this week has been pressing on my heart like an overloaded semi-truck. I am glad tomorrow is friday.
We really had an amazing start to the week (sans the fact that kk started bleeding again). Sunday was our bike ypsispring ride and festival. we had blue skies, sunshiny weather; great attendance and great moments of cohesion and goodness among people in community. That to me is what this bike ypsi is all about--folks coming together and creating sustainable, meaningful community! We succeeded and we will continue to succeed in making ypsilanti a super bicycle friendly community; we will be a presence on the streets and in the parks and in the common, shared spaces that we are fortunate enough to be able to walk through and ride through and exist in.
It was so excellent to have between 100 and 130 people out in the park enjoying simple food (all donated except for the hot dogs and veggie dogs), tooling around on bicycles, roaming by booths that focused on healthy living and bicycles (yet again bicycles), and lazing about in the fifth month's clear and crisp air.
But the day and the days up till the bike ypsi day drained my energy. By the end of sunday i could barely move and monday i had a hard time rolling out of bed and making my way via bicycle (yet again bicycles) to work.
And then work...oh work...oh the work...oh justice work...oh fighting for something that resembles some version of someone's or some people's justice. i will not go into detail about the horrendous abuses and violence and fucking shit that i soak up at work on certain days, but i will say that i searched out a new therapist this week. I looked for therapists who work with activists and found none.
So, while i love bike ypsi and i love helping to organize all of us people to do good and healing things in my own community, when my energy gets zapped and then i have to jump right back into my paid work with no quiet, no breaks, no nothing but the incessant reminders that we treat people like shit and they in turn treat others like shit and the cycle goes on and on and on, then i feel the crashing reverberations of a burgeoning semi riding the bones of my rib cage as if it were a highway to hell.
All in all, i am tired and I need to heed the words of Chickasaw poet, Linda Hogan, "You have to have time, and you have to have quiet. We don't take that often enough. I like to take a day off every week not to do anything. Not take off work to do other work, or chores, but take a day off. It's an incredible experience. Magic happens."
2 comments:
Rest.
Work is all well and good - and I do mean *real* work, the thing that you are driven to do because it is right - but rest is just as well and possibly more good.
Hang tight, babe. Magic's all around you.
Rest, definitely. A good cry and a little self indulgence always helps me get to the other side.
Go ahead, you've earned it and the world won't fall apart while you're gone.
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