medicine

To start living how I want the world to be

| Sheree

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.

The Wind and Rain

| Sheree

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.

A May Day’s Musing

| Sheree

April was the reset month.

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.

Taking the time to play

| Sheree

I’ve always loved drawing.

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!

Cloud Watching in Faro, Portugal

| Sheree

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.

Coming in late

| Sheree

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.

Sidekick

| Sheree

I’m about 116 days into my creative sketchbook practice. Started back in December 2025, my creative sketchbook practice is about turning up each day to the blank page, in an altered book, and getting creative. It’s about playing with my resources, stuff I’m been accumulating for years and always seem to have an excuse not to use. Not to start.

Well 116 days ago I started. I put paint to page without knowing what was going to happen. And over 100 days later, it’s the same feeling. Turn up to the page and dive into the unknown, allowing my intuition, my inner wisdom to guide my hand and heart towards what becomes. Towards what is created.

What I’m gotten into the habit of doing is when I used a brayer with paint on the page, I start by adding a drop or two of paint on a blank page of another sketchpad. A kid’s cheap wire bound sketch pad. I’ll roll out my brayer coating it in paint before I let it roll into my creative sketchbook.

And repeat with other colours, other rolls of paint in different directions. Each time, paint is added and subtracted from the kid’s sketchpad.

I’m calling this my sidekick. Think Robin to Batman. Think Watson to Holmes. An associate, a supporting role. A necessary comrade in the scheme of things. Without which the main action, or in this case creation would not occur.

Always a happenstance. Sometimes a masterpiece. This sidekick is full of surprises. And sometimes are much better to look at than the ‘so-called’ finished piece in the creative sketchbook.

Sometimes pages from the sidekick are torn and stuck into the main squeeze, the creative sketchbook, and are involved once more in the daily creative practice. Reusing, recycling, reviewing.

Each sketchbook, each piece, each stroke of paint feeds into the next from the last. I just love the process and what it throws up. This might be just another reason why I keep returning and keep diving into this creative sketchbook practice. Daily!

let this be the healing

| Sheree

after Danez Smith

let this be the healing

the out of time and space

to flow back to the source

of love & care

let this be the honey to the wounds

the joy within the unknown

the hope to survive

in the mouth of the dragon*

let this be the refusal

the movement underground

to protect our vulnerabilities

let this be the healing

*a line from Audre Lorde’s ‘ The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’ in Your Silence Will Not Protect You.