to the women in my life

Actioning Actionable Actions

14 actionable actions from Got A Girl Crush.

1. BE CONSISTENT AND ACTIVE. One march is not enough. The organizers from the Women's March have started 10 Actions / 100 Days. Indivisble has also published a practical and comprehensive guide to resisting the Trump agenda.
2. CHECK IN with your friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers who may be having a hard time. We need to support each other.
3. That said, DON'T GET COMPLACENT. Taking breaks from social media and the news is healthy and PLEASE take care of yourself--but don't get discouraged or fatigued. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Ask for help from those you are closest to and trust.
4. ADD YOUR REPRESENTATIVES TO YOUR SPEED DIAL. Find your Senate and House representatives. Add Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in there too, for good measure. Call them. Call them often. CREDO has also made a great platform to email/call Senators that are vital in the confirmations of Trump's cabinet.
   Still not getting through? Email or write them a postcard!
5. STAY ON TOP OF & SUPPORT THE NEWS. It is overwhelming and it is tiring, but it's important to stay informed (and have purpose to call your Reps -- see #4). Get a subscription to reputable news sources like The New York Times or The Washington Post who are doing real and accountable journalism and who are under attack by the new administration. Donate to independent media like Democracy Now! who goes where the silence is.
   Hold these news organizations accountable to report FACTS  (there isn't such thing as "alternate facts"!) and to challenge politicians when they are lying or making claims without proof to back them up.
6. DONATE (ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Southern Poverty Law Center, The Audre Lorde Project, National Organization for Women, and local organizations need our help the most). Here's a list of more deserving orgs compiled by Jezebel.
7. VOLUNTEER! 2 Hours a Week is a community fostering a new level of civic engagement following the election by offering you 2 hours a week of tangible action. 
8. GET INVOLVED LOCALLY: block associations, community boards, city council meetings, school boards. Talk to local officials. Change starts from the bottom. Swing Left helps you find and commit to supporting progressives in your closest Swing District so that you can help ensure we take back the House in 2018.
   Check out the Democratic Socialists of America who are working to decrease the influence of money in politics, empower ordinary people in workplaces and the economy, and restructure gender and cultural relationships to be more equitable!
9. RUN FOR OFFICE! Let's change the government from being full of old rich white dudes and being more REPRESENTATIVE of our country. Websites like She Should Run and Brand New Congress are great resources to figure out how to get involved in a local, state, or national level.
10. KEEP MARCHING/PROTESTING! Stay visible and show up for others in solidarity. LGBTQIA+, Black Lives Matters, Standing Rock, the environment--all of these are intersectional to feminism. 
11. ADVOCATE for people of color, for trans people, for sex workers, for queer people, for immigrants. Reposting on Facebook and safety pins aren't enough--be an ally with your actions and your words. White silence = violence.
12. EDUCATE! Get off your smartphone and pick up a book! Start a book club to help navigate what you're reading.
    Some suggested reading on intersectionality: Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks, Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks, Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings by Alma M. Garcia, Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, Living For Change by Grace Lee Boggs, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More by Janet Mock, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Methodology of the Oppressed by Chela Sandoval, Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine, Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit, Trainwreck by Sady Doyle, We Should All Be Feminists by Chimanada Ngozi Adichie. But there are SO MANY MORE, TOO!
13. BOYCOTT companies that support Trump or carry any Trump family products. Money talks! #GrabYourWallet is a great resource as well as the free Boycott Trump app.
14. VOTE! Are your registered? Know when your next local and midterm elections are. If you move, remember to update your voter info. ALL ELECTIONS MATTER! Add to your calendar November 6, 2018 for the next midterm election.

sri lanka

Tales

“ If you are a dreamer, come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hoper, a prayer, a magic-bean-buyer. If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire, for we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in! ”

-- Shel Silverstein

Darn

"... I darn and am looking for holes in people’s clothes and the stories that accompany them; repairing these holes and returning the mended garments. It is a way to briefly make contact with strangers. I am interested in the spaces the body occupies, the tenderness of touch and the ways in which we go about day to day life."

Celia Pym, Hope's sweater, 1951. 

Quote and images from Celia Pym found via Selvedge 

Optimism and Despair

"If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting."

-- Zadie Smith
 A talk given in Berlin on November 10 on receiving the 2016 Welt Literature Prize.

getting to know me

One of the clearest lessons from contemporary neuroscience is that our sense of ourselves is anchored in a vital connection with our bodies. We do not truly know ourselves unless we can feel and interpret our physical sensations; we need to register and act on these sensations to navigate safely through life. While numbing (or compensatory sensation seeking) may make life tolerable, the price you pay is that you lose awareness of what is going on inside your body and, with that, the sense of being fully sensually alive.

--Bessel Van Der Kolk from The Body Keeps The Score

the snowbed

Jan Von Holleben's The Snowbed is one of the best books on my shelf.

"I find and I know that painting from nature is meaningless for me. I'd rather create paintings from memories, as visions of a landscape - I now mostly observe the bodily movement of mountains, water, trees and flowers. They are all reminiscent of similar movements in the human body of similar stirrings of joy and pain in the plants. Painting alone is not enough for me, I know that one can create qualities with colors - in the summer you feel an automnal tree deep inside, with your essence and your heart, it is this wistfulness that I want to paint." 

-- Egon Schiele in a letter to Franz Hauer, August 1913

New Mexico landscape by Michael A. Muller

Otto Kunzli – Arbeit Fur Die Hand – 1979-80

Francesco Viscuso

Ruth Thorne Thomsen, dot lady, 1983

Martin Puryear, untitled, 1977

Kansuke Yamamoto

Ana Mendieta

seeds

I don’t know what’s coming. I do know that, whatever it is, some of it will be terrible, but some of it will be miraculous, that term we reserve for the utterly unanticipated, the seeds we didn’t know the soil held. And I know that we don’t know what we do does. As Shane Bauer points out, the doing is the crucial thing.  

Rebecca Solnit, “The Arc of Justice and the Long Run”

sophie tottie

sophie tottie

Take a walk. Make something.

rules for self-care

1. MOVE. Take a walk. Be in nature. Commune with Mother Earth. She has seen it all, and she's still here supporting us. 

2. MAKE SOMETHING. A sandwich, a scarf, a sculpture, a song. Something small. Just remind yourself of your capable hands and self. It can help you keep the forward momentum. 


people, we need to take care of ourselves and our loved ones, bake cakes and look at the moon, all while remaining outraged, active and committed to moving society in the direction of freedom for all.

ink

Wild harvested Inks from the Toronto Ink Company

'i teach self-care'

"I teach self-care. I create environments for people to investigate themselves. I give them permission to touch their wounds, their blindness and numbness. I believe that deep self-knowledge is the path to healing and repairing the places where we've turned our backs on ourselves, where we were ignorant of our own body biases within our tissues and therefore our heart and soul. I help people find where they have unknowingly been at battle in their bodies. I teach this across fractured party lines. I teach people to empower themselves through body sensing and body-relating practices. And I believe that embodied self knowledge fosters compassion, understanding and better inter-relating to other humans. I want to know my neighbor, even if we disagree. I am prepared to do my part in repairing this country. I chose to not be at war with my own body a long time ago.

To my movement educator friends, let's continue to hold space for people of all ages and stages, let's honor them by hosting environments where they can find ease and peace. May we unify inside ourselves in order transform the anxiety and fear within society."

-- Jill Miller of Yoga Tune-Up

Ina Chadwick Wilde, from “The World Traveler.”

joan mitchell

Joan Mitchell, Pastels

on repeat

carfully tended

My desire
is always the same; 
wherever life deposits me:
I want to stick my toe
& soon my whole body
into the water.
I want to shake out a fat broom
& sweep dried leaves
bruised blossoms
dead insects
& dust.
I want to grow
something.
It seems impossible that desire
can sometimes transform into devotion;
but this has happened.
And that is how I've survived:
how the hole
I carefully tended
in the garden of my heart
grew a heart
to fill it

-Alice Walker

i art rachel

♡ my new shop selling hand made objects to spread love and cause mischief with ♡

iArtRachelShop