What to do + keep doing when there's "nothing you can do":
Four days left before REWILDING closes.
Every Monday inside REWILDING, we gather in circle, on zoom, for live workshop, ritual, discussion, and general anchoring-back-into-the-body-and-the-movement-in-fucked-up-polycrisis-times-ness.
These weekly drop-ins are a lifeline for me, and for many inside the REWILDING community.
It’s a space for us to come together and let the intensity of what we’re feeling move, aligning our personal recovery from colonial patriarchy with the liberation of all - centring our individual + collective response to the multiple overlapping and increasingly urgent crises we’re facing.
This week, we explored the practical antidote to despair.
We discussed some accessible + tangible strategies for keeping ourselves sane and anchored into our collective liberation during times of enormous stress and (apparent) hopelessness.
I want to share some of it with you, in the hope that it grounds you, and with the fervent and genuine invitation to join us if these kinds of conversations are ones you need more of. Click here to do that.
HERE'S WHERE WE LANDED:
May you find this non-exhaustive list useful.
STEP ZERO OF EVERYTHING: defer ALWAYS to the wisdom and the instruction of marginalised people, particularly women of colour, who have been mobilising and organising effectively for hundreds of years, who have ALREADY DONE the hard labour of finding solutions that work.
To all reading this socialised as white in particular: IT'S NOT OUR JOB TO "THINK OF IDEAS". That's already been done. Hooray! What a relief!
Our job is to honour the education black, brown, and indigenous women have been living by example for generations.
Resistance to white supremacist colonial capitalist patriarchy is much older than this election, much older than a news cycle, much older than the two-party system itself, and it's been extremely well documented.
Lovingly and gratefully consume that education as much as you can.
If nothing else - honestly - it helps so so SO much to know that our generation is not the first to ever experience this kind of struggle, we're not unique in our feelings, it's been dealt with before.
Read the likes of bell hooks, Angela Davis, Niki Black, James Baldwin.
Below is a little list of books to start on that will be incredibly helpful in this area.
SAND TALK - Tyson Yunkaporta
PRACTICING NEW WORLDS - Andrea J. Ritchie
FREEDOM IS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE - Angela Davis
HOW WE GET FREE - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
WHITE FEMINISM - Koa Beck
STREET REBELLION - Benjamin S. Case (I haven’t read this one all-the-way-to-the-end yet, but it’s a banger so far)
ALL ABOUT LOVE - bell hooks
LET THIS RADICALISE YOU - Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba
FOUR THINGS TO DO EACH DAY (or as much as you can):
1. Metabolise your adrenaline.
Okay. Maybe don’t be doing this one every day. But doing it a fair bit will help enormously.
Wear yourself out to the point of physical exhaustion (when your body says it's safe to do so).
You'll sleep better, and your mind will be clearer. You'll be able to face the REALITY of what you're here to do, rather than a fight/flight/freeze-induced projection of what you're here to do. This is vitally important.
Adrenaline-based projections are not only unhelpful and often very dangerous to our health - they often feed the colonised ego-mind.
Adrenaline-based projections are how we end up thinking the only solutions are to physically run away (going to an off-grid commune or something like it) - leaving the most marginalised behind, and doing approximately nothing that actually changes shit on a wider scale…
…or else develop a massive saviour complex, and start thinking we are personally responsible for single-handedly saving the entire world and everyone in it - an amazing recipe for intense burnout and colonial hyper-individualism.
This sounds like a super glib cop-out, but it's seriously not: you live inside a human body. Relate to yourself accordingly.
2. Show up in service in a way that's tangible and relational.
Find something you can do in your local community to build the world we're fighting for - where you're literally interacting with other human bodies (not just over a screen).
Don't know where to start? Type "volunteering in [your local city/town]" into google or facebook search.
Pop in "climate activism [your town]" or "anarchist groups [your town]", you get it. You'll find something you jive with.
It'll help with the despair to have this tangible and relational activism as part of your world (bonus points if it's something that's physically exhausting, see Thing One 😉).
Again, you live inside a human body. Your nervous system is co-regulatory. If your activism is exclusively online-based, or in some other way “intangible”, your body has no real chance to ground and settle. You’ll end up stuck in the same mental loops over and over again - constantly in a sympathetic state, never getting that parasympathetic release.
The tangible and relational aspect is key here.
3. Make offerings to the land.
Do you know the names of the traditional custodians of the land you live on?
If not - learn them.
Pay respect to them.
Give offerings to the spirit of the land where your body rests.
Offerings can be burning incense, lighting a candle, or even just pouring water onto the land with intention. This will anchor you into interconnectedness. It will disrupt the hyper-individualist (and colonised) ego-mind. It will make your work real and profound in ways you might not expect.
4. Make offerings to your ancestors.
Where do your bones long to be? Where do your people hail from? In what ways did they honour the cyclical undulating beauty and mystery of nature and existence? This is worth researching.
Learn how your ancestors honoured the land they lived on.
Learn how they honoured their bodies, and how they honoured each other.
Learn how they made important decisions. Learn how they ritualised their connection with divinity. Learn how they prepared food. Learn how they made art.
Where and when you can, emulate them. Do this as an offering.
Rooting yourself into your ancestral connection reminds you that you were prayed for by those who have gone, and that you are relied on by those who are coming.
It's difficult to get caught up in the frenzied dopamine-addiction that is capitalist life (and the often frenzied fear that comes with it) when you root yourself into the thread of how-you-came-to-be.
You'll feel bolstered, stronger, clearer, and much, much less important (this is good) with this practice.
A helpful little map for finding your role:
I stumbled across this gem on a scroll last night. It’s a nice neat little framework for categorising how we can show up to build the world we’re all fighting for, and it’s a reminder that there’s no one way, there’s the overlapping efforts of many ways - which is to say - all of our unique and diverse ways.
Here’s the rub: whatever skills you already innately possess are needed and useful.
You are desperately needed and useful - precisely as you are.
Maybe you spent a lot of your life working in managerial-type roles. You sound like a builder to me.
Always getting in trouble as a child for “attention-seeking and distracting behaviour”, and in your adult life finding yourself hopping from job to job because you can’t bring yourself to conform for any length of time? We need more disruptors like you.
Are you a daydreamer, someone always getting lost in fantasy, maybe you were told you were always “unrealistic” with your goals or ideals, or that you need to “come back to earth”. Thank you for being a visionary. I hope you’re sharing it with the world.
We can’t be all of it. And the amazing news is - we don’t have to be all of it. We need to be showing up as we are, offering what we already have to the movement for our liberation.
(In saying that though, we do desperately need more Frontline Responders. How’s that emergency first-aid and disaster relief education coming? 😉)
To all inside REWILDING who sat in on this discussion yesterday, THANK YOU. Thank you for being here with me. Thank you for being. I love and need you.
To all who want to be having these kinds of conversations with decolonising feminists showing up for our liberation on a regular basis, REWILDING is open for another four days, and there are still some spots left to join us.
The general vibe is that it’s an intimate online teaching community focused on decolonising our minds + bodies and exploring our active roles in the revolution via radical cycle reclamation and mythwork.
We are mapping our anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-imperial shadow work to our cycles, so that it lands in our bodies in a way that actually lasts.
We are learning who and why the fuck we are, OUTSIDE of the toxic and oppressive prescriptions of a dehumanising culture, and we are committing ourselves to centring the liberation of ALL in our personal recovery.
We are divesting from the white supremacist, colonial, capitalist, cisheteronormative, patriarchal conditioning we’re socialised into every day, decolonising + re-indigenising our worldview - with Nature (meaning our bodies and cycles, as well as the Earth itself) as our teacher.
We’d love to have you with us.
Four days remain to submit your application.
(And for anyone wondering at this point - the cost is up to you. Accessibility is everything.)
Click the button below to join us, I’m so excited to meet you.
