resentment is a haunting task. elia poignantly shared “resentment is envy of how someone else holds their boundaries.”
how is it that you are able to take more than you are willing to give (when/if capacities to give are available)? how is it that your expectations are easily received while mine are pressed against stained glass, inconvenient criticisms? how is it that when i am unable to give, it is hurtful, but when you are unable to give, you are healthily boundaried?
while loved ones dance and libate in my honor, i nurse my very sick dog. i often think about my being born and its innate effervescent quality. i feel joy and sadness in what my life provides. joy because who does not get off on witnessing another’s splendor at divine expense. sadness because dignity was stolen from my lineage and that is something i will ache over for however long aching is needed. sometimes, i feel like other people benefit from me being alive more than i do, and i think it is a lot more nuanced than stacked boundaries. we all resplend off Black feminized love and labor though do little to acknowledge this advantage. do i lack boundaries or am i being taken advantage of? am i people pleasing or has subservience been manipulated into my DNA?
of the 208 people subscribed to this newsletter, 9 pay monthly which means 0.04% of you attempt to ethically consume Blackness under capitalism … though no amount of money renders this consumption ethical. it is not even about the money for me …. it is about the middle passage leaving me and anyones born from my body dehumanized, ungendered, and defaced1 … no amount of generational recovery disrupts degradations of my peoples — biologically planted oppression — white supremacist projects … as i began my land stewardship research yesterday, i stumbled upon Genealogist Who Tracks Down Modern Day Slavery Practices — tears emerged unlike any i ever cried — not salty, streamy like rivers, rushed by gravity void of squinched cheeks, long droplets, a somber pain. Nothing else on my face moved but water.
i was touched by Mar’s Monday Monday: going the wrong way where they shared about being a single person in a meadow raising a baby dog … i am months away from testing out this liberation myself .. i think maybe … if nothing else … this land can hold my unbelonging with and for me, possibly rewire my DNA … i experience urgency in arriving to my meadows … building a house ($450K+ … this price makes me want to vomit) is minimum 3 successful seasons away, so in the meantime, i want to put up a Bivvi ($35K+) to live in and begin this work … i am reading Designing Lightness, and thinking about delusional safeties of heaviness … ponderosity, and considering textures of healing happening through employing lightness both environmentally and spiritually (though they do say “burdens of belonging follow bodies” and i say back, “amongst the trees, i am free”) … not sure i can contextualize in a newsletter how big of a deal it is for a Black person to return to land after hundreds of years of land-based torture and violence.
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xoxo, care ecologist