Notes from the Garden
some things I’ve been sitting with… I’ve been on an Instagram break bc my adhd loves the notifications and reels & swiping through stories endlessly and that keeps my stuck in the couch all day. I’ve been thinking a lot about the longevity of this moment. I want to shift my life such that fighting for liberation isn’t something that will fade from my life in a year. That meant (for me) taking a pause to return to myself, to nurture and grow the marrow in my bones to be an abundant and fertile ground for the action born of my grief (h/t @ismatu.gwendolyn, go read the essay/listen to the recent podcast). When I think about what I, someone who lives and benefits from my location in the heart of empire, can do to be in meaningful solidarity with oppressed people globally part of that is where I put my attention, focus and energy (another reflection from Ismatu, seriously go listen to Threadings on Spotify) is lucrative. How & where am I grounding my time, energy, effort & attention in the trajectory that knows there are P4l est inians in the future? What am I doing now to support that? What is it that only I can do to support that? How does that translate to the way I engage in and sustain my communities & the causes that are important to me, outside of the state? The urgency is real. The pain is real. I’m posting from my couch & I wanna (barf emoji)🤮. & we can’t do meaningful work if we can’t show up. More importantly, we (US-ians) can’t engage meaningfully unless we are willing to give up our comfort & radically (!) shift… everything about the way we operate. How do you act on the discomfort of knowing your most enjoyable days of shopping, getting new tech, a cornucopia of fruits in the grocery store available year round are because of the d3aths of oppressed people worldwide?
This week Speckle the golden pothos reminded me of my ever changing nature. As she turned select leaves yellow, prompting them to shrivel and remove themselves from her vines, she taught me about the power of focus.
“What’s beautiful is we can change in the direction of our focus. If you have no focus, it’s not that you wont grow. It simply begs the question: how much stronger could you have grown by having focus that fuels your discernment? Your pruning? Just because you can give your energy in any and every direction, doesn’t mean you should.”
My discernment conserves my energy for the places i need it, and it removes it from the places, spaces, and entities that are simply around to ciphon it for themselves. Everyday for the last year and a half I’ve affirmed that “I am radiant.” And while that is true and i do believe im on tis earth to share my gifts and my radiance, what do I stand to gain by being discerning and honing my focus on myself? I’m not sure what my most focused, most discerning, most prudent self looks like but if I could give so much to others while failing to be discerning I wonder how much more I could give to myself when I do exercise that discernment. It sounds selfish and intially feels wrong, but if I’m truly invested in liberation as a lifestyle and not a trend or something to burn out on, don’t I need a starting place for radically shifting my energy and my focus so that it can not only sustain itself, but increase to meet the needs of the suffering in the world?