Increasingly powerful surveillance tools have shifted the power dynamics between people and institutions. To address this new dynamic, we’ve been creating a toolkit, in collaboration with the ACLU of Washington, that demystifies surveillance technologies in Seattle
An inclusive Community Space dedicated to creating opportunities for Wilkinsburg – a space giving a home to community improving organizations
A personal essay on life and gardening by Georgina Reid.
Gardening is simply a framework for engagement with our world, grounded in care and action. To garden is to care deeply, inclusively, and audaciously for the world outside our homes and our heads… To be a gardener is to give a fuck. To be a gardener is to be invested in a place—to know it, to protect it, and to be present.
— Georgina Reid
This is a good metaphor.
Gardeners plant and tend things that they won’t get to appreciate, trees that won’t mature till we’re dead. We invest in the future, planting bulbs and trusting they will bloom after the dark winter. We are patient, letting young plants take their time to fill in after three to five years. It looks a little sparse there at the beginning, but we know it will grow into something spectacular.
We (hopefully) plant with a vision — and if we’re wise we’ll listen to the plants and adapt our vision to reality, accepting the plants that can thrive instead of coddling the ones we want but that hate our conditions.
We do the boring groundwork of enriching the soil, making it a place where our plants can survive.
We wage the endless battle against invasive weeds that steal our nutrients.
We (hopefully) learn from our failures even as we keep up hope the next experiment will succeed, and aren’t afraid to try new things. We continuously learn and grow along with our garden.
We embrace the seasons, celebrating the best of what each offers – bulbs and annuals in spring, perennials and grasses in summer, textural elements and evergreen foliage in winter.
“One of the big fumbles (sort of) of my 30s was concocting a false narrative that went something like: We need someone on the outside (read: in a position of “power”) to bestow upon us the permission to be or be able to do X…”
“It was only once I hit a few dozen walls and failed to “publish” in the “way” I thought I “had” to publish, that I then — finally! — began to think more creatively around engaging with and owning my work and the space within which I was working.”
“…A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit.”
I feel like Craig’s got a point here that syncs with my feelings about just going for self-publishing and trying to build my own thing. Where I have such strong feelings about work and worker’s rights and capitalism, it’s pushing me towards an older mode of work, a more creator-centric approach to trade.