seasons

How do you want to experience summer? 

| Sheree

Today, 1st June, is the start of meteorological summer in the Northern Hemisphere. 21st June will bring the Summer Solstice: the longest day and solar peak of the year.

I’ve got a love/ hate relationship with summer. While teaching, I couldn’t wait to get to the summer holidays, time off from school. But those 6 weeks always went far too fast. Maybe because I was trying to squeeze in as much as I could, as I was high on freedom.

These last few years, summer has been a more laid back kind of affair. But there’s still, sometimes, an underling tension of not doing enough. Not making the most of my days. Not being out when I think I should be. Not being in when I feel I should be. Sometimes, there can be a frenzied, frazzled energy where rest and relaxation is more of a performance than actually restoring my energy and inspiration levels.

May, June, July, August. Months of summer. Rising energies to the peak. The peak can either be superdeluxe and flourishing or too heady, overloaded and burnt out.

How do I want to experience this summer?

After months of stress and worries, GCSE’s, hustling and financial insecurities, I’m fixing for my summer to be calm and chill. Wholesome and good for my soul. Slow warm mornings, times to linger over coffee and a book. Feasting my eyes on beauty and questions to satisfy the Creatrix in me.

Siestas, sea dips and lake swims. New foods and drinks lingering on my tongue and heart. Scents of rose and peonies reminding me of childhood, ripe strawberries and juicy honeydew melon, tingling in my mouth. Reminds me that, I can slow down and soften. I can stretch out like a cat in the sun, cloudgaze, feel the warmth ease out the tensions and pressures, knowing that nothing lasts forever.

And yet, I’m grateful for being here now, savouring the now. Summer. Summer. Summer ( that High School Musical kind of vibe!)

How do you want experience summer? 

golden glimmers

| Sheree

summer is just around the corner.

you could say summer has come early this year, what with all the warm (hot) weather we’ve been having these past few weeks.

but at what cost I say? as this isn’t the ‘usual’ temperatures for this time of year.

it’s not it, but when, when will there be little distinctions between the seasons because all climate has got to pot.

simmer’s around the corner.

The Plot of Our Repair

| Sheree

I had the pleasure of gathering with the WOC Azadi again in Sheffield today.

We gathered to share ideas around how to plot/plotting our healings, our liberation together.

Visual journaling was on hand to capture our thoughts, feelings, plans and plots.

It was such a nurturing and nourishing space in nature. It was a gathering of hope and aspirations.

It was an honour to be part of the day retreat. Ideas for The Plot of Our Repair came about from a reading is Saidiya Hartman’s essay , The Plot of her Undoing (2020).

The plot of her undoing begins with his dominion. It begins in the fifteenth century with a papal bull, with a philosopher at his desk, pen in hand, as he sorts the world into categories of genus and species. It begins with a bill of sale, with a story in the newspaper that enumerates her crimes, with a note appended to the file: she answers questions easily, but appears stupid; it begins with a wanted poster that reduces the history of her life to a single word-condemned.

And then towards the end of this essay there is a switch. A turn to explore how we can undoing the plot of her undoing. How we can move against the forces aiming to ruin/ control/ oppress the black/brown woman.

The undoing of the plot proceeds by stealth. It is almost never recognized as anything at all and certainly never as significant.

…

It begins with the earth under her feet. It begins with all of them gathered at the river and ready to strike, with all of them assembled in the squatter city, with all of them getting ready to be free in the clearing.

The undoing of the plot begins with her runaway tongue, with her outstretched hands, with songs shared across the unfree territory and the occupied lands, with the pledges of love that propel struggle, with the vision that this bitter earth may not be what it seems.

The undoing of the plot, the plot developing towards our repair was started before us. We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. We continue this journey, this plotting together. Today makes me feel that we have already won.

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.

It’s quitting time, quitting time @ Tara

| Sheree

Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.

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.

Extract from: The Melodrama of Gone With The Wind

Found poem: 

Source: http://www.art21.org/texts/kara-walker/interview-kara-walker-the-melodrama-of-gone-with-the-wind

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.

Extract from: The Melodrama of Gone With The Wind

Found poem: 

Source: http://www.art21.org/texts/kara-walker/interview-kara-walker-the-melodrama-of-gone-with-the-wind

I’m no Missy either.