Autumn in Glastonbury

During our week in Glastonbury through the end of September into October, I read some great books, but this one was transformative: Care Work. Dreaming Disability Justice ~Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashina.



Here are some of the key extracts which resonated deeply, and my journalling in relation to them.



"If collective access is revolutionary love without charity, how do we learn to love each other?"



“Most folks I know come to activist spaces longing to heal, but our movements are often filled with more ableism and burnout than they are healing. We work and work from a place of crisis.

Healing is dismissed as irrelevant, reserved for folks with money, an individual responsibility, something you do on your own time.

Our movements are so burn-out paced, with little to no room for grief, anger, trauma, spirituality, disability, aging, parenting, or sickness, that many people leave them ..."



#thinksystemically :

Our movements, communities, and activism are perpetuating colonisation and extraction.



How can we centre interconnectedness and interdependence and create something new?



This book is giving words to everything I'm grappling with internally at the moment.



"It's not about self-care - it's about collective care.

Too often self-care in our organisational cultures gets translated to our individual responsibility to leave work early, go home - alone - and go take a bath, go to the gym, eat some food and go to sleep.

So we do all of that 'self-care' to return to organisational cultures where we reproduce the systems we are trying to break"



#thinksystemically :

#selfcare - a whole capitalist industry profiting from our burnout cycles



"When we do disability justice work, it becomes impossible to look at disability and not examine how colonialism created it.

It becomes a priority to look at Indigenous ways of perceiving and understanding disability ...

(and) ... a vision of liberation that understands that the state was built on racist, colonialist ableism and will not save us, because it was created to kill us.

... we move together, with no body left behind (@sinsinvalid)"



#thinksystemically :

Diagnose systems & cultures, attitudes & norms



Image above: Chalice Well, and image below: Star Child mandala.  

Both locations are in Glastonbury.