Birthing a New World
how we doula our communities through the labor pains
seedgiver scatters reflections on life, community, resistance, and liberation. You’re invited to join seedgiver in reciprocity as a paid subscriber or by sharing a one-time gift.
Dear Beloved,
Through joyful accident, my life is filled with birth workers - doulas, childbirth educators, herbalists, lactation counselors, and midwives. They are the thread that holds so many families together as birthing people navigate the medical industrial complex to access the care they need, deserve, and choose. It is from these same birth workers that I’m learning how community holds us through difficulty in real-time.
These past few days, I have been doing what one does in a crisis: Reaching out to my people and talking to my community. Grieving. Honoring my rage and nurturing it so that it fuels me in a good way for what’s to come. Planning - always planning. Organizing. Absorbing collective wisdom as people share their thoughts, songs, prayers, and unity.
Today I write to you, Beloved, from a place of defiance. I am strong because we are strong. I am certain because I see us. Because of us, I feel a burning hope that we will overcome. I write to you while thinking about my favorite quote from Arundhati Roy, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Beloved, I can hear her. I heard another world’s soft, steady breath during every mounting crisis, every scandal, every loss. Today I can hear her softly humming the sweet song of liberation.
Above artwork by textile artist Rachel B. Hayes.
While incarcerated by the Italian fascist regime almost 100 years ago, Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.”
Birth is not an easy process. There is sweat, tears (as in the liquid that comes out of our eyes and…tears. down there), blood, screaming, moaning, cursing, clenching, laughing, shitting the bed, walking up and down, pain, and joy. That’s why we call the journey of birth labor. It is not easy or simple but it is life.
Contrary to the empire’s doctrine, none of us are born alone. We do not spawn into this world independently without anyone, regardless of circumstance. Each of us descends from two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and a widespread ancestral network branching out above us. This family tree is nourished - or by systemic design, starved - by other people. For as long as we have been and will be, hands reach out to catch every one of us the day we are born.
We have no control over what circumstances we’re born into but we each have a say in what kind of world future generations will be born into because it is ours, ours to steward and nurture and cherish. It is our labor that births another world for future generations, our hands that must catch each other.
How will we doula our communities throughout these labor pains? How will we educate each other? What medicines will we bring for each other? How will we midwife another world?
For every single one of us, there are at least 10 different answers.
Get involved with mutual aid groups. Start mapping out your pod and build your networks of support. Cook for our community. Mobilize. Advocate for our libraries and build your own. Join seed exchanges. Create art. Co-create those book clubs. Organize teach-ins. Become a pen pal. Take care of each other. Attend intentional peer support groups. Sow native seeds, plant trees, and steward community gardens. Train your body. Find a local organized group. Learn new skills that will serve your neighbors. Save seeds. Bring back the rent parties. Give land back. Engage in restorative justice. Donate to mutual aid. Repair harm. Learn about our movement ancestors. Decolonize. Speak up for each other. Host an open mic at home. Go to the community vigils and grieve together. Mobilize your neighbors and build a tenant union. Descalate in-fighting Endeavor to become a good ancestor. Take care of each other. Become a healer. Study the history - see how our oppressors’ using the same playbook again and again. Center disability justice for natural disaster planning. Organize. Take a walk in your neighborhood. Get emergency first aid training. Know your neighbors. Boycott and divest. Take care of each other.
Now is the time. Yes, there will be crying. Yes, there will be screaming and cursing. Yes, there will be pain and joy and grief. Yes, we will be walking up and down the tireless corridors of oppression. Yes, it is going to really fucking hard and you will probably shit the bed.
But we must keep going.
She’s waiting for us.
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
"The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
- Arundhati Roy, War Talk
Mutual Aid for Stable Housing
As typical of an empire in blue, King County, WA has deliberately neglected asylum seekers and caused incredible harm to migrant families this past year. This county proudly wears Martin Luther King, Jr.’s face as a symbol but throws dirt on his legacy with their criminal neglect of our communities. Thankfully, we have each other.
Superfamilia is a local mutual aid group organized by undocumented and unaccompanied youth. They are currently fundraising to cover rent for six asylum seeker leaders who themselves have put in tireless work for their communities and are currently living in temporary housing in West Seattle.
The goal is just $4,000. Please contribute today by giving via Venmo at super_Familia with the note “home.” It is very cold and rainy in Seattle right now as I write this, and the sun sets at just 4pm now.
Help ensure safe housing for six human beings from Congo and Angola seeking asylum in King County. Donate today and share this campaign.
Seeds for Change
Get free revolutionary books! In light of this week’s election outcome, AK Press is sharing six free e-books and Haymarket Books is offering 10 free e-books!
Take in rimsha’s wisdom, generously shared in her recent essay break the chains and let them fall this week:
“The systems in place that were built on the blood and destruction of Black, brown, and marginalized communities won't ever liberate us. With this in mind, how will you get plugged into local organizing? Which mutual aid groups do you donate to? Are you still boycotting? Are you finally ready to break the chains once and for all? Let your humanity and love for the revolution guide you into believing that we can and will tip the needle - slowly - in our favor.”Join the Abolitionist Book Club! Once a month, I will be hosting a virtual book club meeting to discuss a book centered on abolition.
The first book pick is Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. Get your free e-book copy from Haymarket Books.
Our first virtual meeting is on Tuesday, December 10th at 6-7:30pm. Sign up today!
Read “the revolution starts by building with poor folks in your own backyard” by Ayesha Khan, Ph.D. and build power with working bodies. The middle class will not be the foundation to real change because it exists to service the upper elite.
Check out this article by Farzana Khan, “Building Brave and Beautiful Movements.”
Read “Beyond Medicare for All: An Anarchist Alternative to Government Health Care” by Sarah Miller.
How are you doing in light of this week’s election outcomes? What are you doing to take care of yourself? How are you showing up for our community today?
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your list of ways to get to work and join in on the camaraderie that exists all around us is beautiful, urgent, and a beacon of light for me this evening. thank you for this!
Thank you. This is amazing. I feel held and encouraged.