at SUSU, we understand freedom as something we practice together. we offer three Juneteenth meditation portals that emerge from our work with living archives, homeplace, ancestral relationship, and land-based belonging. these meditations explore how we carry wisdom across generations and how the stories we preserve shape the futures we are becoming.

what if time as we have been taught and how we are living it is not as linear as it seems? many of us were raised inside a relationship to time shaped by clocks, productivity, urgency, extraction, and endless forward motion. under capitalism and colonialism, time is treated as a resource and a linear trajectory. Black, Indigenous, and diasporic traditions understand time differently - cyclical, layered, ancestral, ecological, recursive, and alive, to name a few.

the anthology revolutionary mothering: love on the front lines, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai'a Williams, reframes mothering as a political, cultural, and liberatory practice. we learn from them how to reframe the narrow definition of “mother” as a biological role and understand mothering as a set of actions, commitments, and relationships that are grounded in care, survival, resistance, and creation.

Black womanism in the work of Audre Lorde and Lucille Clifton helps us understand Black women’s lived experience as knowledge, the body as a site of memory and meaning, spirit, emotion, and intuition as valid forms of theory. this mini teach-in on the poetry of liberation is informed by Marina Magloire’s work on Lucille Clifton and Audre Lorde.

at SUSU we talk about Black womanism a lot, intentionally. it’s our lineage of thought and spirituality that grounds everything we do in connection with the land and each other. below are a set of terms we use often, and ones we use less often but are useful to name in order to make some important distinctions.

over the past few years we have been constructing a praise house here on the land at SUSU. it will be a space for us to reclaim our fugitivity, to reclaim our stories, our medicines, our bodies, to be in community with one another, and to find homeplace.

this month we’re talking about women’s history through the lens of Black womanism. we start by acknowledging that ideas of sanctuary, homeplace, and land stewardship are often inseparable from Black women’s intellectual and political labor. Black womanism teaches us practices that sustain life, defend community, and carry knowledge forward across generations. and these everyday practices of care are the foundation we need for social transformation.

during Black stories month, we want to name SUSU and places like us as something called a “living Black archive.” this means we hold memories, rituals, and stories close in our minds and bodies and we document, repeat, and practice them.

throughout Black stories month, we are opening sanctuary portals. these will be presented (mainly on instagram) as invitations to move through ancestral lineage, collective imagining, and mundane magic, food, ritual, land, and care practices that have sustained Black life when the world was organized against our survival.

as we close this year, we pause to honor everything we have created together. every story shared. every circle held. every act of care offered and received. with gratitude, we offer you this meditation on belief, inspired by Octavia Butler and by the land we are on as it rests this winter season.