“Am I too much?” finds me from time to time. It takes the shape of a person intimidated by what I find possible; it punctuates the sentences that contains my needs, and shares my pillow on the days where I refuse expectations.

My fear of being too much followed me here to the Costa Rican jungle. This time being stirred up by trying to fit myself into a situation that was too small for me to begin with. Nevertheless, I let it in, and the anxiety of that feeling persisted into the first few days here but today, the last morning of the weeklong yoga retreat, I feel peace.

I took a walk to take in the smells, colors, and sounds I’ve become acquainted before we left. The bats that squealed while I was in downward dog, the pungent smell of fallen jackfruit rotting on the ground, and the shimmering metallic wings of the occasional Blue Morpho butterfly. While walking, I encountered a flower as purple as the Lisa Frank pencil case I had in middle school. Finding it early in the day, dew covered its petals and bright yellow stamen. As I took it in, I knew I would never ask it to tone down its purple because it was “too much”. I would never ask it why it bloomed as big as it did.

So, why am I so quick to think I’m too much?

Beside it its fellow flowers possess the same purple and remain unthreatened, unbothered by growing so closely to another flower as bright as it is. A few feet away, the magenta leaves of the Cordyline aren’t affected by how purple this flower is, nor are the Scarlet macaws that soar in pairs ahead. The Macara, or shampoo ginger, doesn’t question how boldly it stands because this flower occupies the space it needs to grow. The rambutans grow red as tomatoes and yellow as the underside of a sunflower without questioning themselves.

The vibrancy of the jungle is affirming because it isn’t singular but rather a necessary tenet of biodiversity.

I believe this to be true, which would also mean that my blooming isn’t a threat to other beautiful blooms around me. Those others who are reaching for the sun, daring to shed the confines of enclosures, to occupy the space they deserve to grow.

I am proud of my willingness to stretch beyond my 5’6’’ frame to occupy a space larger than my wildest dreams. The work that I’ve had to do to believe that my dreams are worthy to be spoken hasn’t been easy. My first dreams were of necessity - enough income to feed me, reliable housing, and safety in my own body. Years of dreaming and demanding these things into reality created space for my dreams to now be informed by possibility. It has taken so much to allow myself to want. Several glimpses into the horizon showed me that I can want beyond my basic needs. In fact, we all can.

As I use the outdoor shower one more time, I look up in awe at the montersas that, unrestricted by a pot, wind their stems around the trees and grow leaves as large as my torso. Instead of asking if I’m too much, I want to shed the container and grow uninhibited.

I am grateful to the people who have held caring and reassuring practice space for me to increase my dream capacity. I am grateful to myself for responding to the nudges and standing back up after the faceplants.

Because of that, I move from abundance and knowing, not from scarcity.

My willingness to surrender to my dreams has carried me further and further away from my doubts. I’m closer to tossing out the idea that I need a roadmap to get somewhere. Instead, I move knowing that if that purple flower is possible, then I am too.

I want to be as free as possible in this life, and to do that, I need to wholeheartedly believe that I can. To release myself from the confines and show others that they can too, because true freedom means we’re all free.

The question of being too much is perennial for me and for other Black queer people who dare to dream in a world in denial of our existence, let alone our dreams, but today it’s a little quieter.

I will continue unapologetically bloom as vibrantly as I can while celebrating those in bloom with me. Wanting freedom is never too much

I never thought about living in New York City until I did. On the contrary, I proudly declared I never would. Too loud. Too fast. Too many people. Not enough nature. Rats!

All those things are still true, yet when I felt an internal tug to leave Oakland, the city that I’m madly in love with after 13 years, NYC appeared with surprising clarity as the place I was supposed to go. The internal tug didn’t come with an instruction manual, but I knew that I was being asked to reach for something different, even if just for a little while. For a few years, I have been trying and failing to find a rhythm with my writing in Oakland, but it wasn’t sticking, so on a whim, I applied to graduate school and decided to leave to follow the pull.

I didn’t know how I’d survived the rats (still don’t) or walk fast enough to keep up, but I did know that NYC had the literary landscape I wanted to be enveloped in. During my first month here, I went to talks by my favorite authors on random Thursdays, attended the NYC Black & African Literature Festival in Harlem during the day, and made my way to the opening party for the first Black lesbian-owned bookstore in Brooklyn that night. I have written more words than I ever thought possible, and am almost calling myself a writer without hesitation.

I’ve been here for seven months now, and nothing has taught me more about myself in recent years than this move. I have cried on the subway, moved a table on the bus with a friend, and some days the anxiety makes my skin itch, yet I still know it’s right. And while I said goodbye to Oakland, many of the people I love visit New York, and even more love being pen pals. As new friendships bud and I create mnemonics to remember what trains will take me home, I feel the gratitude of following the tug. Of putting one foot in front of the other and trusting myself and the community I’ve woven to hold me as I expand.

“Why are we here if not for each other?” - Claudine Rankine

I started to write this months ago.

I was halfway through writing this before that Wednesday in early December when a man exited the train and collapsed on the platform at my stop. I started to write this before myself and three other people arranged ourselves around the man to see what we could do to help.

The man, conscious but incoherent, laid face-up on the cold train platform with a terrified look in his eyes.

When he fell, the two people behind him immediately dropped to a crouch to inspect the damage of the fall on his body and to console him. His fright forced his eyes wide open, nearly unblinking, and locked on the couple as he looked between them.

“Hospital.” he said, in a small slurred voice that sounded as if it was coming from above ground and not right in front of us.

Next to me, a guy with jet black hair that he had to keep pushing back from his face while on the phone 911. I stood close enough to be helpful as he repeated some of the questions coming from the dispatcher, “Is he in his 50s?” he asked me and the couple.

We looked down. “70s.”

What entrance are we closest to?

“17th and 4ve”.

He answered a few questions before he hung up and said, “That was the first time I’ve had to call for help ”.

“You did great.”

The man in his 70s, underdressed for the cold weather and biting wind characteristic of a New York winter, had sores on his face. His exposed ankles were swollen and full of more sores that continued down to the tennis shoes that were halfway laced in order to accommodate the feet that were too big for them. His body displayed wear that comes from having to sleep outside regularly.

With the knowledge that the paramedics were on the way, the four of us shifted our weight into a comfortance stance for the wait.

The man babbled “hospital” repeatedly. His words stretched from his mouth and down the length of the tunnel in hopes of pulling in help.

It had been about fifteen minutes since the person beside me had gotten off the phone with the dispatcher. As time stretched on, the man on the ground started to say, “Don’t leave me.”

The man who had crouched down on his right side, held his hand and repeated over and over, “We’re not going to leave you. We’re not going to leave you.”

Suspended in this arrangement of people, I was struck by this commitment. From one stranger to another.

“We’re not going to leave you.”

The paramedics arrived and moved the man from the platform to a gurney and then carried him up the 20 or so stairs from the platform to the street as the four of us followed behind. They hoisted him into the ambulance and closed the door.

Without more to do, myself, the couple, and the young man said a quick goodnight and walked away in different directions. Our goodnight made time resume and we were back in Brooklyn, headed home or wherever else we were going before we had come together.

I was struck by many things that night but mostly, the social contract we had silently but decisively had entered into when we stepped off the train to see what we could do.

We had made a commitment to see it through. A commitment to stay with each other.

This is accompaniment.

——————

I started to write this in June 2025 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. During an opening plenary at the Wellbeing Project’s Hearth Summit, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb spoke of her solidarity with Palestine and other movements for dignity and liberation. Accompaniment, she said, is our ability to stay with each other. It is to say “I will accompany you on this journey of life”.

Her words sparked curiosity in me about practicing accompaniment in my personal commitment to liberation & dignity.

So, I started to write about accompaniment because, as with most things, I write first to understand and then to embody. Three years ago, when overwhelm threatened to immobilize me, I wrote about steadiness. At its best, writing for me is an incantation. Writing for clarity penetrates my psyche, gets in my bones, and becomes a practice.

As I wrote about steadiness, I became steady.

Unknown to me then, becoming steady increased my capacity to meet this current moment with a reliable and practiced sturdiness. Steadiness taught me to be with myself and in the company of my own pain, sorrow, need, and joy. It taught me a form of self preservation that has allowed me to reach deeper and outward without completely losing my footing.

Steadiness taught me that if I commit to my inner work, I might be able to meet others – to meet you – with enough space to accompany you in yours. I practice steadiness not as a fixed state but one that requires attention, maintenance, and devotion.

I can sit with you in the terribleness, discomfort, and pain because I have sat with my own. I am able to commit to staying with you because I am committed to staying with myself.

As the chaos, distress, and grief of colliding crises compound and come closer and closer to each of us, so does our need to be with each other. To stay with each other.

Accompaniment isn’t trying to fix, solve, or even fully understand another’s experience but a commitment to just walk alongside them in it. It is putting our bodies alongside others to demonstrate to each other and to those who wish us harm that we are not fighting this fight alone.

As I.C.E, at the direction of the federal government continues to abduct and execute members of our communities, we have to practice our staying power. As the U.S. continues to show us its centuries long commitment to facism, racialized terror, and creating chaos for control, we must find our staying power. With ourselves, with our communities, and for those we do not know.

May we find the power to stay with each other with the increasingly terribleness.

May we meet each other with an unshakeable presence and decisively sign a social contract of accompaniment.

When I started The Lupine Collaborative I knew I needed to collaborate with an aligned publisher to distribute the writing that came from our communities. I found that in Milkweed Editions, the imaginative and visionary publisher of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Startlement by Ada Limón, A Darker Wilderness by Erin Sharkey.

In addition to our programming, I wanted a book. Something that could be held and felt and serve as a reminder that we have and will continue to be here. A physical manifestation of the work I am committed to with Lupine which is to illuminate pathways for Black folks to ideate, write, and dream. Together our organizations, delightfully both named after plants, are coming together to catalyze the writing of Black women, transgender, and non-binary climate, nature, and environmental writers from across the Black Diaspora.

To that end, I’m over the moon to announce a global call for submissions for a multimedia anthological book of “Blackness, Queerness and Nature” (working title) to be published by Milkweed Editions. Co-edited by me and Erin Sharkey, the book will be a testament of how Black Queer communities across the diaspora live in relationship to nature.

The anthology will be a rich and varied collection of personal and lyric essays, fiction, poems, photographs, oral histories, mediations, recipes, songs, stories, and experimental writing about the experiences/vision/love/erotics/ connections of Black Queer folks and nature/environment/Earth/earth, water and cosmos. With this project writers will have the opportunity to reflect on the significance of nature in their lived experience and speculation, hopes, pessimism, and imagination. This anthology will ask, what does the light of Queer Black life illuminate? How does our shine allow for all of these other things to shine? How do we create fertile ground for others to survive?

We are accepting submissions from Black AND Queer people from across the diaspora.

Deadline: March 1, 2026
Full Call: www.thelupinecollaborative.org/callforsubmissions
Questions: submissions@thelupinecollaborative.org

I am two months into my creative writing MFA at the New School in New York City.

The timeline has been wild. I applied in June and when I was accepted in July, I wasn’t sure how it was all going to work but I told myself that if that path cleared for me to go then I would. And it did. The money came. The housing came. So I picked up and moved across the country in August.

I cried when my partner dropped me off at the airport. I cried when I landed. And occasionally cry when trying to figure out how to navigate the subway with groceries. And even though I felt upside down on the first day of class, and even today, I know I’m in the right place.

I know this because in times of personal, social, and political overwhelm, writing has remained my steady and trustworthy companion. It’s how I know to document, communicate, process, and imagine. It’s instructive.

So, I shouldn’t be surprised then that I feel called and honestly, tugged into being in devotion with my writing right now. My words have created the world that I now inhabit. It’s how I’ve escaped worlds that no longer could contain me or were unsafe. Writing taught me to worldbend.

I learned to write by writing scholarship applications in high school. I’m not sure when or how I learned about them, but as soon as I understood them as a way out of life as I knew it, scholarship became a life raft. As an “at-risk” teenage darling, scholarships became a way to access the inaccessible, a way to keep up in the conversations and experiences of my peers. I measured the gap between my dreams and the resources I needed and I wrote to fill it.

An afterschool program, meeting Mae Jemison, a spring break trip counting desert tortoises, an internship at the Bronx Zoo. I wrote myself away from the world I was in and toward the one I wanted to live in. Scholarship applications taught me to tell a story, make an argument, and showed me what I could bring to life through writing.

Being in school gives me time to return to what teenage Grace discovered. In a creative nonfiction writing program, I have time to return to this practice with complete devotion. I know practice makes possibility. The muscle memory and repetition that practice demands diminishes the gap between my internal world and the exterior one. I know that what I write becomes what I practice and expect in the world. When I write of unflinching dignity, liberation, and love for myself, I become unshakeable in my commitment in seeking it for my loved ones, my community, and those who I don’t know and never will.

Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, June Jordan, Octavia Butler, James Baldwin, Patricia Hill Collins, Toni Cade Bambera, Cohambee River Collective, and countless other Black luminaries have used their words to tell the truth, imagine, and offer new paradigms for me and others to exist in with dignity and possibility.

In this moment, to devote oneself to writing, or any other form of expression for liberation and freedom, is to place yourself in direct opposition to the authoritarian regime in this country and beyond. Authoritarianism thrives when it succeeds in stealing our ability to imagine current and future realities where we can exist and flourish. Attempt to suppress and control the expression of arts & expression is a strategy to silence the truth telling of what we see and how we are resisting. It’s the reason why so many journalists in Gaza have been targeted, killed, and disappeared for documenting the truth.

In Peril by Toni Morrison says:

We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself. And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place. Cultural and political forces can sweep clean all but the ​“safe,” all but state-approved art.

And so I will write. To bend the reality of the current world into one of liberation and dignity for all beings and to contribute to the groundwork being laid for the world to come.

59,000 Palestinians murdered. 

Nearly 8 million Sudanese displaced. 

2 million people in U.S. prisons and jails.

37.9 million people live below the poverty line in the United States.  

1.01 trillion for the U.S. military defense budget. 

We can’t afford to lose count. Our humanity relies on our ability to keep count. It relies on us remembering the 59,000 lives that made up 59,000 dead. The unique body, mind, spirit, and dreams that are no longer here. Remembering that 8 million people, roughly the size of NYC, have been displaced from their homes. That more than 2 million people have disappeared into the U.S. prison industrial complex. Losing count would mean losing sight of ourselves amid the abhorrent devastation and, therefore, our power and vulnerability in it. 

The United States relies on an illusion of safety to desensitize those within its borders to devastation. Depending on the identities you hold, and how far you’ve been pushed to the margins, this illusion cracks over time. Trillions of dollars are pumped into the military defense budget while there is a lack of universal healthcare, millions of unhoused people, stagnant wages, rampant gun violence, and underfunded schools. Does that make you feel safe? 

At a recent teach-in about the war in Sudan, the facilitators detailed the violent history of wars in and on the country. They connected the existence and struggle for access to natural resources, namely gold, as one of the reasons for the violence in and on the Sudanese people. It’s a reality that we have witnessed countless times before. Since then, I have been sitting with the questions, “Whose gold mine are you sitting on? And what lengths will they go to to access and/or protect it?

Ask yourself, if your safety is predicated on the death or subjugation of someone else, how is safety? And if we’re being desensitized to death, why would our deaths matter?

This illusion of safety is dependent upon us losing count. It demands we be desensitized, turn away, and believe that not seeing is the same as not knowing. No matter what identity you hold, the longer you look at it, the clearer it becomes that the illusion is maintained by not looking at it.

How is it that the richest country in the world can’/won’t house its people? What is safety in a country that locks up essential items in grocery stores but doesn’t address why people are stealing it?

The U.S. hides behind both the “costs” and the illusion of safety. It’s predicated on the death, destruction, and occupation of people both within its borders and beyond. I encourage you to interrogate the propaganda of safety that this country parrots and who believes it, defends it, and needs it to be true. As the American empire continues to crumble and we witness multiple genocides on our phones, we must keep count. No allow ourselves to glaze over the mounting numbers. 

Beware of language that swallows humanity because it will swallow yours. 

Continue to speak up, reject, and bear witness.

Be weary of the illusions of safety.

Remember that embodiment as political warfare

Continue to keep count. 

Last year, on a solo trip to Istanbul, I was roaming through a busy market on the way to dinner with two people I had met just the day before. New to the city, I kept falling behind as I tried to take in everything, but Ahmed, always a few steps ahead of me, would look back every few feet to make sure I was still there and just smile. Him continuously turning back to make sure I was still there is what keeps us safe. We keep ourselves safe. Valuing someone else’s humanity without knowing them keeps us safe. Understanding that your freedom and liberation are tethered to the well-being of others keeps us safe. Not losing count keeps us safe.

INHALE My soul is disturbed EXHALE because it's still intact - Cole Arthur Riley

Narrative power is critical, always, and especially in moments like this, where we must double down on documenting, storytelling, writing, and telling the truth of the world as we experience it. We cannot allow those with power, wealth, and social capital to be the narrative for the masses, on the left or the right. 

So it is in these grant reports that we must detail the reality of what it means for the “progressive” philanthropy to capitulate and bow down to risk. We cannot allow the narrative of philanthropic risk to drown out or be equated to the life-or-death risk that many people are facing day to day. Nor can we allow it to parade the success of our work and movements while cutting our feet from underneath us. 

I’ve seen enough of the “risks” to those with wealth who are potential targets of this administration and not enough of the life-threatening risks that Black people, queer people, immigrants, trans people, poor people, disabled people, and others that have and continue to live on that margins are shouldering. 

Imagine waking up every day to figure out how to eat, live, keep a roof over your head, and continue to hope in a world that wishes to erase you? 

That is a risk. 

It’s critical that we speak of this not in the abstract but ground it in the reality of what it looks like. Organizations are made up of people and those people have livelihoods that are intertwined with the vitality of an organization. The reality is that pulled funding is the grocery money. Inconsistent gaps in funds are gaps in healthcare, rent, and car payments. Unexpectedly,  “undertaking some significant strategic shifts in funding” severely impacts one's ability to plan for their future. 

To be clear, I do not believe philanthropy as a sector can be radical, nor do I think it should exist. In a world where everyone had what they needed to live a fully dignified existence, philanthropy wouldn’t need to exist. Abolishing the systems that allow for gross wealth inequalities and resource hoarding would be radical. Guaranteeing a basic income, providing living wages, and ensuring access to safe and affordable housing and healthcare for all would be radical. 

But redistributing wealth acquired through exploitation, greed, racism, and tax evasion isn’t radical. Often, instead of creating abundance and fostering innovation, philanthropy exacerbates competition and manufactures scarcity by forcing competition for limited funding, which is ultimately distributed inequitably. 

Alas, here we are, in the interim. Using this inequitable apparatus to return money to the communities where it originated. 

There is no  “sheltering-in-place” for four years and reemerging into the world we knew. How we are moving now dictates the future and who is in it. 

Describe the key activities of the grant period? We kept each other alive. We kept each other fed. We kept each other housed. We kept each other mentally stable. 

Many of the organizations losing funding are those working to ensure that those forced to the margins are alive in the future. 

Many of us aren’t going to make it. 

And for those of us who do, old paradigms aren’t going to serve us, so we need to let go of them. We cannot cede power because it is only going to get harder and harder to resist, and we can’t afford to give up the ground and gains we’ve fought so hard for. While philanthropy focuses on reputation and perpetuity, the real legacy will be us watching you sit on your hands while many are denied basic rights in this country. 

What do you need to continue your work? I need those in philanthropy to move as boldly as the trans kids, immigrants, refugees, Black people, queer people, disabled people and others who have to fight for their existence daily. I want philanthropy to stop sitting on its hands and move resources now because they’ve been needed. I need the philanthropic sector to figure it out, just as so many of us have to to make ends meet. 

If you’re truly down for this movement for collective liberation, then you need to be upright in your integrity and dignity alongside us. We never had time for performative philanthropy, and truly don’t have time for it now. What we need from philanthropy is to alleviate some of the pressure of the very calculated systemic, institutionalized attacks on the liveilhoods of those of us on the marginzies by surrounding those of us who are risking it all so that we might see a future where we thrive with abundant capital – financial, legal, intellectual, social, etc, needed to fortify and hold our ground.

I’m someone who struggles to write at home, so I am endlessly grateful for these twenty days where I can let my brain unravel and focus on my writing. I started seeking out writing residencies three years ago when I came to terms with how routine adverse I am and the little self-control I have when it comes to prioritizing writing over socializing. So now, home is where I relish in the 33% extrovertedness I possess, and residences are the chunks of time where I envelop myself in writing, reading, and thinking. I’ve found that residencies that provide meals, are immersed in nature, and have little to no structure are where I tend to thrive.

Many residencies around the world provide time, space, meals, and, sometimes, pay for you to attend so that you have dedicated time with yourself and your work. They range in time, focus, and whether or not you need to come in with a specific project or focus. As I expand my writing practice and world, I am committed to tending the knowledge gap of the opportunities that exist to support writers, who, like myself, don’t have family financial resources, haven’t had a template of how it’s done, and are trusting in the power of possibility to bring their work to life.

So, here are some residencies that I have attended (marked with an *) and those I have had eyes on:

Philoxenia - Morocco (maybe on hiatus?)*

Storyknife Women’s Writer Retreat - Alaska*

Rockland Residency for Black Artists - Washington*

Knoll Farm Better Selves Fellowship - Vermont*

The Lupine Collaborative - Various*

Breadloaf Environmental Writers’ Conference - Vermont

New Seneca Village - Various

Disquiet - Portugal

MacDowell - New Hampshire 

Fernland - Pacific Northwest 

Mesa Refuge - Northern California 

Caldera Arts– Oregon

Ragdale - Chicago 

Hawthornden Castle - UK

The Tyrone Guthrie Centre – Ireland

Jentel Arts – Wyoming

The Bellagio Center - Italy 

Villa Lena - Italy 

Yaddo - New York 

Hedgebrook - Washington 

La Baldi Residency - Italy 

Headlands Center for the Arts - Northern California  

Library of the African Diaspora - Ghana

Cave Canem - Pennsylvania 

Changemaker Authors Cohort - Virtual

Oxbelly - Greece

Camargo Foundation - France 

Djerassi - Northern California 

La Fouchette de Rozé Hotel - Ivory Coast

Platforms that I check for residencies, retreats, and other opportunities:

Galleyway

Creative Capital

Pick Up the Flow

Please feel free to add to this list!

So much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination - Saidiya Hartman

Investing in the imagination, creativity, and dreams of Black folks is a critical and necessary intervention in the climate and environmental crisis. As wildfires rage, floods swell, and heatwaves become the norm, Black communities, who experience these disasters harshly and disproportionately, are largely cut off from the resources necessary to innovate and intervene.

Many of the climate solutions that are being mainstreamed and financed come from a small and largely white part of the population and will remain inaccessible to most. These “solutions” fail to recognize that climate and environmental justice intersect and underpin the movements for economic, gender, housing, and LGBTQIA+ justice, as well as the many other struggles for justice. These solutions are being created in isolation, without community input, and without the praxis necessary to address the core of the crisis. 

Why is it that those most privileged in society are being resourced to mitigate a crisis fueled by their dismissal of Indigenous traditions, hoarding of resources, and extractive practices? 

In a capitalist society, those with disposable financial, social, and time resources are allowed the space necessary to ideate, innovate, and implement. Those without access to the resources, but with critical ideas, lived experience, and community input, are blocked from the capital necessary to innovate at scale. 

Movement Generation offers that “a just transition requires us to build a visionary, regenerative economy based on caring and sacredness of relationships to each other and the world upon which we depend. This calls for strategies that democratize, decentralize, and diversify economic activity while we dampen down consumption, and (re)distribute resources and power.”

To realize a just transition, we need to direct significant financial, social, and time capital to Black folks to imagine, design, and dream toward a liberatory and climate-just future.

Who is better positioned to innovate than those who have been systemically cut off from resources, yet still survive?

The times are calling for us to access the edges of imagination and creativity and direct it toward building the world we know is possible. We must root ourselves in the reality and scale of the issues while boldly stretching and reaching toward a new world. For too long, Black folks have been asked to attempt to live in a reality that has been imagined by a small group of white men. Tell me, what did they care about Black liberation, freedom, or dreams? 

The existing paradigms are limited, lack imagination, and stifle possibility. Large white-led environmental and climate organizations have and continue to get boatloads of money and yet, we are. Instead of moving resources toward proximate leaders - those “who arise from the communities and issues they serve have the experience, relationships, data, and knowledge that are essential for developing solutions with measurable and sustainable impact” – foundations and donors pump money into these institutions without a second thought and make grassroots Black-led organizations compete for the leftovers. 

Concurrently, there is a focus on recruiting Black folks into mainstream climate and environmental workplaces that are often hostile to them. Upon entering these workplaces that weren’t created with them in mind, they are often tasked with using precious brain space to educate their non-Black peers and siloed into powerless positions resulting isolation, burnout, and eventually exiting the organizations.

Some of the most brilliant Black folks in the climate space are working full-time at organizations where they still have to frustratingly communicate to the leadership and board that “yes, Black people care about the environment.” Eventually, it becomes harder and harder to drown out the limitations that are being communicated by those who have never had to maneuver and manipulate a system to work for them. 

White supremacy and capitalism seek to flatten us, our experiences, and our imaginations. 

The increasing apathy that we are witnessing – emotionally, politically, socially - is most definitely a byproduct of living within oppressive systems that were designed without us yet we expected to survive in. 

What do we risk by not making space for Black imagination?

I think we’re seeing it now. Genocide. An unimaginative and failing two-party system. A burning planet. A repetition of patterns that serve the interest of a few but put the burden of responsibility on most of us. With trillions of dollars going toward militarization, it’s hard to believe that the best we’ve got is paper straws.

Those who have been pushed to the margins understand the need to connect our movements for justice for a climate future where we all have what we need. Black folks, especially those with multiple intersecting identities, are positioned to develop and implement solutions that center and acknowledge a community and don't put the onus on an individual. 

Directly and abundantly funding the people who have always had to resist, create, imagine, and redefine societies that weren’t created for them to survive is an intervention. Deeply transformative societal work needs to be grounded in long-term, abundant, and power-building resources for Black individuals, which begins by creating space for ideation, innovation, and imagination. Resourcing imagination creates possibilities that ripen the soil for more ideas to take root. 

With an increasingly devastating and visible climate crisis, the questions that I’m holding as I look toward the future are:  “Who is in the best position to imagine, design, and implement the paradigms we need for a climate just future? How do we create fertile ground ripe for creation by resourcing imagination? And with everything being made up, what else is possible?”

Authoritarianism flourishes in our overwhelm, and admittedly, I am consumed. 

I keep coming back to the phrase, “we must refuse to obey.”

Authoritarianism works if we cooperate. If we comply. Not only to the laws, but the ideology. 

I understand that to refuse to obey, I must refuse to become disembodied. 

Being connected to our bodies, embodied, allows us to connect with emotions, senses, and intuition. It can be where we sharpen our self-awareness, find balance, establish a connection with ourselves and others, and be clear on our purpose in the world.

With that, I know my body as my first site of resistance, liberation, and refusal. My strongest defense against the authoritarianism that seeks to overwhelm us is embodiment. My body and mind are where I house my commitment to refusing to entertain the idea that another human is anything less than that. It’s where I embody and reinforce my commitment to the dignified existence of myself and others. My body is the first place I resist the gaslighting and questioning of what I see and know is happening. 

In times like these, it’s critical to shield ourselves from the overwhelm. It’s not to say that we should be disconnected from reality, but to be measured in what we consume, how we consume it, and to track the place we’re operating from. I think about it as having myself firmly planted on the ground so every gust of wind doesn’t knock me over. As this moment calls for me to be my most expansive, responsive, and steady self, I must protect it from the overwhelm. I must stay close to myself. 

I will not cede any of the power in my body to the project of supremacy. 

I will not allow any contortions that allow for the ideology of dehumanization to fit. 

We must not comply in advance nor resign ourselves to accepting things as they are.

The unraveling, questioning, and sense-making I do in my mind and body is my dress rehearsal for how I show up in the world. I know if I can do it here, I can do it out there. 

I am wielding my power and resistance from an unshakeable commitment to human dignity.  

Looming larger than my overwhelm is my desire to be upright. To not just weather this moment but to wage a dignified resistance. I will not preemptively bow or erase my existence from the record. 

In addition to being present and available for deep community care, moving resources abundantly and without question, I am attempting to calm the overwhelm by committing to my writing practice. I aim to be precise,  deliberate, and to have my writing hold my questions, document the truth of the moment, and guide me to clarity. I am committing not because I’ve come to any answers, but because I have so many questions, curiosities, and things that I don’t wish to learn in isolation. 

Toni Morrison told us, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.“ -

And while I do think having space for despair and fear is healthy and necessary to grieve, I believe that committing to our work right now is critical to remain steadfast and hopeful of another world being possible.