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.

BLK South’s 2025 Annual Report reflects a year of transition, learning, and deeper rootedness. As we relocated to Durham and continued our work in the Historic Hayti District, this report offers an honest snapshot of what it looked like to practice place-based community development through presence, partnership, and patience. Inside, we share highlights from our neighborhood work, formation spaces, public engagement, and the relationships that continue to shape our long-term vision for the South.

Can soul work smell and taste like chocolate chip cookies? I think those 6 weeks in some ways did.  Soul work was a beautiful and communal experience. Connecting with those who were looking for community and the opportunity to talk about their faith. I remember my first meeting with these folks and sharing fresh baked cookies with them. The smell and kind gesture lingers with me as I reflect on our time together. Each week was a different batch of chocolate chip cookies. 

Decolonial thinking, praxis, and theologies encourage us to expand and recover other ways of knowing and learning. Art and nature are two important examples of this. Check out this song, poem, painting series, and these facts about the mycelium network, and notice what stirs in you.

“There’s something about smell that gets there first—before language, before logic, before we even know what we’re feeling. Smell slips past the guards. It fills the nostrils, settles on the tongue, and suddenly the body remembers something the mind hadn’t named yet. Smell teaches us how to recognize patterns.”

“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.”

“Christmas has trained us to romanticize this scene, but Black biblical interpretation refuses that move. We know too much, let me use my I voice. As one who was a teenage mother, I know too much about what it means for a young woman’s pregnancy to become public spectacle, social liability, fodder for an often erroneous projection of statistics and moral judgment all at once. We collectively know what it means for bodies, especially poor bodies, Black bodies, queer bodies, differently abled bodies, non white bodies, to be read as problems rather than promises.”

“The prairie dogs facing the sun is an image that returns to me from time to time, a reminder to turn towards the sun literally and metaphorically, to look out for “sun” in my day to day living. To look and see that which brings life.

In the midst of the hustle that is this season, I am reminded to see and not simply look. Or perhaps to look again. To slow down to take in the mystery of each day, to be in awe of my own humanity and that of others. To face the sun as the prairie dogs and pause to take in beauty and delight. As spoken in certain places, we often need fresh eyes to see the ordinary in such a way that the ordinary becomes extraordinary.”

“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!”

“The other morning, on the acreage of my northern New Mexico home, I pressed my ear into the dirt and heard Mother groaning. The same groan I once heard in the city—the helicopters, the warnings, the fear—was humming here beneath piñons and quiet skies. With my face to the earth, I realized the land has been mourning all along. And somewhere in that hum, I could hear Jesus drawing in the dirt again, inviting us to lay down our stones so those who have been targeted and exhausted might finally be free.”

“Our senses, sensitivities, and sensations shape and expand the world we live in and contribute to our health and well-being. They help us perceive, navigate, and understand our physical, emotional, spiritual, and relational worlds. They are impacted by our daily experiences—both traumatic and transformative.”

“As I watched that blood fall, I thought about how easy it would’ve been to stay inside. To tell myself it wasn’t my problem. To stay safe, stay out of it, keep my peace. But that’s the lie of ‘peace’ in this country—it’s really just distance. We mistake our isolation for safety. The truth is, there’s always risk in stepping out. But there’s a greater risk in staying in. Because when you stay in, you become part of the silence that lets systems keep wounding people.”

Howard Thurman’s encounter with Indian students in 1935 forced him to face a troubling question: What does it mean to represent a faith that has failed to live up to its own ideals? This reflection explores how Thurman’s wrestling with the word missionary reveals the moral weight of language and the responsibility of those who claim to speak for faith.

“What if we saw the neighborhood as a kind of church—a place to love and care for folks? What if our neighbors weren’t strangers living behind closed doors, but humans given to us by the Divine to be in mutual care with? That kind of care doesn’t mean trying to change someone or give them what we think they need. It means slowing down enough to listen—to hear what people actually say they want and respond with love.”

“As I walked the track, I asked the trees, What can you teach me about my life? And the trees whispered back: Wait it out, baby. We’ve been here a long time. The seasons will change. Stay rooted. Wait it out.

I know I am not alone in this stress. Our community feels it too—the weight of housing, of bills, of survival under a violent government, of raising children, of keeping our minds whole.”

“Our fathers have given us this practice of patriarchy and racism that remains in our country and in a lot of our churches today. The violent and unjust acts we witness in our world are symptoms of this illness that hides behind American exceptionalism. However, this history reveals, like Kendrick’s song, that this is a generational problem—and our past ‘fathers’ were formed by environments that caused them to harm others.”

Today’s the day — it’s May 1st, and we’ve officially hit the road to Durham, NC!

This summer, we’ll be taking a break from our usual weekly reflections and will return in the fall. Instead, we’ll be sharing more frequent updates about our 12-day road trip and all that we’re learning along the way. You can follow along in two ways:

• Subscribe to our Substack The Way Back Home for real-time updates.

• Bookmark the Pilgrim With Us page on our website: blksouth.org/pilgrim.

“What songs have traveled to you recently?

The other day I woke up in the middle of the night and could not get back to sleep.  After tossing and turning for a while in bed, I knew that the only thing that could help, would be music and song.  So I got out of bed, a ritual that I have known now for many years, and I sat on my couch and got my headphones ready.  I felt in that moment that I needed some old school gospel, words and tunes that had soothed my heart and body aches in years past.  As I listened and as I sang, I began to weep.  I cried and sang for over an hour, releasing much sorrow and sadness.  There has been an overwhelm of sorrow in these past months, moving between personal losses and pain in my own family, to accompanying friends through betrayal, to walking with communities that are facing incredible oppression and challenges today.”