Hello frens,

I’m back with another sit down and chat podcast instalment! I’m really enjoying these, and hope you are too. If you are reading the newsletter in your email, never hesitate hit reply and shoot one back. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

We have been taught that struggle and martyrdom are virtuous.

We have been praised for our screams, our battles and our sacrifices more than we have ever centred our laughter, our joy and our love. Life has always been and will always be difficult, and in the face of adversity, we are told to harden and give it our best fight.

→ But I suggest to you, that there is no future in suffering, there is no lasting change in pain.

Even if we succeed in erasing the source of our pain by fighting it with more obtuse affliction of pain, we will one day look back and realise there is nothing left to fight for. Fighting fire with fire, gives us not only a bigger fire, but also leaves behind nothing. Nothing but desolation, and destruction— soil burnt to ash, with no nutrient left to grow new love.

Mind you, this is not a call for anger celibacy, where we hold hands together and sing Kum-ba-ya with the backdrop of famine and war,

…but rather an invitation for joy and celebration for those who need it.

If we want a world where pleasure is available and afforded to all— we must also value our own pleasure, ease and joy and teach our children to value their pleasure, ease and joy— so that they may never accept any less than the peak of connection and love. We must intimately associate ourselves with pleasure, so that we know it when we see it, that our kids know it when they see it. So that we may move forward— towards true connection and love.

Sometimes I feel…

that as a movement, we the activists, we the minorities, we the disabled, we the queer and the ostracised, we the other, are not able to stand in solidarity with each other the way we should because we are strangers to joy, and to ease. We are strangers to rest and to space. We are burnt, and with burnt edges we find it hard to extend to mend and to hold the edge of anyone else. That is why it is so important that we fight the urge to harden and learn what it means to be soft.

Being soft in the face of hardship—dancing on burning stone—is the most metal, revolutionary act you can produce. It is divine defiance: resistance, boundary, anger, ‘NO’ with love is at its centre.

Feeling aligned with my messaging? Learn how you can work with me further on my website.

Clips

Notes on welcoming ease and pleasure.

For oppressed people to intentionally cultivate pleasure is an act of resistance.

—Ingrid LaFleur

A coach recently told me, “What is easy is sustainable.” I have been thinking, what feels good is sustainable. When my body feels good, my life feels good, and I want to keep going, and fight for my right to exist and love and grow and evolve. This is true whether it is in the context of a meeting, or a relationship, or a night of lovemaking. That doesn’t mean the absence of discomfort or awkwardness or hard conversations or learning. But the majority experience should be presence—being fully alive. And I think that comes from experiencing ease, pleasure, connection.

— Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Politics

June is Black Music Month, and it’s worth noting that Blackness is expansive. Even while police and state governments threaten us at every turn, our joy remains and continues to take on new shapes and forms. We carve our own lanes; we make our own homes. — in

One more thing: where’s pain in all this? Pleasure, for me, doesn’t exclude or deny pain. The same self, the same inclusive awareness that allows me to experience pleasure, may retreat or cramp up in the face of pain (physical or emotional) but returns, and so far, is always bigger and able to absorb or metabolize it.

— Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism

— in

“If we truly are to maintain our new society after we have won the battle and claimed the victory, we must instill into the hearts and minds of our children, our people, ourselves this ability to struggle on all fronts, internally and externally, laying a foundation built upon a love for ourselves and a knowledge of the sacrifices that went before and all we have endured.”

—Safiya Bukhari

“a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It [The erotic & the pleasurable] is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”

— Audre Lorde

— in

As always, it is a blessing to have you here. Substack has given me the strength to move forward in love more times than you can imagine.

If you want to support a chronically ill person and their art considering subscribing or buying me a coffee (that is, if you enjoy what I do here.)

with much love,

Rae