i try to connect beauty using words as healers of possibilities from the state within, the voice, a teacher, a sage, where my poetry winters, where I can see the ‘I’ like a clearing through the trees, where imagination lingers inch wide mile deep, conjuring for change and connection. i try language, not to trick or demonstrate my intellect, but to spark simple, stretching blossoms into ‘we’ rather than ‘them and us’. from the state without, i’m a beast, caged and muzzled. swallowed. cornered and supposedly cowered, i come out writing, wading into dangerous waters, owning my imagination to practice potential futures.
*“An ars poetica poem is a poem examining the role of poets themselves as subjects, their relationships to the poem, and the act of writing.” —Poets.org
For those of us who live at the shoreline… Audre Lorde
It will be 10 years this August that I started my visual journaling practice.
Then it was called Dreaming on Paper, as I completed the course of the same name by Lisa Sonora.
I needed a safe space to explore the tumult of my feelings and thoughts. I was going through a traumatic experience of escape really. Escape from the life I’d spent the past 12 years building up, that was took away in the flick of a Facebook post.
I ran away from the public, the writing community, my home as I travelled into the Scottish Highlands and Islands. To heal.
Visual journaling helped me heal. Helps me continue to heal.
Overtime, I’ve come to understand my visual journal practice as a fugitive practice. Within these paints, images and words, dreams of freedom are planned out and eventually come to fruition. Projects, happenings, events – all on my own terms.
I mean, the whole point about escape is that it’s an activity. It’s not an achievement. You don’t ever get escaped. – Fred Moten
Within these visual journal spreads, I work out how to escape, how to get outside white supremacy culture while still having to be living on the inside. Coming to terms with the thought of that the outside can only occur from the inside. Being here.
Visual journaling is me trying to create an opening, a break in the fabric in which to slip on through into the otherside/ outside, into the woods running between the trees with the dogs barking at my feet. Creating beauty, creating a beautiful space in which to linger in while the terror rages around me.
Visual journaling is a safe space, is a nurturing space, is a free space.
When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
When I was five I said to my mum when I grow up I want to be a lollipop lady.
I saw a lot of lollipop ladies as I walked to and from school each day. Not only did I love the bright yellow uniform and the hat. But I also loved how they had the power to stop traffic.
Lollipop ladies just walk out into the road put down their lollipop stick and stick up a hand and the cars stop for them.
I thought that was cool.
But the main reason I wanted to be a lollipop lady was because they were always smiling. They always greeted me with a smile and a good morning or the question, ‘Good day at school?’
Lollipop ladies not only looked like they were enjoying their job but they were also sharing that joy with others, even if only for the little time it took for me to walk across the road in front of them with the cars at bay.
They were smiling.
So I wanted to be a lollipop lady when I was five and I told my mum. My mum said I couldn’t be a lollipop lady. No, she said. Maybe when you retire but not until then. You can be anything you want to be Sheree, she said. Save being a lollipop lady until you retire.
I better start filling out my application then as I’m getting old (er).
March is nearly over. I spent a lot of it getting ready for a trip that didn’t happen. I’m still sore around the wound but will share here at some point.
The journal above which I share is the journal I created for my travels. It’s an Elle Decorating Magazine which I’ve repurposed. I pulled out the images and text I wanted to use in my visual journaling and then painted over the remaining pages.
It’s rough and ready. Messy and grungy and in the process I didn’t realise how much it has reflected my mood.
It’s not perfect.
I’ve been all over the place in terms of my moods these past few weeks. Serene and blissed out to stressed and anxious and angry.
And this messy, at times ugly, journal has captured it all. And I am grateful for its space and non-judgmental welcome.
I’ll be back here over the coming days to share the spreads that have been created in this journal. Just so you can see a bit more of my process and practice.
One more thing. The back of this journal was converted into a mini guide book to take on my travels with me. Since I didn’t make that trip, I haven’t been back into the back of the journal. I was also contemplated chucking the whole thing and start a new journal as I felt it would be painful and annoying to continue to use the journal as its purpose was for my time away.
But instead of avoiding the pain and frustrations and disappointments, continuing to use the journal has meant I haven’t run away from the feels but have allowed myself to sit with the feels.
I’m not sure if that means I’m a glutton for punishment or if I’m just all in with this life, my life of attempting to thrive rather than just survive.
Still showing up in this journal, just created from a magazine man, has given me the time and space to work through my feelings and come through feeling grateful for my life and the people I have around me who care about me and love me.
Visual journaling, it kills me in how it’s such a powerful tool for staying present and connecting with the self. Amazeballs!
As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future if change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Audre Lorde, ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’, on Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984), 37.
I’ve got time on my hands to read. A reading week as we used to say at Uni. Why? Well that’s another story, I’ll tell you at another time, maybe.
For now, I’m getting my teeth into something that will make me feel better, or feel as if I’m getting somewhere with my self-study/permaculture diploma design/ ways of being.
I’m reading The Black Feminist Reader edited by Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. And I’m heartened to read in the first essay in the collection by Barbara Christian, ‘The Race for Theory’, that along with her Black sisters, Christian has not rushed to create abstract theories around how to read Black women writers/ Black women’s literature. The argument goes that there are countless Black women around the world, women colour around the world, and one single set of ideas cannot be applied to such diversity.
As Christian goes on to argue, “There is, therefore, a caution we feel about pronouncing black feminist theory that might be seen as a decisive statement about third world women. This is not to say we are not theorizing. Certainly our literature is an indication of the ways in which our theorizing, of necessity, is based on our multiplicity of experiences.” ( p.20)
Instead of being seduced into the academy, being at the centre, desiring/ claiming what might seem like power within the hierarchy of old traditional departments of knowledge, where the Black female experience is subordinate to others, ” We can pursue ourselves as subjects”. ( p.21)
This is music to my ears as I have always found it difficult to pin down what is Black Feminist Theory. What does it entail? What are the tools of engagement? What methods should be employed to reading Black women writers?
But that’s where I’ve been going wrong, thinking about theory. As for me theory was legitimisation. Writing dies if it’s not being talking about, theorised. But now I understand that :
Theory has been their way, their terms, their approaches ( p. 16)
Theory has been more about how clever the theorist is than about the writing or writer
Theory is prescriptive and it ought to have something to do with practice (p.13)
Theory is about those masters who have long gone and not about the here and now.
And as Christian states, and I totally agree, “But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And for me I mean that literally. For me literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/ know is.”(p. 21)
So I’m following Christian in my pursuit of what Black Feminism(s) is by having no fixed method of enquiry or even results. My method relates to what I read and the historical context of the writers I read and “to the many critical activities in which I am engaged, which may or not involve writing.” ( p.22)
So there is no set method within Black Feminist Theory and is influenced by practice, no prerequisite of a new theory as every work suggests a new approach, forcing me to think differently.
“As risky as that might seem, it is, I believe, what intelligent means – a tuned sensitivity to that which is alive and therefore cannot be known until it is known.”( p. 22)
This piece was written back in 2020 and published on Medium. I’ve brought it over here to be part of my writing archive. I also feel that the case needed restating frequently. Did I say daily?
We queue with our shopping basket. This is the norm now. But we don’t complain. It keeps everyone safe. We’re at the front of the queue, for a change. My daughter and I. We’ve only come to the one shop. I let her ride her bike into town. She needs the exercise as she’d be happy in front of her screen all day. I probably would too, as at least she’s inside safe, connecting with her friends, and I get a moment to myself.
Front of the queue, but we hold back as the woman in front of us has just gone into the shop. There’s someone coming out at the same time. The store security guard is standing in the mix too. We allow a gap to form between us; the woman and the entrance and our bodies. Coming across from an adjacent shop, a man and woman stride. Stride into the front of the queue, ready to walk into the shop. I raise my voice just above my normal speaking voice to say to them, There’s a queue. We’re waiting to go into the shop too.
I think I’m smiling but how can they know? How can anyone tell if you’re smiling when you’re wearing face protection? By your eyes. I think by the eyes, you can tell if someone is smiling. It’s a warm, sunny day. I’m wearing sunglasses. Maybe they can’t see my eyes. They can only use my voice as means of communication.
Sorry, they say. We thought the queue was going the other way. They walk to join the queue behind us. I say, in a tone of voice which I think says I understand, No, the lady in front of us has just gone in and we’re waiting back here to giving everyone some space.
In the time it takes for the couple to walk and wait behind us, at the recommended 2 metres, the woman of the couple has already started saying in a loud enough voice for us to hear, Some people are just getting angry about the situation now, and there’s s no need for it. We walk into the shop.
Note: The angry Black woman stereotype portrays a black woman as sassy, ill-mannered, and ill-tempered by nature.
Walking back home, Ella walking with her bike, I approach what happened outside the shop, asking Ella if she heard what the woman said about people getting angry.
She was referring to me. I explained. She saw me as an angry Black woman. Do you think I was angry because you’ve seen me angry?
My daughter knows me. She knows I wasn’t angry and says so.
When you live in a society where you’re powerless, perceived as worthless and inferior, those who have power, believing themselves to be superior, spend their time telling others how they handle the situation isn’t right. They tell you that how you speak or act or response isn’t appropriate. You are wrong. They gaslight you, forcing you to doubt yourself; your actions and capabilities. You are at fault, always. You are wrong. You are silenced.
Back home, I talk to my husband, who’s a white man. I think if he’d been with us, the woman behind us, wouldn’t have uttered the angry line. He disagrees. She sounds like a woman who would have gotten annoyed if anyone had checked her behaviour, he said.
He has the right to think and say that. And maybe he’s right. Who knows? But to accept this explanation, I’d have to disallow what I feel about the situation. I’d have to make allowances once again for someone else’s behaviour, reaction and treatment of me. I’ve spent a lifetime of making allowances for other people’s treatment of me. How can I be sure that when they treat me unfairly, or discriminate against me that this isn’t how they treat everyone else? I don’t know. All I have is the way they make me feel. My lived experience as a Black woman.
All I know is that when I’m walking down the street and someone is coming towards me, it’s me who walks into the road to maintain social distancing. It’s me who walks into the gutter to keep us both safe. Would they do the same? I don’t know. I can’t take the risk to wait and find out either.
I’ve been socialised, fed the stereotype of the angry Black woman for so long, I police myself. I play my part. I don’t raise my voice. I don’t protest or question. It’s part of my make-up to check myself so I appear in society as passive and non-confrontational and unseen.
I wake up ( that is if I got any sleep) and give thanks.
Play Love Dimension by Beautiful Chorus a few times
Water out/ water in
Back to bed for Insight Timer medication or course
Read in bed
Make coffee and then journal in bed
Get up.
Strength training with free weights
Move my body – yoga/ walk/run/ swim
Greet the world with a smile.
What led you to this morning routine?*
Well I started on this find tuning of a morning routine at the beginning of January 2025, more or less. I was hibernating and I wanted to start a ritual that would anchor me into my life. Into the present moment at the same time as showing to myself that I am loved. I’ve done everything in my current morning routine at some point or other before but the putting them all together in some kind of coherent order is a first this year.
Did any ancient practices inspire you?
I’m not sure if a particular ancient practice inspired me. But maybe practices from my ancestral ancients might have subconsciously. If I remember living with my mum, back when I was in my 20s, she had a morning routine which I really didn’t notice then but can now. She’d get up early everyday, even though she wasn’t going to work, and go to the bathroom. Then make a cup of tea, open the windows and have a smoke. Maybe read at the same time but she’d claim the sitting room and the quiet. When she’d finish she’d make herself available for others.
For you, what is the importance of following a morning routine?
I hate routines usually. The predictability of them and the monotony gets on my nerves and I have to break out of them. But I think , in the past, this is because the routines and rituals have not been my own but have been imposed on me by external forces. I’ve mentioned when I was teaching before but also when I think of when I was studying creative writing. We were told if we wanted to be successful we should stick to one genre of writing and practice it in this way, using these techniques and following these rules. I found it all so restrictive. But here with this morning routine containing sacred rituals to myself, even if not carved in stone and open to change, I do not fight against the routine because I created. I feel that it is coming from a place of love for myself. This is my way of practicing self-love because I am giving myself the time and space each day so commune with myself and get my shit together ( or not!).
I’ve been up today since about 8am. It’s just after 10am now and I’ve had this track, Love Dimension by Beautiful Chorus on Insight Timer on repeat. It’s only 2 minutes long so I’m not going to work out the math for how many times it’s been on repeat. But let’s just say a lot.
I’ve got it running on and on in the background as I go about my morning routine. I’m feeling the need to have this reminder coming at me on repeat entering my bones, my blood, my heart and soul subliminally.
Oooooooooooooooooooo
Welcome, welcome, to the love dimension. To the love dimension. Ooooooooo
Welcome, welcome, to the love dimension. To the love dimension.
It’s Monday y’all and that can only mean Level 3 Counselling Skills today. Yeah Love Dimension is on repeat. Like a mantra. Like an incantation. Like a protective shield of steel.
Living Wild Studios 