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.
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.
As the north-east is gripped in another cold snap, with wind and rain, in May, I’m desiring a return. A return to Faro, Portugal, where in March, I enjoyed a few days of warmth, relaxation and inspiration.
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.
Sweeping violins. A Southern Belle, pretty and shallow, chatters on as young men flock around her feet, captive. *Fiddle de de.* Relishing in colour, technicolor; rich reds, blues and greens of the gallant Old South. Pan out see mansions surrounding by plantations. Bonnets and ribbons. Dances and horses. Cotton.
I first read Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell while completing an extra year at college. Gaining extra ‘A’ levels while I waited on my then boyfriend to make the grades.
I identified with Scarlett O’Hara, the bitch of a heroine, not Mammy. I definitely was no mammy. Not here to fetch and clean and be loyal. I definitely was not obese and coarse and ugly, or ‘have a shiny, glossy face of contentment as she be the most happy slave alive.’
Of course as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned where I’m placed in society. It’s okay to fantasise being the white heroine but I’ll never really be her. Better learn my place – to be there for the pleasure and enjoyment and whim of the white folk – and smile.
But what about my own pleasures and pains? Apparently they don’t exist. Apparently I’m incapable of such things, such finer characteristics. My reality states/shows otherwise.
It’s quitting time. I’m retreating into the woods in Aberdeenshire for the next week. I’m taking this opportunity as a reset. A chance to focus on my pleasures and pains. Drink on Mother Nature and give thanks for this life I have which isn’t being subservient/ submissive/ subjection to anybody.
I refuse the Mammy as well as the Scarlett, as they are both constructions and constrictions to control the female body.
I’m much more interested in the overspill, the excess, the unruly body. The blackwoman body that I live with/in daily and how nature supports me on this journey.
As a wind of flames sweeps through Georgia; menacing reds and oranges against a bleak dark sky swirl and crackle in time with fast ascending music. Real danger and Butterfly McQueen (real name not character name that would be Missy) flits around like a blue arsed fly worrying with no sense or plan.
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.
I’ve been coming later and later to my creative sketchbook practice this month.
It’s day 123. 123 days since I started this practice of play within my creative sketchbook. Daily.
This piece tonight is significant because it chimes with my word of the year/ focus of the year being AFROSURREAL.
The right now. Capturing the now.
AFROSURREAL has been bubbling below the surface all year so far. I’m thinking it’s about time to share my musings and thinkings here in a mini series of posts.
Everything is overlapping and I’m fixing to gain some clarity knowing fine well that the practice of writing it out will only throw up more questions than answers.
The Matterings of (ordinary) Black Life is the practice. The push back against the colonial, historical categorisation of black people as subhuman. As stereotype as no life beyond the construct.
Right now. Black life. Black aliveness.
I’m living a/my reality which isn’t acknowledged or if is then it’s challenged/ denied/ erased.
It’s important to storytell, mythmake, historicise and archive within these liminal spaces. Centre the margins where these matterings happen.
Through the reconstruction and recalibration, healing and reparative processes challenge the exclusions and colonial impulses to conquer, control and exploit.
Expect to read more around AFROSURREAL and the overlaps with my other obsessions as through my research and readings and writings, I attempt to come to some understanding of myself and my creativity, moving backward and forwards between the now and beyond.
Describe one positive change you have made in your life.
It’s a luxury I know. It’s probably frowned upon. It’s probably not seen as productive within white supremacy culture. It’s probably classed as dangerous. I know it’s where the best insights happen.
In the morning. In my bed. In a book (non-fiction at that).
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve taken to my bed. Well really, I don’t leave my bed, in the morning, until I’ve had a thorough lazy read. A slow imaginative wandering through my current squeeze of a book.
A Nation of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran, an exiled Turkish author who is unhomed but can see how we’re all becoming unhomed , one way or another, due to the rise of fascism.
Climate refugees, political dissenters, people seeking asylum from persecution, may be where our minds go when we think of the homeless. And yet, within these times of far right practices, war and genocide, the silent majority may still be in their homes but feel no longer at home.
Home is no longer what we knew it to be. Home is no longer safe and stable. Home is terror and fear. Home becomes strange. We become strangers and unhomed.
Some of us have never felt at home even when we have made our homes here in the UK as the message has always been we’re not welcome here. We do not belong here. Even if born here.
We search for a language to talk, to share our feelings and experiences of being a stranger within our own lands. It’s a practice.
I continue to practice reclaiming my mornings. Reclaiming the slow rise, reclaiming the time and space to read at leisure. Finding some refuge, some peace within a cocoon of sheets and pillows. Warm and cosy and safe for now.
“When Brian asks me about the word exile as we sit in front of the audience, the words come out of me as if a film ribbon were spooling off its reel. ‘Let me list why this exile thing is no longer plausible and, in fact, already a stale joke. One: Exile is not as sexy as it has been, despite what some still want to assume. I know Westerners still like to think of Europe as the safe haven for the oppressed intellectuals of the Global South, but that is giving too much credit to Europa when thousands are pushed back into the sea to die. Putting the spotlight on “the exile” to divert from “the refugee” operates as a crisis management tool, if not a branding strategy for Europe’s self-image. The Europeans’ need to believe that the continent is still a civilised haven is as critical as the refugees’ need for safety. Two: Exile is a title of nobility that generates undeserved attention. The undocumented refugees, the precarious majority of the unhomed, don’t even get a chance to relay their name so it can be put on their tombstone, whereas an exile is asked too often. Alas, many of us accept the invitation to go on and on about ourselves. We are the boring windbag aristocrats of the greater society of the unhomed. Three: The title exile gives you only two chances in life – you are either kept hostage by your personal melodrama or enslaved by the constant urge to reject your tragedy. Life cannot be diminished into such an unending test of dignity, and it certainly cannot be confined to the limits of the self. Four: If one accepts the title exile, one can never arrive home. But the fifth and the most important reason is …’ For a split second, I catch a glimpse of the listening faces. They are mostly activists, people who are already at work to build a new world, a new home. And it is hard to put your finger on it, but when you know, you know – they are with me, we are in sync. Also, now that ‘the most important’ has already escaped my mouth, I am at that delicious moment of no return. I gear up. “Yes, the most important reason is that you are no different than me. Do you, I mean, let’s be honest here, do you really think you are more at home than me? Of course not. Otherwise, why would you, as beautiful human beings of the earth, be trying to change the world and talk about building communities all the time? Why would you imagine shelters from, rather than movements against the new fascism building around the globe? Don’t you think there is already a sense of defeat there? Aren’t you already admitting that the world is not your home anymore but a hideous jungle from which you need to seek shelter? Yes, we are many in our discontent, but still, we cannot make enough of a majority; we cannot shape the political reality into a new home. We are not powerful enough to make this world our home again, not yet. From where I sit, you are no less homeless than me. Or, if you like the word better, we are all exiles already. Misfits, outcasts, the displaced and the disowned. We are the strangers of the world”
Living Wild Studios 