When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
When I was 5 it never occurred to me that I couldn’t be whatever I wanted to be…
Poor deluded Catholic school girl that I was.
So when my kindergarten teacher asked us to draw what we wanted to to be when we grew up, I drew myself as a priest.
My teacher took me aside to explain the patriarchy of the one holy and apostolic Church.
And that, my friends, is when this feminist was born.
Happy Easter
What bothers you and why?
The world is on fire, refugees to this country are living on the streets because of a shortage of affordable housing; the bodies of Indigenous women are tossed into landfills and the powers that be refuse to search for and recover them; minimum wage workers need to make on average $27/hour to be able to pay rent; interest rates are rising and crippling mortgage holders; the cost of groceries has skyrocketed while corporations report record profits; wildfires that ravage the planet and the air we breathe are the result of unfettered greed, destruction and deforestation over centuries.
And that’s just today’s headlines.
People suffer. Communities suffer. The earth and nature and wildlife suffer, all because hoarding wealth takes precedence over LIFE.
And the consistent message I’m hearing that it’s the fault of those suffering for not having played the capitalist game well enough.
The state of the world isn’t accidental. It’s happened by nefarious design and it’s criminal, all in order for an elite few to sit idly on their piles of gold.
No one is getting out of here alive. How can they not see they’re burning too?
That’s what fucking bothers me.
It took to my crone years before I was able to begin the ongoing work of detangling the voices in my head that weren’t mine.
Instead, they were the voices of a white-supremicist cis-heteronormative patriarchal, capitalist colonial machine, planted in my head to keep the machine chugging along.
Even my innate inclinations towards social justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, truth and reconciliation – inclinations that led me to labour and political activism – were informed by corrupted messages of grind culture (credit Rest as Resistance by Nap Ministry founder Tricia Hersey)
Working for social justice to create caring society in extractive and unsustainable work environments (using the tools of the master to dismantle the master’s home, to paraphrase Audre Lorde) led to a burnout from which it has taken years to recover.
I suspect I am not alone.
The interrelated systems of colonial capitalist fuckery employ a diverse set of tools to keep us separated from ourselves and our true nature.
They separate us from our hearts and souls, our bodies, the Earth, and each other by design.
The result us individual, collective, and environmental trauma.
Shame and binary thinking are two of its mainstay tools.
Shame is a liar, meant to keep us small and quiet and asleep, to prevent us from disrupting and challenging dysfunctional systems that harm. To prevent us from the thriving that is our birthright.
I believe the antidote is a return to the body, to interdependence, to rest, and reconnection with nature.
The antidote is individual and collective trauma healing.
This is what I am passionate about – to remember my wholeness, beginning in ecosystem of my own body, and rippling out from a place of sustainable thriving into my community, my work, and my world.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀
What are you passionate about?
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
What’s the oldest things you’re wearing today?
My skin