay down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Well, I think that if we explore some of those old sayings and kind of evaluate where they may have come from, there may be some pearls of wisdom that we can extract from those oysters that seem to have been closed off from us for so long. You know, when we look at the notion of birds of a feather, what exactly does that mean? Well, maybe they're talking about who you hang with, the quality of people you hang with. How do you determine who you hang with. Have you given it any thought? You know, I had an experience when I was in Brazil hanging with my buddies and they gave me a very big piece of wisdom. They said no matter what you do, don't let the situation choose you. You choose the situation, and you know that follows right in line with what my mom used to tell me. She would say if you don't stand on something, you'll go for anything.
Maceo Z. Keeling:Now these, I guess, ideas or lectures came from a place of knowing, a place from understanding and a place from wisdom. And see, there is a difference between all of them. But one thing you need before you get any of them is ignorance. Now it's interesting that I might say you need ignorance. The reason I say that is because oftentimes we think we know and we don't know, and there's no way to know what we don't know. So we often speak out of turn, speak from a place of not knowing and not really realizing that we don't know. I call that unconscious incompetence. Unconscious meaning you're not aware of what you're saying, and incompetence meaning that you just don't have the capacity to know right now. The beautiful thing about that is unconscious incompetence lends itself to a huge opportunity to learn all kinds of new things. You've got to be open for it, you've got to be receptive to it, but, most importantly, you have to pull down the walls of arrogance, self-righteousness and being a know-it-all to receive the possible pearl of wisdom that you may not know. And to me that sounds like vulnerability, not something I've been comfortable with for a lot of my life, and now it's something that I realize I could not have come this far without it. At some point you have to lay down your guards, make yourself available for something big and better and more beautiful than you could have imagined on your own, and by doing this I think it's pretty clear that the world will do the same for you. Now I told you I was going to talk to you about Happy Feet the movie.
Maceo Z. Keeling:One of the things that I found that struck me right from the onset was when the daddy let the egg kind of get away from him just for a second, and he felt that he needed to keep that to himself. It was just more than he could bear for anyone to know that he wasn't perfect in helping the gestation of the egg while mom was gone. What's particularly interesting about that scene is that when it looked like the baby was not going to come forth for a moment, he stood there and people around him immediately started casting doubt on the fact that he was going to have a child. He says you know, sometimes things just happen. But the most poignant moment for me in the beginning of the movie is when the baby was born. First thing out of the egg was his feet and he starts shuffling, he starts dancing oh, he was doing his thing. And his daddy said hey, what's wrong with you, boy? How many of y'all have heard that? Oh, he was doing his thing. And his daddy said hey, what's wrong with you, boy? How many of y'all have heard that? You know that's akin to outright rejection, alienation From a person that loved you, from a person that cared about you but just didn't have the tools or the understanding to move forward in a way of exploration and curiosity with you, as opposed to jumping to a conclusion that was anchored in their own mind. And that's evidenced by the fact that he said you know what? That just ain't painful.
Maceo Z. Keeling:Well, as we move a little later in the story, the baby, whose name, ironically, is Mumbles Mumbles, goes to school and the teacher said I'm going to tell you the most important thing you'll ever need in this life, and she asked the class what were they? And a couple of the little penguins came up with answers and the teacher said no, no. Momo said don't eat yellow snow, which makes a lot of sense for a penguin, okay, but finally, in that scene, she said the most important thing in your life is your heart song, and if you don't have a heart song, you can't survive as a penguin. Now, part of that was right. You've got to have a song in your heart that moves you to a place that you're willing to lose time, lose sleep, lose energy to pursue it. But it was taken a little too literally. They thought it meant that you had to have a specific talent, moreover, a specific talent that was a part of the existing community, and then any deviation from that meant that you would certainly fail in life and in that community. Now, that posed a particular problem for Mumbles, because he couldn't sing. What he could do, however, was dance, and no one understood it.
Maceo Z. Keeling:So it doesn't make you particularly evil or wrong or bad, because your gift is different from someone else's. As a matter of fact, we all have different gifts, and to be able to be born. Knowing exactly what feels right to you is truly special. Even when his dad asked him what's wrong with you boy, he said I'm happy. He said well, what's wrong with your feet? My feet are happy too. So you know, I just wanted to make the point in this particular video that there's always going to be something that nags at you, something that tugs at your heart string, and I'll call it your heart song.
Maceo Z. Keeling:But it may not be exactly what everyone else understands fully. You know, I have a question for you today. Have you ever stopped and wondered why you have your own fingerprint, your own voice print, your own retinal scan? I mean the biometrics that make you uniquely you? What was the reason that so much energy and effort was put into making you who you are and we so quickly look at other people to try to emulate who they are? It's kind of. It's kind of ironic that we're a specialty, custom-made entity but we really don't welcome our own identity. We often look outside of ourselves for validation for things that were validated before we were born.
Maceo Z. Keeling:What I'm talking about is we look at other people and we see that they have a skill or a talent that may be, on its face, more significant than ours that they have a superior characteristic they might be really smart at math or a really great singer or a really fast runner and we ask ourselves, well, man, I need a little more of that. And when we ask those questions, what we're really doing is looking at something that's outside of us, and when we do that, it's very possible that looking at that particular specific thing is something that we don't have, and, instead of acknowledging the beauty that it is and the talent that it is, we will look inside ourselves and say, oh, I don't have that. We concentrate on what we lack instead of what we have. That's pretty common information. We hold ourselves as better than other people, and that's because we see that they don't have certain things that we do have, and we fail to look for the things that they have that could lift us up.
Maceo Z. Keeling:I'm talking about the difference between an inferiority complex and a superiority complex. Perhaps no one's ever told you, and you may not even agree with me, but I think that both of those complexes are just imposters of the other. What I mean is, if you feel superior in a thing, you may be more adept at it, better equipped to do it and it may be a part of your core fundamental blessings or gifts or talents. On the other hand, if you look outside of yourself and you find that you're not as good as someone else doing their thing their way, then you are feeling inferior. And the reason why I say they're both impostors is because they have one major thing in common. The first thing they have in common is you. The second thing they have in common is that you looked outside of yourself for something that you hold up as a litmus or a standard by which you should judge yourself. When you do that, you will lose 100% of the time, because what you're looking at is the gap between where you are and where they are in both instances, as opposed to the game, which is everything that you already have.
Maceo Z. Keeling:So how do we govern ourselves? How do we find out what's right for us, what's good for us, what's our thing? And the answer is something that's rarely ever spoken of in these terms. We talk about identity. Great guy that I've been listening to quite a bit. Myron Golden says you have an identity, a lie-dentity and a my-dentity, and these are concepts that he's acquired from his travels and they really are very valuable, and I encourage you to take a listen to him.
Maceo Z. Keeling:I choose to couch it in terms of an inferiority complex, a superiority complex, but we should find ourselves, spend ourselves, exhaust ourselves in our interiority. Complex Interiority means the inner self, the person that you are, the structure, architecture, character, personality that was gifted to you, that you have been endowed with, and there are some very specific ways to do it. They're not the only ways by any stretch, but I'm offering up some suggestions, some advice that my dad actually gave me. He said you go to your private place, I don't care if it's a bathroom or a lake, but go somewhere where you can see your reflection and look into your own eyes and ask yourself the question what do you want? What do you want? What moves you?
Maceo Z. Keeling:You know, when I think about the movie, happy Feet reminds me of me and my dad in a lot of ways, because in the movie Mumbles, who's the dancer? Mumbles? He's a late bloomer. I was a late bloomer and the first thing out the shell was his feet. So he came out the world backwards let's just leave it at that. And when he gets, the first thing that hits the ground is his feet and he starts shuffling and dancing and the daddy says that hits the ground is his feet. He starts shuffling and dancing and daddy said what's wrong with you? He said nothing. He said well, what you doing? He said I'm dancing, he said he said because I'm happy. He said, well, what's wrong with your feet? Nothing. He said well, my feet are happy too. And it moved me because he said Bobo, you need to straighten that out, because that just ain't penguin. How many of y'all can relate to me on that? Someone that we love, someone that loves us, in whom have been given the responsibility, the person who has been given the responsibility to ensure my greatness?
Maceo Z. Keeling:One of the first commentaries on who I was or who Mumbles was was what's wrong with you, boy, as opposed to what's right with you, son. You got all your fingers and toes, you got sight, you got your hearing, you're able-bodied, you're strong. These are the things that have value, but things we need to explore and take a good hard look at and ask ourselves where are we looking? Most people would say that the world is full of despair, frustration, stress, anxiety, fear, and that these are desperate times, and I guess that's all very accurate. If that's what you're focused on.
Maceo Z. Keeling:You know, later in that scene, mobile's father asked him, said boy, what are you doing? This is after he wasn't able to sing at school. He said well, what are you doing? This is after he wasn't able to sing at school. He said well, what are you doing? He said I'm being spontaneous. You ever wonder what comes out of you when you're being spontaneous. You know, I can tell you that I think the truth comes out when you're being spontaneous. And the truth has signals and affirmations and confirmations, and we have to pay attention to those signals that tell us what's real for us and what's important to us. And there are ways that we can figure that out, like how much time we can spend doing a thing and not get tired.
Maceo Z. Keeling:Again, saved wisdom from my dad, to whom I'm eternally grateful. He said boy, if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. You know, doing what you love may or may not pay the bills, but you got to ask yourself what's your priority? Do you want to just muddle through and exist, or do you want to live? And what does living look like for you? What does it feel like for you? What's important to you? What's important to you.
Maceo Z. Keeling:I know people that will sacrifice and work day in and day out tirelessly for the thing that's important to them, and I always stand in awe when I see greatness. And more and more as I develop, I'm seeing more and more and more. As I develop, I'm seeing more and more greatness in each individual I meet, because I stop looking for it and I find it. It's there, it's in you, it's in me, and because it's in you, no one can take it from you. So the suggestion that I'm making today I'm gonna pass on from my dad he go to your private place where you can see the reflection of your own face and look deeply into your eyes and ask yourself a very consequential and important question, and that is what do I want? What do I desire more than anything? What am I willing to lose sleep over? What am I willing to lose sleep over? What am I willing to struggle for? What am I willing to sacrifice for? What am I willing to trample down underfoot that gets in my way? Who am I willing to leave behind if they don't share my journey? Let me tell you something If you have to leave somebody behind to pursue that which is important to you, like mumbles did and happy feet, guess what?
Maceo Z. Keeling:Just start walking and you don't have to turn around. Start walking and you don't have to turn around. That's what stops you from your goal, from your blessing, from your gift, from your talent. It disinherits you from that which is rightfully yours, that you are heir to. When you stop and turn and look back over your shoulder, that is not the direction of March.
Maceo Z. Keeling:So the thing that is your thing, you pursue relentlessly and you can tell what it is, because it'll make you want to get up early and stay up late. It's the kind of thing that'll make you put everything else down, because when you do a thing you got to give up a thing. You'll know what it is. No one will have to tell you because you'll find yourself doing it all the time. And here's the beautiful part when you're doing your thing, you kind of glow. You're a little different, your light shines a little brighter.
Maceo Z. Keeling:People notice you a little more. They want to know how come he's so happy, how come he seems so cool. What's he got that I don't have? And the response really, really, really, you know ironic thing about it is they have it too, they just haven't found it. But the greatest thing is that, for the people who are supposed to be there when you arrive, you won't have to turn around and look for them. They'll still be right there, standing right next to you. I hope you got a message and a word from today that you're able to apply in your life. This is the beginning of a journey between us that I think is going to really be beneficial for me and you and you. So, in the words of the great artist, philosopher, creator, marvin Gaye, let's get it on. My name is Macy O'Keefe, I am your host for the show and thank you for subscribing. Thank you for listening.
