Smell is the quietest sense, yet it speaks the loudest. It enters without asking, slips past logic, and lands directly in memory. Long before we have words, we have scent. Before sight sharpens or language forms, smell is already working—wiring safety, love, fear, and belonging into our bodies.

Scientifically, scent travels straight to the limbic system, the part of the brain that holds emotion and memory. That’s why one breath can take you back decades. A kitchen you haven’t stood in since childhood. A person who no longer walks this earth. A version of yourself you forgot you were.

As the world around me is constantly changing and traveling up my nose and nervous system, I am triggered with something I was told quite a bit as a young girl, but am “today years old” in understanding more.

Growing up, the church would sing it was “...built on nothing less..than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.”

In 2006, India.Arie went on to sing about its presence.

“While reviewing my recent writing I noticed a theme I didn’t expect to find. And I didn’t need to squint to see it. One search for the word “squint” in my Google Drive and the list populated down the page. Perhaps I’d overdone and overused the metaphor or maybe I haven’t squeezed tight enough. The shape of my heart has been a squint for the last year or so and that’s the source of the writing.”

“Our ways of knowing often leave out the voices of those marginalized while retaining the perspectives of those who held power. Realities and stories from the marginalized are often ignored or forgotten. Perhaps one of the biggest threats to America is the immigrant and the foreigner in that they may offer us another way of knowing. This may be true from a scarcity mindset, but from one of abundance, it can be seen as the biggest opportunity. Learning and the sources from where we attain our knowledge is a lifelong journey, with periods of unlearning, relearning, discovering new ways of knowing, and rejecting past ones that no longer serve us or our community.”

“Lately I’ve been listening more closely—not just to the world around me, but to the echoes within me. What do you hear when you sit with the truth of your own formation? What do you hear when you listen for what your faith, your church, your practices are shaping you to become? As a descendant of enslaved people—specifically a Black woman whose foremothers were bred like cattle to create this nation’s wealth—I find myself asking what it means to now use my voice to ask for that wealth back, to reclaim what was extracted from our bodies and redirect it toward the flourishing of Black people.”

“Maybe that is the invitation of this moment: to choose hearing when the seeing is too much. To let our ears become instruments of discernment when our eyes are overwhelmed by the spectacle of power and the theater of intimidation. Could it be that in a time of trouble and chaos we need to hear at all costs? Hear from the Spirit, and hear from those who walked before us through storms that should have crushed them!”

"When I look back on my upbringing, I reflect on how frequently the imagery of trees surrounded me in relation to my faith. My father, who grew up in a rural town called Taylorsville, North Carolina, faithfully attended Liberty Grove Missionary Baptist Church—"Grove" referring to a small group of trees. Even though I did not attend the church growing up, it is part of my heritage. My family has been connected to..."