In this newsletter:
"What’s Hope Got to Do with It?" (musings)
TOMORROW: THURSDAY Interfaith Panel at Trent
March 7 and 8: Zine Fest at Artspace
March 8: International Women’s Day Rally
Recent Events
Back to the Hope Thing
What’s Hope go to do with it?
One morning recently, I woke up with a clear numbered list in my head. Three things we all need to be doing. Re-reading the list today, I think I can stand by it.
It’s connected to an aha moment I had recently.
Out on a walk, a friend said to me: “I just feel so hopeless about activism. Like what’s the point of doing anything? We can see that we’re past the point of no return here.” “I feel this too,” I told them, “but I just can’t stop thinking about Future Ziysah. In ten or twenty years, I know I’m going to be looking back at this moment, like: ‘What the fuck were you doing?! Like what the actual fuck?”
It suddenly occurred to me how absurd it is that we determine how to be based on the likelihood of a certain conclusion. That if we don’t think we can reasonably, say, “save the planet” or stop fascism, then there’s no point in doing anything.
I’m sure most of you have had an experience of being bedside with a loved one who was dying. An experience where you knew for sure their life would be ending in a matter of moments or days or months. Did you say, “Ah well, the situation is hopeless, no point visiting anymore?” Of course not. You sat there and held their hand as they approached the unknown. This is our dedication to caring for one another. And it is not connected to an end result, but to an integrity of who we are and how we choose to live.
Future Ziysah isn’t going to think I somehow could have prevented whatever reality has come to pass. But they are going to be racking their brain to understand the choices I made at this moment in history. How I used the freedoms and privileges I still had. How I aligned my own integrity with my daily life.
Maybe it was Future Ziysah who got into my mind that night and gave me this numbered list.
THREE THINGS WE ALL NEED TO BE DOING (ALWAYS):
1: ENJOYING the fuck out of this world. And our lives. Life is a statistically impossible experience without any guarantees other than an eventual ending. And we are each experiencing it right now. Don’t let anyone take that miracle away from you.
2: CARING for those we have pledged to care for. And that includes ourselves. Resting when we need to rest. Eating nourishing food whenever we can. Texting someone who’s having a hard time. For me, it means getting up in the morning so I can be present for my kids.
3: CONNECTING up in some way, any way, to a collective strategy. On Friday nights, we have a tradition that everyone is touching the challah while we bless it. But sometimes, there’s more people than can fit around the challah. It’s a small challah and a lot of hands. So what do we do? We say, “If you’re not touching the challah, touch someone who’s touching the challah.” In this way, we’re all connected, You don’t have to be taking action all the time or even doing anything major. You just need to have some part of your life that’s connected to the struggle. My partner sometimes says: “I don’t want to be out in the streets, but I’ll make dinner so you can go out in the streets.” You don’t need to change your personality or your skillset or your passions – you need to embrace them, and find a way to connect them to collective action.
And now for a confession: Despite my clarity on these points, the truth is I’m stuck on how to actually do these things. How does one access joy when one is depressed? What if self-care only makes you feel more lonely? And where exactly do I find a well-organized collective movement for liberation of all beings?
So as an act of collective care and joy, I invite you to participate in a poetry experiment with me.
Please REPLY to tell me one thing, no matter how small or big, you are doing for each of these three steps:
1. Joy
2. Care
3. Collective Action
I’ll weave all our answers into a poem.
[piece continues at the end of the newsletter.]
UPCOMING STUFF
Excited to speak on this panel about interfaith solidarity TOMORROW with Peter Boullata (Unitarian Fellowship minister) And Reem Ali (City of Peterborough DEI Advisor).
Living the Golden Rule: Building Interfaith Solidarity
Thursday, February 6th, 2 pm-4 pm
TSC 1.07 (Event Space)
REGISTER HERE
Excited to say this will be my first year tabling at Zine Fest. I’m putting together a new book of all the pieces I presented during my year as Poet Laureate. I’m also bringing back my out-of-print chapbooks, including a collective one from the 90s. This event is full of brilliant creatives, writers, artists, and letterpress printers. Hope to see you there.
Friday, March 7th, 6pm - 9pm and Saturday, March 8th, 10am- 4pm
Artspace, Admission by Donation
International Women’s Day
Chuffed to once again be invited by KWIC Peterborough & KSAC to speak at the official IWD rally.
This year's theme is: Accelerate Action!
Saturday, March 8, 11:30am, City Hall.
Artwork: 'Waauchipitaau' means 'Together' in Cree, created by Nuin-Tara Wilson ᓄᐃᓐᑕᕋ, Star Daughter Woman
RECENT STUFF
Since I last wrote, I've been doing the usual - wandering my own kitchen, prying screens from my children's hands, and worrying about all the things I'm not doing. But occasionally I take a break from all that to co-facilitate a poetry workshop at Nozhem, speak at the Hope Abides multifaith gathering, perform at E. Fry’s Rebel with a Cause awards, or read at the celebration for Rosemary Ganley’s appointment to the Order of Canada. Thanks for luring me out of my cave, friends.
Back to that Hope Thing
... Right now, we’re having such a hard time that it feels like we have no capacity, right? We’re dealing with so much shit. Illness and gaslighting and corporate greed and war and genocide and fires and coups. We’re experiencing and seeing this in real time and it’s affecting our emotional state, it’s affecting our mental health, it’s affecting our spiritual clarity. It’s making it hard to get out of bed in the morning, to think clearly, to focus, to reach out to people.
AND
We have so much capacity still. Think just for a second about the vision these tyrants have. Their vision is that every living being on the planet will be in service to them. Will have no mind of their own. Will simply be used to continue creating more and more profit for a smaller and smaller number of people. That’s horrifying, yes. Are we there yet? No. BILLIONS of us still have autonomy. Billions of us still have the means to eat every day and be in a home. Billions of us have the right to vote. Our issue is that we’re not organized and connected in a way to manifest that power. And we’re not motivated because the media is telling us all day every day (and let’s be honest, we are telling each other) that we are doomed. Imagine we spent the same amount of time hearing about how many people in the world want change. Imagine we were all listening to a radio station that played stories of revolts and interventions all day, tipping points where people took back control. We aren’t spending any time there. And so while some of our power is being violently wrested from us, we are also collaborating in this, allowing our perception of reality be warped and narrowed by the short-term successes of a few hideous men.
You have the capacity as a human being to live in integrity with what you think is important and fun and loving and nourishing. You have the capacity to do that. There are some incredibly massive barriers to enacting the things we want, and those barriers impact us disparately. AND as we take that into account, we can still acknowledge that each one of us, each one of us reading these words, has the capacity to take a small step each day in line with our own integrity.
If our standard is that we need to stop everything bad from happening and reverse the course of evil, of course we’re going to lose. Of course, it’s hopeless. No point getting up today.
But if our goal is to stay in our integrity, to keep caring for each other, and to be part of a vision for a just world, that is 100% achievable every day. We don’t need to have hope to accept that. We just need to hold each other's hands as we approach the unknown.
We can’t be deluded into thinking we are fully free. But we also cannot, cannot afford to forget the freedoms we do have. We must enjoy them. We must care for them. And we must use them to act for the collective good.
Please help me do that. And let me know how I can help you do that. I’ll make you a poem and we’ll keep going. And we’ll be in whatever this is. Together. We are going to keep being ourselves and honouring the life we’ve been given.
No matter what. No matter fucking what.