You don't even have the kind of courage to pursue liberation if you don't believe you're worthy to be free.

Tony Morrison actually said this, you know, being freed was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

And I knew, you know, if I'm really gonna, in the end, talk about what it means to experience some kind of liberation,

I have to start with this origin story of dignity.

Cole Arthur Reilly grew up in a house full of personalities that she described as loud and funny, but as a kid loved as she felt.

She kept her voice from others. In fact, Cole barely spoke until she was seven. Still her dad, he kept finding ways to, as she described,

bribe her to share her voice and nurture her creative impulse, often in writing and poems and stories and beyond.

And as she grew into herself, she developed this dual passion for contemplative spirituality and also the work of writers like

Audra Lorde, Octavia Butler, James Baldwin, Thomas Burton, Tony Morrison, Maya Angelo, over time, her lens on spirituality,

it's stored to yearn for a more expansive expression, one that embodied more of her lived experience as a black queer woman who also found herself living with an autoimmune disease that manifested in illness

and uncertainty. And Cole was drawn to literature and began to write her own blended prayer meets poetry informed by really her unique experience of life and faith and love and creativity,

harm, inequity and justice. And she began sharing these modern literatures on Instagram under the moniker, Black Literities, which she described as

a space for Black spiritual words of liberation, lament, rage and rest. And the project it quickly grew into this global phenomenon.

With deep resonance far beyond her original intended audience and led to her debut book, This Hair Flush, which explores some of the most urgent questions of life and identity and faith,

how can spirituality not silence the body, but instead allow it to come alive? How do we honor lament and heal from the stories we inherit?

How can we find peace in a world overtaken with dislocation noise and unrest?

In this really beautiful and stunning work, Cole invites us to descend into our own stories and examine our capacity to rest,

wonder, joy, rage, repair and find that our own humanity is not an enemy to faith but evidence of it.

So excited to share this conversation with you.

I'm a quick note before we dive in. So at the end of every episode, I don't know if you've ever heard this, but we actually recommend a similar episode. So if you love this episode, at the end, we're going to share another one that we're pretty sure you're going to love too. So be sure to listen for that.

Okay, onto today's conversation. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

This book by the way, gorgeous. Thank you.

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