Presence is not performance.
It is breath and backbone. The low drum beneath our hurried names.

While the world strings lights on credit and calls it joy. We light candles for survival. For the mothers who worked doubles. For the grandmothers who seasoned silence with song and salt pork. For aunties who prayed over rice and rent at the same kitchen table.

We gather where warmth is chosen, not sold. We build altars from our laughter and call it abundance. We pass sweet tea and testimony. We set out plates for those gone home and those on their way.

Presence is our protest.
We stand still in the river of demand and refuse to be swept into its capitalist frenzy. We become the still point. The hush between hymn and hallelujah. The ring shout in the marrow, that ancient Black praise where our ancestors circled slow, feet shuffling, hands clapping, voices rising as body and Spirit prayed together. That rhythm lives in us still.

We are not rushing. We are remembering. We are the daughters of those who made holy what was left. Who turned scarcity into sacrament. We cook memory into gumbo. We braid prayers into hair. We chalk the doorposts with hope and two fingers of oil. We dance our way through disappointment, wrists clapping time like church mothers keeping the beat.

Presence is the inheritance we give ourselves.
It is our right to be whole, unhurried, and seen. It is the sound of a people returning home to a pulse that never left them. It is vinyl spinning on a Saturday. Incense curling like a psalm. Children laughing in the hallway while greens simmer and the house breathes yes.

Let the world count its receipts.
We will count our blessings. The kind that cannot be bought. We will sit in the soft glow of being. Brown and breathing. Together and enough.

Because presence, when carried by descendants of resilience, is not a pause. It is power.
It is the sacred hush that saves us. Again and again.