Twenty Things

number 39

In such dark times, it’s hard to find hope or joy or beauty amidst it all.

I started my Substack in 2020, and obviously that year it was hard to find anything to hold onto that was joyful, but, even then, I knew it was vital for us to do. To remember why we are alive and why we live, to reframe survival and expand into new parts of ourselves. I also wanted to offer my paid subscribers something more intimate and playful, a way for us to remain tethered to all the things we miss or overlook through so much destruction and gloom. Thank you for being here, thank you for supporting me. These are tender things, moments, songs, photos I’ve been collecting over the last few weeks and I’m excited to share them with you.

Speaking of tenderness, I’ll be co-faciliating this online class this Saturday with my dear friend Ev’Yan Whitney, who is a somatic practioner and writer, and we’ll be working through prompts and somatic postures to get closer to the stories that our bodies are telling us. If you know about any of my work in the realm of healing, you know how much our bodies store, and how I believe it’s our {r}evolutionary duty to release and understand ourselves on that level. I really see this with a lot of my friends that are organizers or work in healing… we don’t know how to look after ourselves, we don’t know how to face ourselves, our pasts, the brutal realities of how we’ve been shaped by genocide, mass migration, colonization or even just deep-seated familial traumas. Our bodies tell us so much but we rarely listen. What if our bodies are gateways to new ways of being? I think this is what decolonization means.

I’m living in exile currently, trying to figure out how to firmly place my new roots while apart of me is still disjointed, my home and the vast majority of my friends and comrades are still in the US… it’s a strange time but I find myself seeking joy in new ways, finding things that move me and being moved by art in ways I’ve never been moved before. I’m thinking a lot about this James Baldwin quote:

“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.”

May we remember art can save us and it can redeem us. It can light the way forward for us when all else fails.

Here’s Twenty Things that have moved me recently.

with love,

f