Blending ideas

By: Eliza
​I do something with five friends that we call a craft circle. We don’t make anything at all. We are people who care about what’s going on in the world but are too busy to write to our legislators or educate ourselves on different issues, so we carve out an hour a week to do so together. (I highly ​

recommend doing this. Each week, a different person brings an article or issue to write a letter about. It began when I reached out to a bunch of people asking if they wanted to work on environmental issues. The interested ones responded, and everyone else didn’t. And that’s fine.)
Our meetings have shifted focus from environmentalism to race, and we think it’s valuable for both topics to inform each other. My friends suggested reading and discussing the book Me and White Supremacy. I was not entirely on board; I thought that I was “pretty good” on race and didn’t need to do more self-examination. This belief, I have learned, is called white exceptionalism, meaning you think you’re more advanced than other White people and don’t need to do the work of untangling what you’ve been taught. But undoing the harmful views that society has taught us is a lifelong process.
I am deeply grateful to my friends for initiating the process of reading this book;  it is uncovering layers of my world-view that needed examination and it’s helping me understand my past and helping me learn better ways of existing in the present and future. 
There is an astrologer, Alice Sparkly Kat, who writes articles that I admire very much because she does her readings through the lens of colonial theory. Her writing is powerful because the intersection of the two creates new ideas and a fresh view on astrology. 
I doubt I will reach her level of sharpness, but I  am compelled to write about what I’m learning about justice and blend it into my writing on permaculture. How? Not sure yet, but the ideas will blend over time. For now, I’m just going to write about my both topics because life is short, perfect is the enemy of the good, and the world is tired of my silence.