authenticsheshe

Well it happened …

| Sheree
Jug, Simeon Leigh, Loophole of Retreat Exhibition

I come here with a heart filled with joy, love and gratitude.

I put my heart, soul, care and dreams into the WOC Azadi Collective fugitivity visual journaling retreat today.

The time/space we created together was magical. We’re becoming a fugitive collective, creating mischief as we steal ourselves away. Steal our lives back from systems of oppression, systems we never consented to but find ourselves subjected it.

We refuse.

I have so much love and gratitude for Dal Kular who got me back to work with the collective. Dal sees my practices and processes around my visual journaling and fugitivity and constantly cheers me on, holds space and supports me to explore these further in collective/ collaboration with beautiful people.

What we created was powerful and ripe with possibilities. What we can do together is empowering and criminal. Disorderly and messy and so much needed.

There are other ways to {BE} and I’m all for exploring these further, deeper, together.

MORE.

Satda Planning and Dreaming

| Sheree
Strategy for Fugitivity Retreat

After a busy week of being here there bad everywhere, I come to the page after my Satda Permaculture Gathering.

I’m planning out my workshop for my fugitivity visual journaling retreat with WOC Azadi Collective tomorrow. And I’m excited but also apprehensive. I had so much I want to share but I don’t want to spend all our time together talking. I don’t want to lecture to the participants but I get so excited when I’m sharing anything visual journaling and fugitivity. For me they go hand in hand.

I’m also worried that the participants might not get what I’m on about. I’m not sure sometimes. What I’m doing? What I mean when I practice fugitivity?

I suppose I won’t know until I put words to the air and attempt to communicate these liberatory practices.

Girl’s Reading for Pleasure

| Sheree

I’ve got a reading streak going on with kindle – not including the physical books I’ve read this year.

I’m at about 210 days and 70 books done. I surpassed my projection of 50 books on kindle.

Anyway when I get sick, I get to taking it even slower and instead of watching pap TV I turn to books to escape from my uncomfortableness and irritability.

It soothes me to read a good book. And I’ve been getting into speculative fiction. I would have said I’m crime fiction and romance fiction till I die. But once I’ve come to realise, really see how both of these genres prop up the capitalist, white supremacy, patriarchal, colonialist system, I can no longer read them with joy.

I can no longer read them full stop. So to fill the void, I’ve been reading non-fiction by black authors and speculative fiction by black authors too.

If I’m gonna be buying this shit then let me buy the shit that supports my people and continues to help me get free.

So here’s a selection my recent reads.

Out of sorts I am

| Sheree

These last few weeks of November have found me out of sorts if I’m being honest.

Things that I’ve committed to, or poured my energy into haven’t gone my way or come to fruition.

The disappointment has been at times crippling as well as left me questioning.

Am I good enough? Am I putting my eggs in the wrong basket? Am I really going to bring about change in a system not looking to change?

The sheer effort to keep pushing that boulder up the hill is taking its toll. There’s a voice that’s getting louder saying, why bother?

What the fuck am I doing anyway?

It doesn’t help having these thoughts and being ill too. It doesn’t help that I feel I’m making progress and then turn the next corner to just get knocked back.

While I sit and lick my wounds, doing all the things I said I would never do again, I have to ask myself what am I doing? Where am I going? And would it be just better for me if I stopped caring so much, stopped fighting the ways things are and just give up/ in and accept the crumbs I’m given and be grateful.

Like I said – out of sorts I am!