holding on

Sending my love and care laced in garlic and protective smoke to you all. It's been an intense time, as I navigate, assess, feel, and dream my way through these incredibly uncertain times.

In this time, I am grateful for my ancestral technologies of care and resilience, for the seeds and gardens of food and medicine my family and I tend, and the calm knowing that my ancestors have weathered worse storms. With all that said, I am also simultaneously overwhelmed with grief, sadness and rage, as we witness and experience this pandemics reach. How are you and the ones you love?

A balm for these times personally has been looking to my community to listen and witness the wonder of hands and hearts helping and sharing care. It's been powerful to be apart of mutual aid networks, and to see what happens when we come together in these expansive ways. This pandemic is showing us, albeit non-consensually, the tears in our systems that need repair, if we are to imagine a future where all people are treated with respect and care. Migrants, refugees, folks in prison, communities of color, and low income folks are unequivocally disproportionately impacted by this pandemic.

As, Arundhati Roy says so powerfully,

"Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

I've added some photos from February below as a reminder for myself of the sweetness, positive mystery, exploration, beauty, love, pleasure, newness, and aliveness I have experienced. Hope these photos inspire you to keep the tiny flame in your heart alive for our new world dreamed.