A little late, but here we are. Nonetheless. I wrote this on Friday so the name remains.
Coming Home to Self: Capacity Building for Femmes is this weekend! This Sunday, 2/12 from 11am PST. We’ve extended the time to 1:30pm PST and 14 day replay access is included for registrants, so even if you can’t stay for the extra time, you’ll be able to see it in the recording! There’s still time to register, if you’re curious... I’m excited to collaborate on this with my friend and fellow collective member Jewel! We have SUCH a great time creating together. Go check out her IG sometime to see allll her shenanigans because you need to know about Black birthworkers who are out here doing birth, policy and action, AND making waves in the art space too. BIRTHWORK IS LIFEWORK y’all.
This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us by Cole Arthur Riley is another ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ read for me. I’ve started a list on my little bookshop.org storefront but I’ll keep sharing them here too and on @booksandbreath . There’s much to be said for starting from where you are and I appreciate the way that Cole took something that certainly most would view as limiting (being housebound by disability in a global pandemic) and grew it into this beautiful, lush book filled with wisdom, contextualizing religion and family and history. It’s definitely something I will read again, and I won’t say that about too many books 😂
Update: just finished it and wow. Definite 5 stars. Definitely will be reading this again. More to come.I’ve been loving learning about all the many flatbreads made throughout the world. I am always captivated by the bits we share, some of which can be clearly traced to a common ancestor but others which seem to suggest that we just came to the same or similar conclusions about things. Flatbreads seem to be a mix of those. But it seems like almost everywhere in the world, our indigenous ancestors have created some form of grain ground into flour and mixed with water and/or fat then kneaded, flattened and cooked on a hot pan or flat stone. I love the chapati I grew up with but I am also eager to learn how make the chapati from Granada or paratha from India or fry bread from Turtle Island. The mix of delicious carb and profound history is right up my alley.
After reading Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media and How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms (without ditching your friends) I’ve been thinking (again) about how I want to use social media and recommitting to checking in with myself on the regular about how I’m using it because it’s so easy to get caught up in it all and then suddenly find myself disheartened and mindlessly scrolling, wondering how I got there. I may well write myself a lil manifesto so I’m really clear about what I’m doing there. How do you manage your social media use? How are you feeling about what you use?
My soulsibling @asoulversation posted some recommendations for the first prompt of our Disability Appreciation Reading Challenge. I was irked to notice that only a few of the books she listed were already on my #tbr. It got me suddenly realising that I will likely die before I read all the books I want to. I know at some point I’ll be okay with it (definitely after I’ve transitioned I imagine 😂) but right now it’s a smidge unsettling. I guess I’ve been unconsciously assuming that there would be a time, at some point, that I’d be done with it. Yeah. I hear it. lol.
p.s my little book club idea is kinda warming up, if you think you might be interested in gathering once a month or so in a space obsessed with bell hooks, a future where Black & Brown folks are thriving and all books birth, life and death… lmk here.
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