a thing we shape like clay.
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Dear ones,
Every week I think my plate is full. I look at my schedule of tasks and to do’s and I think: this is a full week, I cannot add more things to this week. Maybe I could muster one unplanned social event, and maybe I could find my way into a bit more writing on a new project, but probably not. The week is full. I need time for my mornings, my walks, my workouts, cooking, my downtime TV. There is no room.
We do this, don’t we? Some of us anyway, I think we can’t imagine fitting in more amidst our normal life things. And then something happens, and we have to. There’s a storm, or a riot, or a health emergency, and suddenly we make time. We clean up debris, we march in the protest, we go to the hospital. No one ever really has time for the hospital, but yes, I think by some way of magic under duress, we make it. We create it. We realize: there is no other choice here.
The past two weeks I had two unplanned doctors appointments and, because of my brain, that also included days lost to googling the various things I was facing or about to face. I do not have time to spend days googling, but somehow I did it anyway.
In her analysis of the way community emerges in times of crisis, Rebecca Solnit writes: “If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.”
In the usual order, I do not have time for googling or doctors appointments. In the usual order, I do not have time to go to the protest or gather food for my neighbors. In the usual order, I am too busy, there is no time. When things come undone — joyfully or tragically — time is no longer a finite thing, it is a thing we shape like clay. We say, here is where I will fit this in, and then we press our thumb into the edge to make it so.
I did not get as much writing done last week as I would’ve liked. I did not schedule clients that would have generated more income and I did not spend as much time on my students’ reading responses as I could have. But I made time for care — the hard kind, in sterile medical offices, and the softer kind, like resting on my couch with comforting television in the background — and it feels kind of like magic. I want to remember this. Can I remember this, even in the usual order? That’s our task, maybe. Can we be consistent with our magic, with our ability to shape the world we want, without always needing to be compelled first by disaster or emergency?
I want to hope so. Okay; I will hope so.
More on all this soon. For now, I love you. <3
love & solidarity,
raechel
Reading (+ podcasts)
I know Dan Savage is not perfect, and I’ve never been one to put him on a pedestal, but I really like the recent interview he did with Ezra Klein; I was doing a lot of vigorous nodding. Cameron Steele on the Seventh House and illness and partnership. Cornel West and Panashe Chigumadzi on Black theology and African theology. Haven’t watched this yet, but I have no doubt it’s going to be compelling: Dean Spade on whether or not movement work should be paid.
Watching
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