Day 3: Soul Food

Today was spent in the company of one of my dearest aunts — in soulful, heart-led and heart-fed conversation.
Stories we’ve each held our whole lives.
Stories we’ve embodied across differences in generation, life, and experience.

We sat at the very table my dad built — the one he’d swear, and share with anyone who’d listen, that I helped him build.
I like to believe I did.
I like to remember the smell of sawdust and the sound of the sander smoothing the wood.
I like to return to the way my dad worked with his hands — methodically, with such precision and beauty.

I like to remember the many meals centered around that table — some filled with frustration, others with joy and laughter. And the beautiful truth, here we are yet again. Gathering around the grains and greeting the lives we so live.

Today was a day of remembering where I come from.
It filled me with more empathy.
More perspective.
More curiosity.
And more diligence to stay the course — to break every cycle that can be broken, to shatter every pattern that longs to be undone, to stretch every inherited limit,
in fulfillment of a life more free —
for me,
for those who came before,
and for all who will follow.

Today, time moved entirely too fast.
It was a day of soulful conversation, of spacious pauses,
of presence lived so fully it felt like integration.

To be heard.
To hear.
To know even more than what we always show.
To show more than what we think we know.
To sit in the beauty and the brutal truth of all that lives in between.

Today was Soul food.

And I am so blessed to receive.

I am so blessed to be.

Heard and seen and right, right here.

Reflection Invitations:
🌿 Who or what brings you back to the roots of who you are?
🌿 What stories have shaped you — spoken or unspoken — that you're ready to honor, revisit, or rewrite?
🌿 What is your “soul food” — the kind of connection or remembering that nourishes you on a deeper level?
🌿 Where in your lineage or life do you feel called to break cycles and expand possibility?