I love colour. Colour brings me a lot of joy. Red is usually my go to. Brown used to be my nemesis. But through use and practice I have learned to work well with brown now.
But purple is still a stumbling block. I’m not sure what it is with purple. It’s a regal colour, a symbol of power. But it just doesn’t do it for me.
It might be its sense of power that might be just too much for me. Too powerful.
Anyway, I was determined to worked into the colour purple today. Different shades of purple, to build up some layers, working it toward a pink palette. This sat better with me, for me. Made it easier on the eye and heart to be with purple.
Laying down the colour field, the piece felt flat and incomplete. Adding black and white lines worked for me. Gave me something to hang a feeling on.
What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
I’ve been noticing how my work/ being has been reactive. There’s been a sense of scarcity and time urgency that’s been guiding my thoughts and actions. There’s been a hopelessness. Because some incidents are out of my control but which have impacted me. There’s been feelings of not being appreciated, feeling a lack of trust and working without purpose, moving away from my core values and moral compass.
I might have been using food or drink to numb my way through the shit. Through the ‘work’, not allowing myself to feel and be present. Really present to all the feels.
Do you feel me?
I know I need to take a step back and really look at the life I’ve been living. This is the only life I have and cannot be relived. I have a deep desire to change the system. To abolish the system and live otherwise.
And yet in order to change the system, I have to change my life, how I live my life. The way / how I live has to reflect the way/ how I want the world to be.
What does this mean in reality?
How I am just as much as what I do within the system will have an effect on system change. I have to be living my life with intention and purpose. Making sure I’m living my values, that I’m not compromising my integrity. That each decision I make is coming from that place of love and trust and hope.
That I’m not shutting down but open to togetherness but also trusting my gut that when I say ‘no’ it’s not from a place of malice but from a place of capacity and boundaries.
I’m learning, I’m sharing and I’m growing. Alone and in collaboration.
And I’m feeling and shifting into the practice and recognition that this is coming from a place of love and care rather than exhaustion and pain.
Small steps. Small acts. Small makes up the large. Small scales up to large.
I’ve got to be practicing the world I want to see now in my own life. Daily. Practice.
Love not hate.
Cooperation not competition.
Conversation rather than condemnation.
More care less harm.
More listening less violence.
The turn towards Mother Nature rather than against her.
A recognition in the value and worth of every human being regardless of race, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, age, sexuality, body type and body and mind abilities.
From The Peoples Wants come a book that I invite you all to read. Alone and in group, reading and discussing together as we learn about revolutionary strategies for doing the work now to bring about structural change. How we can work together to make this happen.
I’m reading it now if anyone wants to join me in discussions about it, just get in touch.
Every vision is also a map. As freedom fighter Kwame Ture taught us, “When you see people call themselves revolutionary always talking about destroying, destroying, destroying but never talking about building or creating, they’re not revolutionary. They do not understand the first thing about revolution. It’s creating.”
This is why my favourite pattern within nature, apart from the wave, is the spiral. Again and again, experience shows me how we may feel that we are going around in circles doing the same things, making the same mistakes and never learning or moving forward.
But I beg to differ. I believe life’s journey is a spiral. Each year we go around, and it may feel as if we’re not moving. We’re not making any progress or making our mark. But I see it as coming back around over similar track but we have changed. Through the movement of time and experiences and knowledges, we’ve changed since the last time we were in this spot. It’s not the same spot. Things have shifted. and so we’ve changed. We’re not right back at the same point but moved further into the spiral. Not in a hierarchal way, , ascending or even descending, but more of a going deeper, more connected and centred movement of the journey.
Each rotation in the cycle, in the spiral throws up more learning and more insight that if we’re paying attention we can use on our life’s journey with more consciousness, connection and joy.
I share this because I’ve just recognised how I’ve moved through the spiral this year to come to further understandings and wisdom.
This time last year, preparing for anti-racism facilitation, I was reading What White People Can Do Next by Emma Dabiri.
It was from reading this slim volume of wisdom that I fell into ‘solidarity’ is needed within the anti-racism movement. In fact I started using a anti-racism is anti-capitalism. Solidarity between oppressed and marginalised groups in society is the way forward.
I went on a journey from here, maybe a spiralling into despair, as I searched for a group or organisation to be a member of, in solidarity across different sections of society. I was looking into the communist party, unions, anti-racism organisations, trying to find a place where I could belong and be in solidarity with others.
In my search, I found racism and sexism, individuals and groups still perpetuating the racial capitalist system. Still working with hierarchies and the unconscious bias that they were better than me, than they knew more than me therefore should control me.
I become demoralised and retreated. I put away my radical thoughts and ideas, convincing myself that it was better to be alone and true to my ideals than compromise and waste my time explaining or highlighting blind spots to so-called comrades.
And then these part few days, solidarity has raised its head again but through a different door. Through the door of abolitionism.
Ours is a fight against powerful systems of violence and terror.
In recognising the interconnectedness of systems of state violence, abolition can be the basis of a new solidarity: one that acknowledges specific experiences of violence in particular communities, whilst building a unified, internationalist resistance.
Abolition doesn’t understand the concept of solidarity as an airy-fairy call for different oppressed groups to ‘just get along’. Solidarity is a vital strategic response to the prevalence and ubiquity of state violence.
Abolition Revolution by Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean
As we have witnessed in the recent council elections, with the surge in the popularity of Reform. This isn’t because this party has set out a manifesto of policies that will solve the issues of poverty, unemployment, economic crisis, the state of the NHS, the policing in our schools and stop crime such as rapes and murders. No this party, it just playing out the age out trick of creating the ‘enemies within’. The ‘enemies within’ can carry all the responsibility for what’s wrong within British society today. The immigrants, the refugees, the gangs, the nasty women, the people with darker skin who are innately hardwired for crime. The general public, usually predominately working class white people, can blame others, other oppressed and marginalised people for all the woes of society. Smokescreens and mirrors, instead of people coming together, across class, race, gender, sexuality, religious lines, in solidarity and challenging racial capitalism and state control and violence which are geared towards keeping the majority of people in poverty at each other’s throats instead. While a few, usually white cis-gendered men, retain wealth, control and power.
I say Reform, but the present ‘Labour’ government operates the same way. They’re all apparatus of the State working to keep power and control through violence and terror in the hands of the few.
So for them the problem is not the historic experience of racism and the legacies of slavery and colonialism: it’s Black ‘gangsters’ on our streets. It’s not disinvestment from and neglect of working class communities: it’s Syrian migrants in our hospitals. It’s not military and imperial domination of vast swathes of the world: it’s Muslim extremists in our schools. Constructed ‘enemies within’ like these provide a constant justification for the use and expansion of state violence in order to maintain control; they tie people’s lived experience of the world to divisive narratives that weaken the collective consciousness of ordinary people. – Abolition Revolution by Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean
I see the value of solidarity now, in building power in the direction of marginalised groups because it weakens the State’s power and control which is based on divisive narratives that weaken the collective consciousness of everyday people. The marginalised and oppressed.
Now maybe if I had this knowledge, last year, cycling and spiralling looking for my tribe, I might have stuck it out a little longer. Allowed our differences and bias to take a back seat because I believed we were working together across solidarity lines. Maybe.
This year though, with another trip around the sun under my belt, and another spiral deeper into my learning, I believe my solidarity within these groups would have still faltered as within and outside of these groups because they are not spurred on from the foundations upwards and onward with an abolitionist revolutionary thought and praxis.
I see now that these groups are looking toward reform rather than abolition. They are satisfied with tinkering with the edges. Gaining small concessions rather than a total overhaul. It’s like asking for and being satisfied with a more comfortable prison cell as a demonstration of change in how the State handles inmates instead of defunding/ abolishing the prison industrial complex all together.
I see that now as I continue to spiral towards consciousness, again and again. Onwards.
Our ability to reframe failure into something that aligns with growth is key. When I fail at my attempts to execute an idea, I now have more information and I can use that to move forward. If I allow myself to feel defeated and tell myself that I’m not very good at this, then failure becomes a toxic thought that limits me and ensures I do not grow. – Cheryl Taves
Today I am 150 days into my creative sketchbook practice. Ego speaking here, but I’m pretty proud of this achievement. It demonstrates to me that I can be consistent.
These 150 days are evidence that I can change the script. I can change the narrative from not being consistent enough in my art practice, hells bells in anything really.
I can change the narrative into something more true, more closer to my reality. I can change the narrative, I am changing the narrative toward recognising that I can be consistent.
My consistency muscle is being exercised, challenged and stretched.
With 150 days of turning up daily for my practice, I can quite rightly say, my consistency muscle has been strengthened.
After making plans for the year, 2026, April was a time to reflect and reset after the first quarter of the year.
April didn’t go to plan.
April is always a funny, awkward, weird month for me, what with it being cut up with Easter holidays. And both my babies being born in April. This year was also another April birthday as we welcomed Nath’s partner into the fold.
April is something and nothing.
April, I thought it would be a good time to review the situation. It happened I suppose but not to the depth and width that I would have like. That I probably needed.
April has come and gone.
Come the end of the month and I don’t feel any further forward. And it feels like last year, when I couldn’t get traction after an elongated winter hibernation. Every month that came along was like a reset, a restart as I had no momentum.
I’m not sure if I’m that bad this year but there’s that lingering feeling of what am I doing? Where am I going?
April, Who am I?
I could blame the menopause as I feel as if I’m in that stage of life now. Everything is slowing down or giving up working ‘properly’ bodily, emotionally and psychologically.
Some days I’m missing the plot , dropping the ball, checking all the way out.
In these moments of losing myself, or any kind of sense of self and direction, I fall back into trusted routines and rituals.
I go back to the start, back to ‘go’ and don’t collect my £200. But restart anyway.
I invest in my morning rituals. Those habits that ground me and set me up for the rest of the day.
Waking up early, getting some fresh air into the house and my lungs. Making fresh ground coffee and grabbing my visual journal and letting everything spill onto the page. Get ready and walk out. Walk where? Anywhere. Just be outside and give thanks to be able to {BE}.
May. This is my plan for May.
To stick close to my morning routine and everything else can follow. The sea and Mother Nature are in there too, no doubt.
Hopefully, putting down this trusted track will help support getting me back to myself.
At different times of my life, I was either really into drawing or gone off the boil from drawing.
Basically, if I allowed my drawings to come into contact with other people, that’s when my drawing would go off the boil. I wouldn’t do it, I’d let the practice slide because someone or other had said my drawing wasn’t very/any good.
Or they’d looked at what I’d shared and start giving me pointers on how to improve it. How to shade ‘properly’ or how to get things into ‘proportion’. Basically saying that what I was doing, instinctively and true to me, was wrong.
For large stretches of time, I didn’t allow myself to draw, to play because in comparison to others, my work just didn’t match up. Didn’t look like theirs.
And then one time, while feeling less than, while feeling the odd one out, not accepted or appreciated, I picked up a pen and started drawing again. I found solace and safety in the lines I drew.
Faces, I love drawing faces. Usually of black women. Seeing myself reflected.
I completed a 100 days of black women one time, a few years ago now and I loved where this challenge took me. It took me to a place and peace of accepting my drawings. My style, my subjects and themes, my shading and perspectives.
Fuck man, we’re all individuals, unique and no way are we supposed to or should be drawing all alike, to a certain standard or brief.
My drawings are an expression of me, and how I see/ move through this world.
I’m dealing with it. I’m embracing it. And fuck everyone else!
Things are definitely looking up when I give myself the time and space to look to the sky.
Spending time cloud watching is always a good indication to/ for myself that I’m slowing down, that I’m breathing that little bit deeper, than I’m present.
When clouds go missing from my radar, from my daily view then it’s time to worry.
As it’s another indication that I’m not taking my medicine, that I’m allowing the shit of this world to overtake me, to bog me down.
Cloud watching, cloud appreciation is such a simple task, gift to myself and yet the loss of it, can mean the loss of self.
Living Wild Studios 