holding onto hope #7: on what to do
navigating the chaos with Black women at the forefront of resistance, survival, and transformation
“It’s a lot to live through. I know. We live in a time that offers many reasons to despair,” writes Mariame Kaba. “But the truth is quite simple: [W]e don’t know what to do because there’s not just one thing to do.”
I’m writing again. Returning to Raymond Carver’s style, practicing how to say more with less. His sentences remind me that love — like resistance — doesn’t need to be tedious to be true. I’m sketching stories, gathering my heart and gazing at its many forms.
There’s not just one thing to do, so I’m doing this.
“Change is both happening and needed in our world now more than ever,” writes . “I believe rituals can help us in creating a sacred relationship to change.”
I’m meditating in my kitchen more, leaving news alerts in the living room and making the time to cook this meal and that. Chopping tomatoes and olives and mozzarella with care. Slowly, surely seasoning flour and whisking eggs and spreading panko. Washing my hands with compassion flower after I dredge the chicken, asking the worry — of genocide and grocery prices — to wait, just long enough to give thanks to the earth, the hands who harvest, and those still fighting for what’s right.
Rituals can help us honor change, so I’m practicing this.
“Disciplines and routines have been one of my ways of keeping the gloom at bay, but I’ve also learned that the feeling that nothing will change is just mental weather…” writes Rebecca Solnit. “That’s helped, too, and it’s why I try to distinguish between despair as a feeling and as a forecast.”
I’m remembering this poem I wrote and trying to stay constant. Recalling when my friend1 Kristina said, “Feelings are not facts. Stay with the facts.” I’m marking up books, tracing histories of sudden social shifts. I’m counting on the infinite new ideas to come.
Despair is not a forecast, so I’m staying with this.
Donella Meadows writes that the “future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being.”
I’m sitting and thinking and maybe smoking too much weed.2 I’m collecting my thoughts and taking notes and sharing the inspiration I find with you 💌
The future can’t be predicted, so I’m dreaming like this.

Kaba writes, “Another world is possible in part because each of us carries seeds of new worlds within us.”
I’m a human being trying ~to be~ while also helping to plant what comes next.
Goddess speed,
KB xx
Also… 😊
I’m also watching Love Island USA, cackling with and learning from Ericka Hart.