After a busy week, where it felt as if I didn’t get a weekend, because I didn’t as I was permaculturing and fugitivity spreading, I’m making myself comfy and cosy.
I’m all wrapped up in bed, catching up with my creativity. Catching up with myself.
And I feel so grateful for this cosy fort, for the week I’ve enjoyed, mostly on my own terms, and for the weekend to come. Rest and creative fugitivity.
I’ve still got mothering and taxiing duties this evening but I feel, in my cosy fortress, I’m on my own time/space.
I get to play and be curious and satisfy my desires. And right now all I want to do is be here. Right. Now.
I’m safe. I’m warm. I’m stealing my life back. Each cosy, comfy fort at a time.
It’s nothing major or anything spectacular. All the the time I’ve lived here which will be coming into it’s third year at the beginning of July, the yard hasn’t really featured on my radar. Yes maybe to put the washing out or store my bike. But as a place to hang out, like an extension my home, no way. Maybe having neighbours who allowed their dogs to pee and shit in their backyard which is joined to mine, separated only by a short fence, was a put off. It was a smelly place I didn’t want to be.
Now we have the sun, the fresh air and the morning bird song, I find myself flocking to the backyard as soon as I wake. I throw open the kitchen door and give thanks for seeing another day. I’m setting up a table and chair and having my morning coffee in the backyard while I visual journal. It’s helping me with my mood. I feel as if Mother Nature is holding me once more as I go through a health issue that is making me stay close to home.
I know I’m privileged to have an outdoor space which is private. It’s waiting for me to put my mark on it. Of course that will involve colour. But for the moment, with my permaculture hat on, I’m just observing and interacting within the space. I’m sitting in the backyard and marking where the sun is and moves. I’m dreaming into the space and opening up to how I want to feel while in this space.
At the moment, I’m feeling expansive within the space, within a contained way. It feels good to feel the sun on my skin and the breeze moving through my hair and clothes. It’s being outside as well as being inside, as my kitchen is just there for a refill. I’m also close to Miss Ella’s bedroom window and I can hear her talking to herself or watching TV, chatting to her friends. The backyard is my sanctuary and I want more.
There is something here in terms of fugitivity. There is a quote that I used just the other day when I finally completed my chapter on black mothering and fugitivity. Hold on let me find it …
In Stolen Life (2018), Moten writes, “Fugitivity … is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument” (131). BECOMING FUGITIVE: refusing what has been refused of us dr. sheree mack
That desire for the outside, I’m feeling it on so many levels. I’m choosing to lean into it. No matter where it leads, I’m enjoying how it feels. I’m enjoying that sense of freedom, out from the enclosure. Continue.
Usually I’m in the hate spectrum. I’ve internalised beliefs about the Black woman’s body that are oppressive and ugly that have been passed down through generation and generation.
I can’t remember a time that I haven’t felt that my body didn’t fit. That my body was too big, too fat, too Black. I’ve learned how to keep myself small, keep myself invisible( even while being hypervisible), keep myself safe.
Those moments when I’ve felt glory being within my body have been few and far between. And when I’ve got to that point of accepting my body, accepting myself, I can’t remember how I got there to get back there now.
My mum was thin once. But most of my life I remember her as being overweight. I saw pictures of her slim and I asked her what happened. Even that question is loaded and judgmental and wrong.
She said when she had lost all the weight she wasn’t well and she wasn’t happy. She said she was happier being fat. I didn’t ask any further questions probably because I didn’t like her answer.
I’m pondering this now, here. Wondering and wandering around my body.
I feel better now. I feel as if a weight has been lifted off of me and I can finally breathe again.
In March this year I announced to my substack followers that I was fixing to leave the platform because I could no longer be there in the light of their tendencies to allow racism to be spread on the platform. I was fixing to leave and then did nothing about it. But this also meant I didn’t write anything else there either. Until today.
I wrote about the above little purple flower. And how they and I have something in common, we choose to grow where we choose to grow and thrive in the process. In the cracks, in the margins, we find freedom.
I simply migrated my subscribers from there to here. Totally understand if this isn’t your bag and you choose to leave. But this is my home and there is no place I find more safe and reassuring and room to grow than here, my own website. This is something I’ve been forgetting of late as I’ve been quiet and to some extent paralysed therefore. not really writing, sharing or dreaming in public for reasons I’m not too sure. But I’ll find out in time, all will be revealed. I trust in the process, in my decisions and in my potential to create my centre out of the margins and edges.
So welcome to my home. I hope you’ll be comfortable here. This home has been around since 2017 and it’s a creative archive of my progress and process which I am very proud of and continue to invest in. I’m happy you could stop by.
Let’s not be strangers and let’s connect on a deeper level. Always x
I thought the snow would come and go especially with living by the coast. There’s something in the air, maybe it’s the salt from the sea, which makes snow here a fleeting thing.
But she’s stayed the last few days and has dug in. Fresh snow falling over night. Clinging to roof tops, layer upon layer, creating slippery paths and doorsteps.
But as I’ve said before there is something magical about snow and how it silences the air. Almost like a cocoon is created in the world you’re walking through/{being} within.
So like the child that still lingers inside of me, I’ve been taking joy in the snow lingering and transforming my world into a safe and cosy cocoon away from the harshness of the other world.
Living Wild Studios 