Slowness and sanctuary ⏳
I’ve been thinking a lot about justice and the paradigms wherein those efforts take place. The paradigm is the thing with power, and yet we look past it. I’ll let someone smarter than me explain this.
Most of the time, in pursuing justice, we’re reinforcing the system we’re trying to escape. In trying to climb out of the the pits that we’ve dug for ourselves, the pit becomes resilient. In trying to escape the prison, the prison gains form.
Activism is increasingly instrumental. It’s informing a form of power that is tied to the logic and algorithm of the status quo. Which makes activism, even in its search for justice, a creature of the status quo. Which makes hope and justice, as ironic as that sounds, a creature of the thing we’re trying to leave behind.
This quote is from Dr. Bayo Akomolafe. I’ve been reading and listening to his work recently, including this podcast that was mind-bending. He believes wisdom is found in liminal spaces. What if we imagined activism beyond the “versus” of binary paradigms? Inequality vs. justice, problems vs. solutions.
I will be meditating on this podcast for a long time. For now, I want share eight quotes that resonated with me at the end of my Hermit Week. They’re about the importance and transformative power of slowness and sanctuary.
/// 1.
Most of us are caught in the habit of thinking of escape as a way towards the sacred. The sacred lies in the distance, and if we can leave the mundane and the banal behind, then we will find the sacred. But I think the sacred is more pervasive, more fugitive than just something that is exterior to the spaces we want to leave behind.
/// 2.
In the 17th century, when chattel slavery was beginning, the Great Dismal Swamp was a fugitive space between Virginia and North Carolina where African-Americans—maroons they called them—built new communities. In the swamp. In the heart of the empire that did this. So I feel invited, I feel led and inspired, to ask if quietude, if rest, if fugitivity isn’t a space of reckoning with the banal.
/// 3.
Our imagination of what the sacred looks like often gets in the way of our transformation.
/// 4.
I think and talk about sanctuary. Reclaiming this medieval practice of allowing the fugitive a place of rest. It became wiped out when our judicial system started to emerge. Our system of laws and judges and courts of law. Prior to all that, we had sanctuary.
/// 5.
Where are the places of sanctuary today? Where do we run to with the Anthropocene breathing down on us? Running away is not a function of escape. I think of sanctuary as a place of the monster. As a place of shapeshifting.
/// 6.
In the architecture of those old sanctuaries, the monster was always at the front door. A gargoyle, or some other monster, a lion or something. Was this just a trend? Or why was the monster on the face of the very first thing that welcomed you into sanctuary? And I think to myself that sanctuary is the place where we gain different shapes. Because the monster is the dismissal or the diffraction of shape.
/// 7.
Sanctuary is this place where we gain different shape, where we lose shape, where we compost. And how do we do that? We do it by listening, by working together in ways that are probably fugitive and outside the normative ways of producing food, or money, or stories. We it by listening to our wounds, sharing wounds. We do it by sitting with the trouble of being alive.
/// 8.
The invitation to sanctuary is an invitation to incapacitation, to shapeshift, to descend, to fall. Descent and demise are shockingly generative spaces.
Thanks for reading Gemini Mind! Elsewhere, you can find me as @yokizzi 💫