For The Worldbuilders Ep. 028

Overlapping Catastrophe Calls for Overlapping Creative Action

Sun bathing on the couch
Heavy with water
Buoyant and brilliant
Our body is asking for permission to weep

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In check-ins with friends and the Seed A World Retreat workshops I keep saying the waves of emotions I’m experiencing are grief, rage and gratitude.

• Grief because of the lives taken from us, many too soon; the individual unrealized dreams, their personal love we’ll never get to feel.

• Rage because I live in a country funding and supporting genocide, grouping Pro-Palestinian protestors calling for a ceasefire with white nationalists in Charlottesville. Again we are not anti-semitic, we are anti-zionists — they know this and I’m pissed they keep playing in our faces, forcing us to repeat ourselves.

• Gratitude because as an artist I don’t have to proceed with business as usual. It is our job, it is our practice to learn how to hold our gaze. To refuse to look away. To witness and act. To sustain our grief and our imagination.

Grief, rage, gratitude. Grief, rage, gratitude. On the good days, inside my art practice, I can hold all three. When we March on Washington this weekend may we give thanks to the blazing fire falling from the trees, as a fact of nature, reminding us empires fall, as a fact of nature.

James Baldwin reminder pulled from this Zeba Blay IG post. Image description: Color photo of James Baldwin wearing a black hat, brown jacket and scarf behind text added on top of the photo reading, “I’m aware, you know, that I and the people I love may perish in the morning. I know that. But there’s light on our faces now.”