The Garden, Part Two

We gather in the hush before the bloom.

In a room held not by walls, but by the soft, unshakable hands of our foremothers— who stitched freedom into lullabies and planted vision into soil they could not stay to tend.

We are their garden— risen.
We are their prayers— answered.
We are their wildest remembering.

As we gather in a year where the stakes for our freedom feel both ancient and urgent, we return to the wisdom of Alice Walker.

She taught us that Black women have always led from the margins and the marrow— cultivating beauty in barren places, insisting on joy as resistance, and planting legacies we may never live to see bloom.

Her words remind us that rest is not a break from leadership, but its birthplace. That our liberation is not a solo act, but a collective inheritance.

In 2025, amidst a world still reckoning with how to love and value Black women, we look to her garden— and to each other— as blueprints for what is possible.

Let this space be sacred.
Let it honor the pause and the pulse, the triumph and the trembling.
Let it hold the weight of what we carry, and the wings of what we are still becoming.