What the Next Generation Inherits

Dear Beloved,

If Brittany Packnett Cunningham opened this season by asking what we are ready to seed, and if Katara McCarty reminded us that no seed survives without living soil, then Dena Simmons brings us to the next sacred threshold in the third episode of Meet Me at the Highland™’s Season Two:

What are we planting in the emotional ground of the generations coming after us?

Because not all soil is visible. Some soil lives in the body. Some soil lives in memory. Some soil lives in classrooms, homes, hallways, and communities. Some soil is made of what a child learns to do with grief. What an educator learns to do with exhaustion. What a Black girl learns to do with her anger, her brilliance, her tenderness, her questions. What a community learns to call care. What a system teaches people to swallow in order to survive.

This is the soil Dena tends.

She begins by calling in her mother — Jacklyn Constant Roberta Knowles. Who would later add Simmons to her name – the name Dena calls her mother’s name of liberation. A woman who came to this country alone at 18 with just $25 in her pocket and made a way not only for herself, but for her three daughters. That story matters here because Dena’s legacy is not separate from her mother’s. It is an extension, a widening, and in some ways, a refusal. Her mother had to make a way out of no way.

Seeded by her mother’s journey, Dena’s legacy asks: how do we create conditions where Black children, Black educators, and Black communities no longer have to be formed through constant survival alone? That question feels especially important after witnessing the legacies in progress of Brittany and Katara. Brittany taught us that even a mustard seed can change the whole field. Katara taught us that we cannot keep burning the soil and calling it devotion. And Dena now teaches us that the emotional and relational ground beneath people’s lives matters just as much as any dream we claim to plant there.

What is the use of aspiration if children are never asked how they are? What is the use of achievement if success requires swallowing every difficult feeling? What is the use of care if it is disconnected from justice, context, and power? Dena’s life and work sit inside those questions.

She speaks of being taught, as so many Black girls are, to be strong, to be good, to aspire, to not cause problems. She speaks of becoming the child who swallowed her emotions when her twin sister became chronically ill, because no one asked how she was. She speaks of later redefining success after leaving Yale — realizing that wellness was not separate from success, but part of it. That success could no longer be measured only by accolades, institutions, or proximity to prestige, but had to include self-preservation, care, laughter, family, and the full processing of what the body has carried.

That is not a small shift. That is a replanting. And it is precisely what makes Dena such an important guide in this season. Because once we start talking about seeding, and once we start talking about soil, we must also confront the systems that shape what gets to grow. Dena reminds us that children are always being educated into some definition of success, some relationship to emotion, some story about whose lives matter, some sense of whether their humanity will be held or ignored. If that is true, then the question is not whether we are tending the emotional soil of the next generation. The question is how.

What are we normalizing? What are we rewarding? What are we asking children and educators to suppress? What are we teaching them to trust? What are we teaching them to fear? What would it mean to build ecosystems of care where listening, context, and humanity are not extras, but part of the ground itself?

This is where Dena’s legacy becomes so necessary. She is not only naming what is broken. She is insisting that wellness without justice is insufficient. That care without cultural responsiveness can become another form of erasure. That emotional support divorced from power and context will always fail the people most harmed by the systems around them.

And that true care begins, sometimes, with the simplest and most radical questions: How am I really? What would feel good right now?

Those questions may sound small. But in Dena’s hands, they become world-building because they interrupt performance. They interrupt disconnection. They interrupt the machinery that teaches us to override the body, mistrust our knowing, and keep producing through pain. They invite us back into relationship with ourselves, and from there, back into relationship with one another.

That is why this episode feels like a deepening of the whole season. Brittany asked us to plant. Katara asked us to protect the soil. Dena asks us to become far more intentional about the emotional, spiritual, and relational ground we are leaving behind for others to grow in.

And perhaps that is one of the most important forms of legacy there is: not just planting a dream, not just protecting your own wholeness, but tending the inner conditions that make future freedom possible.

Until we meet again at the Highland - sending love,

Gabrielle

Write at the top of the page: What am I helping grow in the emotional soil around me?

Then reflect on these questions:

• What did I learn as a child about emotions, strength, and success?

• Where have I been taught to swallow what I really feel?

• What kind of emotional climate do I create in my home, work, or community?

• What would it mean to make care, context, and justice part of the ground itself?

• What do I want the people coming after me to inherit emotionally and relationally?

Close with: The emotional soil I want to help leave behind is ________.