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.
Nothing I’m flicking through is feeding my desires. Nothing is filling the void of just wanting to switch off and forget my troubles. Pap TV is what I usually call it. The stuff that renders me brain dead.
And then I happen upon The Alabama Solution. This is how I be sometimes. I feed an itch, a curiosity.
I shared the other day about my abolitionist tendencies. Well this Oscar nominated documentary is furthering those occupations.
Man oh man, this documentary hard hitting. And I dare anyone to watch it and say those inmates deserve the inhumane treatments, the injustice they receive in prison. I dare you.
There is a tendency to think people who do the crime should do the time and deserve everything that comes their way. They’re in prison so must have done something to be there and what befalls them in there, well they had it coming.
They be evil. They be degenerate. They be monsters. Lock away, throw away the key. We say.
This indoctrinated, conditioned response to crime and punishment, criminals makes us, the general public, no better that the ‘monsters’ we are condemning. That we are putting away and not caring about.
They be human beings, with flaws, vulnerabilities dealing with issues with no help from anyone else.
No chance of redemption or rehabilitation because they are left to rot. Or are exploited, farmed out as cheap or free labour.
This here documentary The Alabama Solution explores the lives of the incarcerated. The viewer gets to see what it’s really like in the prisons in Alabama. How they are beaten and killed and no one is held to account.
What is remarkable is that these men are behind bars, classed as the underclass of society, the forgotten people, not by their families I may add, but they still manage to coordinate a mass strike across all of Alabama’s prisons in protest of the treatment they receive behind bars. In a peaceful way , they are demanding that their human rights be recognised and that the Federal Government steps in to compel the state of Alabama to treat their prisoners right, with respect and dignity.
Prisoners from all backgrounds, 20,000 strong refuse to work as slave labour anymore in 2022.
They downed tools. They rationalised that instead of meeting violence with violence they chose to hit them where it hurts, in the economics/ money, rather than hit them in the mouth.
Straight away the Governor was trying to break the strike. After a couple of days, rationing their food. Prolonging feeding for up to 14 hours a day and then when they did feed them just small amounts of food. But together the men shared the food they’d been stocking piling . As a community they came together to make sure no one starved. There was unity. Unity never see like it within prison system as it suits the system to have them fighting each other. Divide and rule. Divide and conquer.
But together, standing together strong, there’s power there and that’s dangerous. And has to be suppressed.
How come we, the general public, the majority not behind bars haven’t been able to organise a strike? A withdrawal of our labour to bring the system to a stop?
One of the main spokesperson for the prisoners, Robert Earl, who had already been beaten to near death for being an activist for prisoner’s rights and lost the sight in one eye for it, was taken from his cell in a head lock and taken to solitary confinement.
Again a similar tactic is being used, a tactic used from time in the Civil Rights Movement for example, cut off the head of the movement, the leaders and the strike will fold.
And you think it would happen, as the prisoners are vulnerable, no one can see what goes on behind closed doors. No one listens to them as they are criminals, they lie and are untrustworthy. Right?
They’re murderers and rapists. But that doesn’t happen. As this action, this strike is more than one man. Someone else steps in to take th baron, to keep rallying the cry that the strike continues until the demand are met.
And the demands are not unreasonable demands. They’re not asking to be all set free. They’re asking to be recognised as human beings with rights. To be respected and protected from violence within prison. Violence from the guards who are supposed to be supporting their rehabilitation.
But how are you gonna rehabilitate anyone if you’re beating on them?
I must go back and complete my watch of this programme now and see how the strike goes. However, this strike was in 2022 documented in The Alabama Solution documentary which was a decade long project of capturing the conditions in prison by the incarcerated cell phones.
I’ve just read that the 3 main instigators of this strike, including Robert Earl, have been placed back into solitary confinement as of January 2025 in retaliation for their activism and standing up for the rights of incarcerated citizens. And probably because of their involvement in the documentary.
You see what I did there. Citizens, human beings, not criminals. The language we use is part of our conditioning. Language is power. And I refuse to continue to use such dehumanising language in reference to people who are incarcerated. They are still people with needs and wants, desires drams, pain and sufferings.
Solitary confinement. No contact with family. This is an abuse of power behind bars. Out of public view and no reasons are given for these movements/ punishments. Solitary confinement is a form of torture. It is not a safety and security issue to the individual but it is an abuse of power by the authorities and highlights what a vulnerable position incarcerated people are in when behind the pros walls. This is another example of the denying of human rights.
There is talk of another strike happening this year, the withdrawal of labour. This can only mean that conditions have not improved within the Alabama Department of Corrections prison facilities. So I already know the ending, what the conclusion of this documentary will be. But I will watch it to the end.
Not as a spectator in the spectacle but as a witness for these incarcerated citizens as they, by any means necessary, attempt to get their voices, their issues, concerns and fears outside of those walks. The least I can do is watch and listen and share.
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!
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.
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!
Living Wild Studios 