Image Description: Red dollar sign covered in ivy and plant matter against a blue background. I created this image for the back of a card deck about busting capitalism's myths, which I made as a gift for my brother. |
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Dear community, The turning of the calendar year naturally inspires questions within me about time. Some people pause to reflect on the past year, more set goals and intentions for the year ahead. |
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There are other timeframes to consider. This year, the U.S. will elect the president for the next four years. A ceasefire and peace in Gaza is long overdue. The climate crisis is unfolding in the present with worse impacts looming ahead. |
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What time is it on the clock of the world? |
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Social, environmental, and humanitarian crises plead for urgent action, which can cause burnout among movement organizers. With the stakes of inaction so immense, and the degree of change needed so great, making best use of our our time feels deeply important at all scales—from what we do during the scant hours we have outside of our workday to the ~4,000 weeks we have in this life on Earth. What an irresistible cocktail for a perfectionist (and a capitalist): urgency, optimization, grave consequences of failure. |
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Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? |
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To live, let alone thrive, in this pressure cooker, we must perform as an “economic citizen,” as Sarah Hendren describes in her interview with Krista Tippett. In order to be valued and have rights such as paid rest and sick leave, we must be productive in meeting ever-increasing demands. There is little space for relationship with time, and our needs, outside the scope of economic production. |
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I don’t wish to ignore the urgency of the matters of our world that literally mean life or death for humans and other beings. Nor will I overlook that urgency is often a tool for power-over decision-making, and is a value embedded in the dominant systems we seek to dismantle. And so I wrestle with the question of how we respond to urgent, important issues with depth of history and width to hold complexity. How do we act quickly, slowly? I turn to, and share with you, perspectives from disability justice studies. Crip time is a concept that speaks to the relationship between bodies and time, specifically the ways that living in bodies that do not conform to the model of an “economic citizen” necessitates a departure from normative, linear time and the expectations attached to it. |
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either you have no needs and get to have autonomy, dignity, and control over your life, or admit you need care and lose all of the above. - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha, “Care as Pleasure” |
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Ellen Samuels, in her exquisite essay, discusses ways of looking at crip time, including how it “requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world…Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words.” Responding to urgency with an ableist approach to productivity means shutting out the cues that tell us what we need, how to care, and when to pause. Instead, to respond with a desire for depth, width, and intentionality requires connecting to the sensations of the body that we live within, a willingness to honor the body’s messages, humility to accept the reality of what we can do within the time we have, capacity to grieve the loss of all we cannot do, and perspective to appreciate and celebrate the joy of care as a response to crises. I see this as a daily somatic practice, beginning with simply feeling our bodies, where we feel heat, coolness, tightness, softness, movement, and stillness. It grows into noticing and naming the needs we feel—for water, food, activity, rest. From there, we can begin to notice our embodied reactions to urgency, and we can practice choosing to be responsive to our bodies’ needs rather than numbing to meet expectations. You're invited to join in and get curious about what you feel. I hope you stay warm and stay connected. As always, I welcome and appreciate your reflections, questions, and thoughts. Warmly, Em Wright P.S. If you enjoyed reading this note, please share it with others who might enjoy it too! I am grateful for every share. If you received this from someone and you want to sign up, you can do that here. |
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Free Somatic Support for Gaza Organizers I’m offering somatic support and coaching sessions at no cost for people organizing for Gaza and Palestinian liberation. Please reach out to me at helloemwright@gmail.com if you are interested. |
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Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators & Facilitators |
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I am grateful to have been a part of a project to create curricula for educators and facilitators to use when teaching about climate justice. My chapter, “Building Somatic Awareness to Respond to Climate-Related Trauma," integrates somatic approaches to support students in understanding the stress and potential trauma they experience from the climate crisis. The book comes out in May and is available for pre-order now. | | |
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This note was sent from the traditional land of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish People past and present and honor with gratitude the land itself and the Duwamish Tribe. Learn more at their website. |
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