Tending to our patch of the sky
We are all part of a greater constellation.
Hi friends,
Here we are again at the start of the Gregorian calendar! 2024 was one wild ride of a year, as most years have been lately. I don’t know if the world is actually getting more complicated and daunting, or if this is just what happens as you start getting older and paying closer attention to everything around you…or both. But in any case, what a year!
2024 was many things for me, but above all else, it has been a profound time of trying (key word!) to hold contradictions without moving to hide it or fix it. As I wrote in my last newsletter, I’ve been leaning into vent diagrams as a tool to sit with these complexities. In the spirit of this practice, I share this one with you that I have been grappling with:
How painful. How beautiful.
The tides are turning. The tides are not turning fast enough.
This work is urgent. This work will take generations.
Truth. Truth. Truth. Truth. Truth. Truth.
While the weight of this heaviness has felt unbearable at times, this past year has been the most hopeful and connected to my community that I’ve felt in a very long time, and I close this year feeling deeply nourished.
Back in September, my friends at The Theatre Centre – a nationally recognized live-arts incubator and community hub in Tkaronto – hosted a gathering that asked, “How do we leave a place of despair, and move toward a place of hope?” I was invited to share a response and reflection and I thought this would be an apt time and space to share it with you. Here’s just a little snippet:
I am walking down Queen Street looking for a treat for myself. I’m thinking some kind of baked good, or a fruit smoothie, or a fancy coffee – you know the kind. Instead, I find that the treats, really, are found on posters slapped onto signposts, graffiti scribbles on random brick walls, and on decor hanging from the windows of random homes. They are the posters that assert that “Colonization is a crime”, the graffiti scribbles that read, “Free Palestine”, the Palestinian, Black Lives Matter, Every Child Matters, and trans flags that hang on my neighbours’ windows.
I am supposed to go see my mom in Markham but before I make my way to Union Station, I first join the Grassy Narrows River Run March. I am surprised and delighted to see how massive the protest is. It’s a Wednesday at noon and there are thousands of people gathered at Grange Park. More than 8000 people, they’re saying. Many of them are young children and teenagers. I pass by a group of 6 or 7-year-olds with homemade signs full of their gorgeous artwork, marching and chanting, “Grassy Narrows! Grassy Narrows!”.
I get on the streetcar, look for a seat, and make eye contact with someone wearing their keffiyeh. “Nice keffiyeh,” they tell me. “Free Palestine!” I hold my fist up. We smile at each other and nod, going back to whatever it was we were doing before.
Almost every Sunday, I cycle over to the Wallace Avenue Pedestrian Footbridge that my Davenport neighbours have, for months now, renamed and reclaimed as Gaza Square. We gather together to put up posters, eat snacks, make bracelets and other art, share books, plant our newly made healing garden. It is our time to get to know each other, to cultivate our growing community.
It feels so small when I write these words down that I pause and question if I should write them down at all. But in the moment, these interactions mean the entire world to me. It feels foolish sometimes in the face of so much violence and death and endless fucking destruction all around the world and right here on Turtle Island to feel uplifted by these fleeting encounters.
And yet these moments are the portals to other worlds. Just worlds. Loving worlds. The kind of worlds I want to live in. The worlds that we are creating in real time. Right now. Together.
I ground myself in these small moments reminding myself of the lessons I’ve been learning about fractals – that is, a pattern, a thing, a process that, regardless of how zoomed in, or zoomed out you are, looks very similar to the larger whole. Fractals are all around us – look at snowflakes, broccoli, trees. The infinite repetition of details or patterns occurs at progressively smaller scales.
This is all to say that, as writer, educator, and facilitator adrienne maree brown has been teaching me, how we are on the small scale is how we are on the large scale. Our actions and behaviours on the small, interpersonal scale ripple out into and ultimately become our larger systems.
And so when I witness these small acts of resistance walking down the street, when I am a part of these moments of connection with my neighbours, I know we have arrived.
Our work lies here. On the small scale. In our daily lives with those closest to us.
As activist and filmmaker Valarie Kaur wrote in her memoir, See No Stranger:
“I had forgotten the stars burning so strong and long that their light reaches us long after they have died. Isn’t that what our lives and our activism should look like? Not the supernova, a single outburst under pressure. We must be the long burning star, bright and steady, contained and sustained, for our energy to reach the next generation long after we die. Oh, and to be part of constellations. Let us see ourselves as part of a larger picture, even if we are like the second star on Orion’s Belt or the seventh of the Seven Sisters, for there is no greater gift than to be part of a movement larger than ourselves. That means that we only need to be responsible for our small patch of sky, our specific area of influence. We need only to shine our particular point of light long and steady to become part of stories sewn into the heavens.”
I anticipate that the year ahead will be even more challenging with the political reality of this moment, and while this may be daunting, I hope that these words offer perspective and renewed energy.
Before closing, I want to take a moment to thank you for subscribing to this newsletter and joining me on this 3DR journey to decolonize, disrupt, dismantle, and rebuild. This newsletter began in the fall of 2021 as a writing practice for me. Life moves so fast and I wanted to find a way to capture the lessons I’ve been learning as an evolving educator and facilitator for equity, anti-oppression, and collective liberation. Fast forward three years later and this newsletter now has over 350 engaged readers and co-learners. I’m grateful and humbled to know that there are hundreds of you out there who are invested in dismantling systems of oppression and tapping into the curiosity, creativity, and courage it takes to rebuild our systems to create just and equitable futures.
Howard Zinn once wrote, “If we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
And here we are today. Communing through this screen sharing ideas and curiosities and dreams, opening a portal to these just and loving worlds.
Cherish this moment, step through that portal, and remember – we are living a marvelous victory.
May we all tend to our small patch of this beautiful sky.
Grateful to be a part of this constellation with you,
Justine
Glad that we are on the same boat towards emancipation and liberation! Love your words!