ROOTED IN LOVE

After 2.5 months at the house, we’re really in it. In it in a way that smooths the sharp curve of complete orientation, with a new sense of routine and familiarity. As these comforts grow, and as we extend ourselves outward into the communities around us, I’ve felt an increasing attentiveness to our work here together in its wholeness - to each one of us individually, who have known and felt that life as we know it could and should be transformed, and the work we’ve created in our togetherness.

Marveling at the ways we and others are together and act radically through love. At the ways of being in relationship that we’ve disrupted and that persist, weights of capitalism that we’ve carried so long on our backs that we forget they’re still there, ways that unconscious leaning toward efficiency and competition can eclipse creativity and cooperation in real time, and vice versa. As I reflect on these, some thoughts from Autumn Brown in imagining an alternative way of being (outside of capitalism, exploitation, and slavery) have been with me:

“No one can measure the value of your work - the value of your work is not measurable” (quoting Toshi Reagon) - “Any measures that someone would be using to measure the value of my work would be rooted there, in a system that relies on poverty and debt.”

“How free can we get, and how free can we let other people be?”

“How far can we stretch into seeing other people as our family?”