Being Present Is Soul Work

The potential for your Black freedom resides in your ability to maintain your presence here in your life. That is difficult when we have cultivated a practice of escaping for survival. Remember that as we do this work to free the Black body, we are really doing work to free the Black soul. Soul work is not bound by current conditions. Soul work is both existential and never-ending at once.

I invite you to acknowledge that our ancestors preserved the soul by learning to retreat. They protected the psyche by sacrificing the body. We are here because they did what they had to do to keep us here. And now that we are here, we can choose to reunite the body with its soul, the being with its shadow. To do that, we must be present. We must face discomfort and know it in order to face joy and it know it. Both are within us simultaneously and neither seeks to destroy us. We can rest in trusting that if our bodies and minds are under threat, our ancestral, cosmic, animal instinct will reeegage, but we are safe in this moment. We do not need to hold anything, not even ourselves. We are here totally free, rooted to the earth beneath us. We are breathing.

My Lady by Lory Ivey Alexander, Collection of the Estate of Dorothy Delores Logan, South Carolina, United States