06/19/2026
💛Today, we honor Juneteenth, a day that commemorates freedom, resilience, and the enduring pursuit of justice. We are honored to share a reflection from writer, educator, and yoga student, Rachel 💛
Juneteenth
I’ve been thinking the past few days about the black Texans who first had cause to celebrate June nineteenth. These were the descendants of the calamitous trafficking of humans to this new world, the surviving lineage of the mass killing of millions of African people in the Middle Passage. I do not presume to understand the abyss of the horrors they endured nor the enormity of the might that sustained them. But history and wisdom teach me that their ancestors’ survival, first on the angry shores of Virginia, then the fetid slave markets of Charleston and New Orleans, to the loamy soil of Texas was not by chance.
If there is any message for us, their posterity, in this - and I believe our ancestors long to speak to us - if we would only listen - the one I hear today is this: Live. Because they did not.
Live because they did.
I do not know how that translates for you. Today, for me, it means making the foods my grandmothers taught me using recipes kept only in their hearts, loving - loudly and with every breath of my being - the people I hold most dear, and watching the world’s first Black independent republic play the country with the largest Black population outside of Africa in the World Cup - reveling in the joy and expanse that is this beautiful diaspora.
Because here is the secret: We were not meant to survive, and yet here we are.
We were not meant to survive, and yet here we are.
We were not meant to survive, and yet here you are.
(Picture: Juneteenth Celebration Austin, TX 1880)
Thank you, 🤎
