Dear Gentle Reader,
(yes, I did just binge watch a whole season of Bridgerton)
I write this with my 3 year old resting on my shoulder. It seems I’m always fighting for some time to write (these emails, for my own creative practice, for substack, etc) and I like to think it’s okay to want to do both — or none at all at times, even.
It’s how we’ve been conditioned by capitalism. It’s an either/or mentality and I like to embrace a more both/and stance towards things.
Like a curling vixen, resting and also very attentive. I can be a parent and attend to my creative practice. I can hold the seed of a possible future while weeding out the invasive species that are trying to uproot me from my present…
In my last email, I spoke of problems, thesis statements and hypotheses. Today, I present to you my thesis statement.
My thesis statement is simple: if we can imagine a different world, we can birth a different world. We can create it, work towards it, and facilitate it.
The different world I imagine is one where we’re no longer living under the freeze of capitalism.
I spent a long time trying to map the different nervous system responses against the stages of capitalism and it seemed like such a big feat for me to undertake given that I was then a newly single mother of two – two years into my single motherhood, I still don’t think I want to pick that project up yet (again?)
Anyway, my conclusion was that late stage capitalism puts us in a state of freeze. And that’s how I got here, talking about thawing the freeze of capitalism.
But there’s also an image there, a beauty to the thawing of winter and allowing spring to emerge. And that doesn’t have to look a certain way because, at least in my case here in Cairo, Spring is windy and sandy and just…not pleasant. Yes the trees are flowering again, but it’s just not the romanticized version of Spring.
If you would pick a nervous system response to match late-stage capitalism, which would you choose?
PS I’m running a 6 week Work that Reconnects workshop called Thawing the Freeze of Capitalism starting March 25, you can find some more information here |
