Intentions
I’ve been thinking a lot about this space that I neglect. I think about how the Kochiyama family put out a regular 8-page newsletter for over a decade and how hard it is for me to keep this little thing going. I also think about how Yuri was a mother in her 40s when she started her organizing and movement work. I think about Grace Lee Boggs saying the last decade of her life was the most invigorating of her time in the movement and she lived for a century.
I’m young and I’m not. I’m old but not really. I’m 36 and it’s the year of the Tiger. I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship to organizing and my “role” in the movement, what community and organizations mean. What does it mean to have an organizing “home.” Do you need one? It’s hard to build something and even harder to keep it alive, but watching something fall apart doesn’t have to be a loss. I tell myself that it’s not too late, this is a lifetime of work, work that will go on after me.
This uprooted feeling is not helped by recently having literally uprooted, moving out of my long-time neighborhood to a suburb just outside the city. It’s not a life I ever expected for myself, but I’m getting settled and falling in love with it. I’ve been eager to transform the property into the little food forest of my dreams, full of native pollinators. But I don’t know this new space. So I wait, and watch. One of my favorite things has been watching the changes over the seasons, seeing what blooms, what stays, and what falls away. Watching the way sun moves across the sky. We planted a garden with seedlings that spent a little too much time waiting no the windowsill in the kitchen. My partner was worried we waited too long, that the plants were too wilted and far gone. I told him to wait. And sure enough with room to grow, consistent water and sun, they recovered and we’ve been enjoying the harvest. Well, sort of. It’s been a dry summer.
I want to be more intentional with this space even if it doesn’t translate to subscribers or clicks. I want a space to write and water my ideas (to keep the clunky garden metaphor going). People tell me they like my writing and my ideas so maybe I need to believe that. Maybe I need to recognize I can’t and won’t please everyone, which, you know, is a little hard to accept as a perpetual people-pleaser. But I also left an event the other day where I chickened out on speaking Korean in front of a room of Koreans thinking, “that wasn’t very year of the Tiger of you!” And it wasn’t! So I’m going to try and use this space to be braver. As a former gifted child, I’ve had to learn that not everything can or needs to be A+ material. When I was writing my graduate thesis there was a point when it just needed to be done. Sure, I could have kept chasing sources and tangents, but the paper needed focus. And now its out there as a base. I dream of turning it into a book. Who would read it, I ask myself. But maybe that question can wait. Maybe the first thing is to just start writing.