On being met with silence.

An offering rooted in earth; a body gripped by modernity.

Rusted, blunted hook pierces through tender viscera of lungs, tugging sharply inwards, yanking constriction, thieving breath, screwing tightness of chest.

The ancient hook hangs from agéd, frayed fibre of line, which threads and entangles through the spiral of cells, muscles, nerves.

At uneven intervals are tied torn shreds of ribbon, stained burgundy iron.

Squint, and worn ink reveals the measures.

“Shrunken”

“Unseen”

“Unheard”

“Insignificant”

“Trite”

“Snubbed”

“Abandoned”

“Unloved”

Fresher paper has been tied to the line too, penned in a newer ink.

“Clicks”

“Reach”

“Algorithm”

“Speed”

“Urgency”

“Sell”

“Exploit”

“Manipulate”

“Extract”

Leaking lungs strain against the ripping of metal, searching warmth, seeking purchase, seeking breath, against the frosted bite of exposure.

Hook catches on pulsating heart.

And the ribbons darken once more.

---

Offering our hearts, our arts, our selves, is no small act.

Nancy Goebel, a dear mentor who managed me in my previous role, said to me in my final days of the job before I left to explore this freelancehood of deeper creativity: “You’re like an artist who locks up her art in the atelier”.

It was a challenge, a dare, to start sharing my poetry, my self, my writing. To be courageous. To move, as she so often says, from ‘worrier’ to ‘warrior’. For the world needs poet-warriors, art-warriors, soft-warriors.

Ahhh but in this warped digital landscape, the pixelated moment of ‘Send’ or ‘Publish’ – when flesh meets hardware meets software in search of new hardware and another’s flesh – is no small act.

In my early Knowledge Management days, when I was still apprenticing in a law firm and learning this new craft on the job, I remember coming across a study that spoke to the social contract between knowledge sender and knowledge receiver.

My own thinking about how knowledge is created and shared as an intertwined, relational act has evolved since then, but the heart of this study has always remained with me.

For the act of sharing is relational. Someone shares. Someone receives. This can be transactional, but it can also move beyond transaction. For the sharer to know, to feel, that what they have shared is of use, of value, or has been received – as a feedback loop for future sharing and receiving – the receiver must communicate back in some way. A connection is opened, established, through which knowledge, love, care, all our entanglements, can begin to flow in different directions. And thus, trusting relationship can be nurtured.

Social media, our attention economy, has pushed this intimate relationship of reciprocity to scale, and to extremes, and to speed.

We can share one to many, to thousands, to millions. We as an individual can receive from thousands, from millions. We have been trained to expect the instant feedback of likes, comments, shares. But the noise is deafening, a deluge of content, opinions, offerings, slop, wisdom, connections, harm, joy.

And so, ‘optimisation’ enters the chat. How to craft our words to supposed perfection, to hook and catch the eyes, the emotions. Use this many words, use this language, use images, no video, no carousels, what’s your hook, your call to action. Use this structure for your messaging, don’t make it too long, check your reach, your engagement, your numbers, polish it until there are no more edges, beat the algorithm, the algorithm’s changed, change your content, your strategy.

Within our smaller, dearer circles, messages go unanswered, left on read. I am guilty of this too. We are tired. We are overwhelmed. We are pulled in many directions. I try, so hard, to advocate for, encourage and practice a spirit of non-urgency in replies to varying degrees and with those I’m in relationship with, to stave off the deluge. I don’t always succeed in both my actions and my expectations.

And amongst it all, our wild bodies beat.

Are we loved. Do we belong. Do we matter.

The agéd line cuts at us, its ribbons and papers of measure rubbing sore against our open wounds.

Modernity’s speed doesn’t offer us the time to sit with, to digest, to reflect.

Modernity’s speed doesn’t offer us the time to heal, for the scar tissue to protect new flesh.

---

adrienne maree brown’s 'this is the only moment (species love poetry)’ is a poem I return to again and again, as a prayer.

Two of the stanzas come to me in this moment:

but when i listen
the universe is reminding me
i cannot be taken from her
i am never untethered from her roots
never beyond the whole
and nothing is lost, it is lived
and we are not here to win
but to experience love
and those who do not know love
are missing life in spite of all other accumulation

and when i listen
the universe is teaching me
that control is impossible
and the season will change
and enough is a feeling that cannot be measured
and the small circle is the deepest
and i cannot teach anyone what i have not practiced
and i cannot change anyone but myself
and i will never feel free in a position of demand
and i am already free
and we all are, and when we realize it
we cannot be contained

---

When I moved from employment to freelancehood, I made a commitment to myself that I would practice regenerative ways of working and being, as far as I was able.

Collaboration over competition. Fluid, responsive emergence over hard, unmoving plans. Relationality over transaction. Patience over urgency. Openness over protectionism. Generosity over selfishness.

These, of course, aren’t either/ors, but dances. There are times for urgency, transaction, protectionism. But as far as possible, within the realities of our current society and systems, I would seek to resist everything that modernity, that capitalism, that colonialist worldviews, teach us is needed for business.

Financially, it means things are hard. But my heart has grown these last few years. I have grown, rooted in this tender soil.

And yet. My body, my nervous system, remains tied to modernity.

Joining Ijeruka’s ‘Digital Kinship’ journey in 2023, one rooted in Afro-diasporic and Global South perspectives, cemented my beliefs that digital community and connection can be generative. And also cemented my knowledge that many of our digital tools and platforms are conceived in real harm, most often for those modernity and colonialism have created as the most vulnerable to these systems. The cost is death, mental trauma, structural harm, ecological harm.

The hypocrisy of me sharing this on Substack, which has recently been in the news for profiting from Nazi content, is not lost on me.

How do we hold the both/and of this complexity? Do we divest? Seek alternatives? Hold our noses?

How do we hold the joy of digital community with the requirements of digital visibility with the accountability of digital harm?

---

Sharing our art can feel like lifting our chins, exposing the fragile flesh of our throats, not knowing if we’ll be met with tender kiss or sharpened blade.

Will I be met and held, witnessed, with love? Will I be met and rejected, witnessed with indifference? Or will I be unmet, unheld, unwitnessed, with silence?

Whether to a beloved over message, a trusted circle over mailing list, or the ‘big wide world’ of social media.

And whether handing over physically to someone trusted in front of us, or sharing to a living room, a conference room.

In all, there is the fear of being met with silence.

Not the blessed silence and stillness of the calm ocean or breeze-fluffled forest, where our bodies melt in pleasure.

But the anxious silence of uncertainty. Of anticipation. Of the exposed throat.

And in this silence, that ancient, rusted hook goes to work with its sawing and pulling.

---

I feel as though a settled nervous system, rooted in healthy soil and love, would be able to luxuriate in this silence.

I know, deeply, that I am able to come back to the body, to soothe myself, to place warm hands, to slow the breath. To be curious about what is happening and where. To find a home within myself.

I know, deeply, that silence has different meanings. That people are busy, need time, not all will be moved, and that all of that is okay. That I, too, have greeted others with silence.

I know, deeply, that these angular digital tools aren’t created for the soft curves of our bodies and hearts. That we have, many of us, been robbed of the immediacy of the press of reassuring warm flesh against our skin, instead pixels flickering colours to form words and emojis as surrogate for touch.

But for me, clicking ‘Send’ this week into different places – both private and near, and public and far – has revealed wounds new and old, fresh and well-worn. All my attachment fears activated.

Within the public and far, my body has been fighting against the lessons of capitalist modernity. The numbers, the views, the clicks, the reach, the comments, responses. The speed of the feedback loop validating me.

Within the private and near, my body has been fighting against the lessons of anxious belonging. Do those I care for care for me back. Can those I hold hold me in return. Do those I celebrate celebrate me too. Can I be met in this moment as I long to be met.

The answer, as is often the case, has been a both/and. Some have, and the warmth and love has felt tangible. Some haven’t, and the perceived cold and distance has felt tangible too. The old wounds, despite the rational mind understanding, torn a little further.

My body, also, has been fighting against the lessons of uncertain creativity. Does what I’ve created matter. Have I truly followed my heart. Have I opened the atelier at the right moment.

In Carina Jean Lyall’s Earth Medicine Mentorship last year, she shared a story about a princess who falls in love with a hermit. The hermit lives on an island in the middle of the sea. Each night, he places a lantern on the threshold of his home. Each night, the princess risks swimming out to be with him.

More happens in the story, of course. An angry father king, of course. Tragedy, of course.

When invited to consider what we felt reflected in the story, which parts of our selves we felt reflected, I immediately was drawn to the hermit. The way I live and work is different to so many of my peers. Not married. No children. No beautiful well-sized house. The choice to go freelance, and lean in to the uncertainty of writing and facilitating, rooted in my passions. No bulging bank balance, although all is supported by the safety net of savings. I said I often feel like the strange hermit, on the edges and fringes, uncertain if my freshly-lit lantern will be seen.

And Carina responded, yes. But look at those swimming towards you.

---

I've been nurturing a dream since the early days of December; a little seed shook itself loose, bedded itself in the soil, and has been growing its roots over winter. And now, its first shoots are starting to taste the air, as the season starts to shift.

And those shoots are tentatively growing, unsure if the lingering cold of winter will claim them, or the emerging warmth of spring will greet them.

I have placed a lantern to tend, unsure of whether it will be seen amongst the many other lanterns and fires as darkness descends. Unsure of whether those who feel called to it will risk the swim across the ocean. Whether I will need to risk swimming towards them, lantern held above the hungry licks of wave.

I have opened my voice, unsure whether my call will be met by response, or with silence.

---

Last night, in the throes of anxiety, all the bloodied ribbons of belonging and witnessing chaffing at me, I received a message. Someone’s own lantern was sent towards me, in the form of song.

"Follow the heart
Like a lantern in the dark
Follow on now, follow your heart
The mountain high, the valley low
The edges caught by moonlight
Like a lantern pulsing heart
The balanced rhythm, air in my lungs
Sweeping up the mountain high
Returning wholly to the divine
Like a lantern, finally breathe
Imagine all this, finally free
The mind will open, drift on the wind
Can you feel it?
Time to begin
Begin
Like a lantern

This song to celebrate and applaud you for bringing out: “Becoming the Seasons: A Spring Journey” - may those ready for the journey hear the calling - and pick up the invitation!”

My lungs regrouped, strengthened.

A deep, deep inhale, followed by the shove of exhale, expelled the hook.

---

Stepping back, and with my curious, non-judgmental self, I know and can understand everything I’ve experienced these last few days.

In these last 72 hours, I’ve learned new things about myself and what attachment, belonging, being witnessed, mean to me.

I know I can hold space. I know I can hold others. I have so much excitement for the journey I have created, and to travel it with those who feel called to join. I trust it, and its purpose, so deeply.

I know that those who feel called to it will find their way, without the need for modernity’s tricks.

I know with all my cells that this offering has been sown in healthy soil. I can see it birthing as it should.

Ahh but the body from which the seed came.

This body, which too is of earth, of seasons.

This body, with its old anxieties of belonging.

This body, which remains gripped by modernity.

And these are the tensions of our times. How to birth the new, the emerging, while hospicing the old, the dying. How to hold both. How to be a witness to both. Even when that witnessing requires a mirror.

The ancient, rusted hook with its line of bloodied ribbons and papers remains embedded within this flesh.

But for now, it rests.

And the lungs settle once more into steady breath.

---

With all my gratitude to Jonny for his messages last night, which found me in a moment of darkness, and to all those who have reached out these last few days.

Becoming the Seasons: A Spring Journey is a 6-week journey starting on the threshold of spring, inviting you to become reacquainted with the life on your doorstep as it awakens from winter.

And in doing so, remember that you, too, are of the seasons. And that kinship begins where your feet already are.

You can find out more on shimritjanes.com, and message me with any and all questions. I’d love to journey into spring alongside you.