IF YOU'VE BEEN SEEKING EASE AND SLOWNESS . . .
in this season and finding overwhelm...you are not alone.
One thing we have learned about grief - whether it's individual or collective - is that we find ourselves moving slowly within the overwhelm, out of necessity. Grief slows us down by making our inner worlds stop, while the outer world cycles on. In other words, it's a recipe for feeling off kilter, at best, and easily overwhelmed.
Which is why one of our favorite writers and thinkers on grief, Marisa Renee Lee - whose book, Grief is Love, will arrive on the doorstep any day now - was the person who summed it up best for us this week. In remembering her uncle Ruben, Lee wrote:
As an LGBTQ+ ally, I never feel like I am doing enough, but I think that's how it should be. My privilege exists to make me uncomfortable, more aware, and ultimately more compassionate. In allyship our responsibility is to put our feelings aside and find our own unique way to use our power for good.
We recommend reading her full post on instagram here. But as we wrote recently on the topic of finding balance between errors and perfectionism, we know there can be a tendency to receive this message as an invitation to overdo it, or to sacrifice yourself. Instead, we like to see it as a normalization of what it means to be in collective grief, and to live in community with others from a place of knowing that we cannot do it all (or any of it?) alone.
When we share this newsletter platform with others, we experience both our power (to cede space and to influence you, dear reader) and our privilege (to be in community with other writers, thinker, and workers). Learning is incremental, as is shifting culture. We invite you this week, and always, to be in the incremental and uncomfortable space with us. We're so glad to be here, and so glad to be in your good company.
Yours in food justice,
Tay + Dor
photo by Jehan Nizar for GFJ Stories
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