Thank you to everyone who subscribed last month! I’ll be donating all of the subscriptions from last month to the Movement for Black Lives.
This month, I’ll donate all subscription funds to Families for Justice as Healing, which works to end the incarceration of women and girls in Massachuesetts. Scroll to the end to learn more about their recent work.
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Image description: A piece of green seaweed with three white circles on its surface floats in a tide pool above small barnacles and snails.
Real talk. The time I had set aside to work on this newsletter first morphed into an article pulling forward lessons from the recent activism of K-pop fans and TikTok users -- and the Black organizers who led the way. It just got published over at Waging Nonviolence, so I hope you’ll browse over there and check it out.
And then the remaining time I had set aside for this newsletter morphed into a morning that became an afternoon at Halibut State Park in Rockport, Massachusetts. My partner had the day off, the sun was shining, and the ocean was calling.
I resisted going at first. I felt stressed out that I hadn’t written this newsletter yet, and I had a list of other substantive book-related projects I planned to work on.
But the ocean was calling. It reminded me that I am a free woman. As a freelance writer, I have no boss, no one to report to, no one to punish me if I don’t do everything that I set out to do in a day. No one, that is, except myself.
So I gave myself a break and followed my heart and the call of the ocean. But I took my notebook with me to the amazing seascape where huge slabs of granite slope into the water, and giant rocks nestle up against each other to form an uneven and sometimes treacherous shore.
We clambered across the rocks to find an inlet where we could stand in the water as the waves crashed against the outcroppings. I spent many minutes gazing into a tide pool formed in a shallow stone hollow.
Image description: Waves swirling over seaweed-covered rocks. I’m in a white tank top, crouched, looking at the water, my back to the camera.
And I wrote a little:
The stone against my back is cool, the stone against my feet is hot. The stillness of the stone echoes centuries. The ocean crashes in and the tide draws itself out. The constant pulse of the waves echoes the motion of centuries.
The stone says, there is no time. The ocean says, time cycles again and again. They say, this is what is. Change is both constant and the work of millennia.
Now, I’m home, and it’s nearing dinnertime. I continue my lifelong work of understanding how to let go of the constriction of time while still showing up for the things I care about, that I feel committed to, that I am responsible for.
Because that’s the thing, right? Freedom means nothing without responsibility. The freedom to do whatever you want and not giving a damn about how your actions affect your community, other people, and the more-than-human beings you share space with—that’s not so much freedom as it is being alone. Independence can be a lonely thing.
But there can be freedom within networks of mutual care and mutual responsibility—doing what you want within reason, remaining accountable to those you love, who support you, who are your kin, in the largest sense of that word. That kind of freedom brings us closer, I think, to how humans are meant to live and survive. And I think that’s when we can start to understand that interdependence is so much better for us as a species than independence.
Thank you, as always, for being part of my network and community. I am truly grateful for you.
Prompting
I believe an important task in this moment for all of us, and especially artists, writers, and visionaries, is to take part in the collective imagining of a world without the prison-industrial complex. There’s so much great work happening around this by Black artists and organizers and other folks. I’d like to uplift some of that work with this newsletter.
So the prompt this month is two-fold:
Read Franny Choi’s “Field Trip to the Museum of Human History” or spend some time with this graphic, and then write or draw your own portrait of a world without the police.
Send it to me! And/or send me poems, drawings, videos, dances, or any other artwork you come across that is imagining a world without the prison-industrial complex.
Engaging
What else I’m reading/listening to/thinking about:
I’m going for TV and music for this July issue—a first for Starlight and Strategy!
Queen Sono is the first fully produced Netflix show from Africa. I love spy shows, and this one unpacks the legacy of colonialism in Africa while doing so. Plus, everyone is beautiful and kick-ass, especially the main character.
The Indigo Girls dropped their new album, Look Long, and it’s lovely. I have been listening to them for more than twenty years, and I so appreciate their commitment to their art and politics.
Community/Announcements
This month, I’m donating all my subscriptions to the Families for Justice as Healing, a Boston-based community organization. Every week, they lead actions toward ending the incarceration of women and girls in Massachusetts. They played a lead role in the recent fight to defund the Boston police. Almost a dozen organizations came together to demand that at least $40 million of the police budget be returned to the community.
From the collective statement:
Though not all of our demands were met, we are celebrating the work of organizers who made all of these victories possible. Black-led organizing won a $10 million shift away from the police budget and pushed our City government to begin addressing its racist budgeting process and generations of disinvestment in Black communities. Immigrant youth won a unanimous vote to pass the facial recognition ban. Young people won investments in youth jobs, recognizing that we must invest in economic opportunities and jobs rather than policing. Muslim organizing addressed the falsehood of community policing and put a pause on grants that enable racial profiling through the use of technology. Boston teachers organized to pass a meaningful resolution within their union in support of our demands.
I hope you will join me in supporting them by subscribing. Thank you!
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