The spider’s web is web of protection around art-making, around play, and around intentional community. It is an offering of spaciousness from social media. This work allows me to take time with my daily practice, with myself, and with my communities that feels easeful in my body. I hope that these offerings will bring you more ease and consideration in your own body. You can find me here, with my energetic offerings, my contact, and my IG @meredithannewhite.
As I watch information spread widely over social media channels, I am reminded of the practice of sustainable commitment. It can be incredibly overwhelming to sustain the practice of commitment when it looks differently for each of us on an individual level.
I’ve immersed myself in practice alongside community for over 10 years. I’ve registered voters at shows and created public work for arts organizations. I’ve managed a museum facilitating accessible programs with volunteers and kids in mind. I’ve held raffles for farmers and as land reparation. I’ve offered tarot and embodiment work after years of practice.
I’ve learned so much about myself and my own capacity in working alongside community. I learned a lot; I fucked up a lot. I remember how I felt in 2020. I jumped into everything. I sent money out to spaces that were outside of my financial bandwidth. I used my body for protest and deep labor unaware of its toll on me. I hit burnout within the first few weeks of action.
The narrative of burnout was fed to me in working with non-profits for many years. It’s a narrative that’s been fed to me as an artist. I believe it’s been fed to us very intentionally for a very long time.
I was forced to pivot my energy back inward. I found that much of the work I needed to be doing during that time was with myself. I had internalized homophobia and saviorism. I needed to further understand my privilege in this body. I needed the space for unrest to bubble up and through. I needed to take the time to have reckoning outside of public opinion.
This dialogue with myself is a huge part of my practice now. If I am better able to show up with myself, then I am better able to show up alongside community. This practice allows for disagreement to be met with more compassion. This practice allows for many truths to exist at the same time. This practice allows me to sink into the spaces that are yet to be seen. I am better able to commit to that vision even if the structures around me are crumbling. This practice allows me to sustain commitment to community.
These moments remind me that anger lights the path of knowing to where we feel called to speak. Grief has the ability to transmute itself into a space of connectivity. My current practice of connectivity looks like beekeeping. It looks like writing this newsletter as an offering. It looks like having talks with my family about queerness and reproductive care.
Community work transmutes into so many different fields and skills and hands. All of this work allows for collective action to sustain. It sustains because different hands are pulling at the tethers of outdated constructs from many angles. This constant dialogue allows for new voices to pull their chair up to the table of many. It welcomes dismantling because it heeds to a foundation built with equity in mind.
When I feel disconnected, I look to those that have been doing this work before me in this lifetime. I look to those that have done this work in lifetimes before me. The commitment to community is sacred work.
What does it mean for us to commit to community as a practice?
How do we create sustainable commitment within movements?
How do we provide care when there’s deep grief and rage involved?
How do we check in with ourselves so that the stopping point isn’t just burnout?
I continue to feel overwhelmed with information on social media, so I will share the work of those around me here. This feels more easeful in my body. Therefore, this feels like a sustainable commitment to myself and community.
I am held by Mar and their work. This section of my newsletter is in direct conversation with their newsletter Monday Monday.
I listened to an amazing interview with Adrienne Marie Brown on On Being. Adrienne’s books Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism have been incredibly helpful for me and reorienting around community work.
Sarah Faith Gottesdeiner holds me weekly with their podcast Moonbeaming. Through the lens of spirituality, they cover difficult topics with legibility and grace. This is no love and light bullshit. The most recent episode digs into money. I highly recommend.
Y’all bought shapes from me. This is allowing me to hack at some of my own debt. Thank you so very much.
There is an upcoming week of action in the forest from July 23-30. I will be hanging work there for it! Send me a message if you want to join.
My friend Danielle is teaching me some tattoo things. I get to be there with them and their puppy Elowen 🤎
I took a trip to Birmingham and visited Joe Minter’s African Village in America. He has spent the last 30 years creating work in response to the racial and political climate of America. He showed us around the land that is built upon an African American burial ground. Thank you so much for having us, Joe.
Thank you for being here. You are held!
You can find me here, with my energetic offerings, my contact, and my IG @meredithannewhite.
your writing has illuminated a part of me that i've lost to illness and depression, the part that was deeply rooted in community before the pandemic, and is reminding me just how important it is to connect with communities of all kinds. bees, activists, writers, friends. we need each other. i've been feeling isolated lately, and this is a good reminder <3
I think it can be difficult to dig into community where there are varying levels of accessibility in those spaces. I honor that 🤎 thank you for taking the time with this offering Lindsay