Systems

“The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.” Johanna Hedva

Our American culture exists in direct opposition to my nature. I wake wanting to walk outside with my coffee, bare feet in the tall grass. Checking our garden for signs of growth, thanking the worms for being so purposeful in their digging.

I do this for a while. Playing and laughing with my little one, greeting our dogs and the morning sun.

But, eventually, my coffee goes cold and the anxiety in me rises. It’s time.

Time to start the checklist. Get everyone breakfast, get myself and my little dressed. He protests, “But I want to stay in my jammies and play mama.”

“I know little one, me too.” I answer

I don’t want to go exchange my energy, light, and love for money. I don’t want to make white men richer and richer as I become sad and tired. I don’t want to listen to them talk about numbers and growth for the sake of growth.

I don’t want to listen to the supposed leaders of this mess tell me, “Well that’s just the way the world works.”

There is another way. There are one million other ways. We created this system, we can just as easily break it and form something new. A new way of being that honors the earth and the creatures that live here, including us.

This pandemic was an awakening. More people than ever are questioning this system, this mess we are in. The one that glorifies money and pleasures for the richest at the expense of all others.

So, what can we do?

For those of us with privilege and time, we start changing. We start making decisions and choices that slowly turn us away from the current system and toward something new. We take action for the good of all instead of the good of a few, and we watch it ripple.

We start to imagine. What sort of world is utopia to you? Not what you want, what your heart and soul yearn for.

For me, it is one where all beings, who are our relatives after all, are honored and cared for. One where there are no police and prisons, but restorative justice and healing.

I yearn for a world where we stop focusing on growth and only do what is sustainable and good for all.

And I’m not the only one. It’s time to live better.

Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts,
forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and
love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to
work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much-needed, long-overdue, and
motherfucking glorious halt.

More soon,

Bonnie Rae xx

Degrowth

I do not dream of labor

Peace

other ways of living

Beauty in ordinary living

Sick Woman

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