I remember digging.
Easy digging.
On the beach, in a bathing suit with ruffles on the bottom, just after eating sandwiches and apples with a light dusting of sand; muddy feet and sunbonnets on a perfect San Diego beach day.
My sister and I, with plastic buckets and pails, making sandcastles and mud pies, while the grown ups watched under the umbrella, keeping watch over the cooler and Mom with bandaids and Mercurochrome for the inevitable boo-boos. Dad was on the pier, catching our dinner, which Mom would fry up later with cornbread and beans and salad with bright orange French dressing. Summer supper.
Easy digging. In soft sand and salt air. Sometimes we would get it in our heads to dig to the center of the earth, all the way down. We never got further than a foot, if that, I recall. But we were certain we would find treasure, and sometimes we did! Loose change, seashells, once a rusty watch. We would run back to Mom and she would go all wide eyed at what we found, and promise to make sure our treasures were safe.
Once, my plastic spade broke. I was inconsolable–for about two minutes. The distraction of cookies and chips and Kool-Aid in a plastic cup were enough to divert a tragedy. And then I dug with my hands! Even more fun! Digging up to my wrists, then elbows, dirty and burned and blissful. Plastic spade long forgotten.
Eventually we would head home, with blankets spread over the back seat of the Buick to soak up our dampness, if not the sand of half the beach, asleep before we hit the freeway, legs tangled together in the middle of the bench seat; lulled by Aretha and Marvin and Smokey and Dionne. We would awaken in the apartment to the smell of fish and cornbread. We would eat, still sandy (Mom didn’t run baths till later) and savor our time at the shore.
We didn’t go often, and now, as an adult, I can imagine why. All the prep work; getting picnic into the cooler; finding towels and blankets; herding two little girls who were far more excited than obedient; wrangling a husband who could spend, if you let him, hours in the bait store debating the merits of different worms–and then packing the whole thing up, and de-sanding the car, but not before cleaning and cooking the fish that stunk up the Buick for days.
But how fun it was! How amazing to be at the edge of the shore and come back with sloshy buckets of water, and make mud (too much mud) and not worry about being dirty, or if your braids came loose, or if your apple slices fell into the sand. Mom, usually clean to the point of compulsive, would just grimace as she wiped off the slices and gave them back to us. We survived.
We thrived.
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Digging is hard. So much harder when we become adults.
As grownups, with jobs and mortgages and sunscreen and creaky knees and protective gloves and shovels and spades, digging is no longer play.
Digging is work. Digging is a chore; it is something we have to do so as to get to something; to make way for flowers, or veggies, or fence posts, or to remove tumbleweeds and gopher holes.
Digging makes for sore backs and callused hands. Digging makes for dust in our faces, and sunburned necks. The fantasy of sandcastles and hoping for gold (or at least a rusty Timex) gives way to the reality of hardpacked, unforgiving soil. Tedious, we can often lose sight of the end game: the rows of kale; the elegant fenceline gracing the front field; the weeds gone; the gophers deterred; the tree which will grow to give shade and succor to generations.
That is, if we do our digging well. Some plantings will do ok with a shallow hole; some need more, much more. Sometimes soil needs to be prepped because it is so hard that no tool will break it. Sometimes it needs to be watered to become soft enough, pliable enough.
Digging always takes more time than one thinks it will take. When I go outside to dig, I double the time I think it will take to make one hole, two holes, three. And often, it’s still not enough. There is more to do; deeper and deeper to go. I am so sore. I want to abandon the project; the process.
But I hear a voice. A rough voice, not unkind, but definitely directive.
‘Put your back into it!’
It’s Daddy.
Daddy was an organic horticulturist before organic was cool. On his little plot he grew greens and tomatoes and turnips and carrots and beans and chiles which he would dry and then drop liberally into every pot on the stove–collards; black eyed peas; neck bones; chicken and rice. Even spaghetti. Even meat loaf.
He fed us, along with the fish he caught from the pier near North Island Naval Air Station where he worked as a jet mechanic; a sheet metal man who kept fighter jets aloft, and who would then come home to clean and dress fish, and then, still in his overalls, tend to his garden.
Only now, as I myself age, do I fully appreciate what Daddy did for us. On weekends, between football and basketball games, he would be out there tirelessly, always prepping, always planting.
Always digging.
If you grow organic, you have to be hands on. You can’t just plant and spray chemicals and hope for the best. No. You have to know good bugs from bad; you need to get your hands dirty; you need to hoe and weed and be ever vigilant.
As it is for Chief Watkins, so it is for us.
Digging deep is something not often considered in racial justice; or if it is considered, it is discarded. Too often, we decide that it is altogether too much work. It’s easier to shop the produce section at Kroger or Aldi or Costco; and if that’s too much, there’s always the frozen section. A quick thaw and nutrition is at hand. Or, if we want to feel virtuous, there is always the farmer’s market where we can get carrots with tops on and heirloom tomatoes and apples and pears, and learn about the farmers–I mean growers–but rarely about the workers who actually did the hoeing and the digging and the picking and the sorting.
We are once removed. Our hands remain soft and clean. Our overalls stay pristine.
This cannot be if we want to reap the harvest of the North Star.
As I pivot to our orchard bearing the fruit of racial justice, I think of the work–and it is indeed work–necessary and crucial and which simply cannot be outsourced.
Because we do try. To outsource.
Rather than park at Kroger, we park on our couches and read and read, and then forget what we consumed before the book even goes back to the shelf. Or, we do the analogue of the farmer’s market, appreciating/appropriating/Columbusing the work of others; all too often not the actual workers in the fields, stooping and picking and weeding, but those who take credit for the harvest, while their palms remain as soft as our own.
Again, gently and lovingly, No.
We need to sweat. We need to have dirt under chipped fingernails; we need to have muddy boots; we need to taste the soil as the wind whips it up into our noses and mouths. We need to keep it organic, which means we need to root and weed hands on; faces close enough to smell the loam. We need to dig, again and again and again; deep enough we go beneath the topsoil, so roots will take.
We do indeed need to work.
But this work does not have to be a slog. Does not have to be tedious. Does not have to be joyless.
Daddy always came back from his little plot with quiet joy on his face. Even when frustrated by aphids. Even when bone tired. The pride he took in feeding his family from the labor of his hands made the beans and tomatoes and yes, the neverending chiles, made the food even more nourishing.
So it must be with us. As we water, and dig, and amend, with the tools we are learning to use with competent precision, there is indeed joy and Hesed love. We share our implements; share our sunscreen, share our cups of orangeade.
And orange slices.
Our orchard will thrive, not because we farmed out the work that is ours alone to do, but because each of us knows the sweat and the effort and the faithfulness behind each tree. Each of us can admire soil streaked overalls and jeans; and smile at smudged noses. Each of us can smell the soil we have worked, side by side and shoulder to shoulder.
Spades will break. We will stumble over gopher holes. We will ache sometimes.
Count it all joy.
This is How We Do, so we can sit at a laden table and share the firstfruits of our labor with the people we stand with and for.
How soiled; how holy are your overalls?
Dig deep.
Join in The Bistro discussion below.
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I love the comparison Lace makes here with how easily we dig in our youth, eagerly, even, compared to how difficult we make it as adults. I wonder how much is the soil being tough and how much of it is my own (and white supremacy’s way of) making it that way. I’m also wondering how much I’ve made harder by trying to do it on my own rather than in community. I can certainly find myself in reaping the harvest once removed, enjoying the flavor (though not nearly as much) of an anonymous person’s labor rather than my own. I’ve been engaging and learning more about an organization in my community that fights for local farmworker rights and it really has helped me see the food I eat and the labor behind it differently. Now it’s not so important to try to get a good looking fruit or vegetable at a price point I like, as it is to know where it came from and how those workers are treated. But that’s only a start. I didn’t do well with something this year I promised I’d do last year with my own garden proceeds…a way I could have contributed to others who would have appreciated it. It was wasteful to not carve out that time better, or to not ask for the help to help me do so. How soiled are my overalls? Well the starch is worn out and they’re not crispy new. They don’t smell like they’ve just been laundered, but they’ve still got a long way to go, more digging to do.
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I was pondering myself, the hardening of the soil. I have thoughts like, when we’re kids we dig where it’s easy, for fun. When we’re adults, the only reason we dig is when we have to, and if we have to, it’s probably where the ground is hard. There’s… sort of a societal expectation that if we’re real, successful adults, we’ve done all the digging we need to, and we’re set for life? And that the set for life life should be easy, and if what we’re doing is hard, it’s a “sign” it’s not meant to be?
I have other thoughts about how, when we’re young, we’re soft and impressionable in many ways, and we have to harden, or think we have to harden, to face the toxicity of this world when we can no longer be protected from it. At least… for people like me, who had the luxury of a soft, impressionable, and protected youth.
I haven’t reached any sort of summation of this line of thinking, but the thoughts feel illuminating to me right now.
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As adults we often move out of learning and into doing and maybe it’s both because of societal expectation to prove ourselves as you mentioned, Laura, and the isolation that occurs when we’re adults as Rebecca talked about doing it on our own.
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good point, Shara, how a piece of it is that shift from being too doing…goes back to Lace’s question who do I want to be and from that comes what I do, not visa versa.
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There’s this loving kindness expression I’ve used over the last few years to respond to anxiety and self-doubt. The expression goes, ‘you are enough. open your heart. soften you’re being. live with ease’. While I do find it steadies my hand from responding from an emotional and sloshy space that last line (and elements of the first), since coming here just doesn’t work anymore, because this work should cost me something, should require some digging in, change work, some anxiety. I think white people have enormous resistance (hardened earth) to digging in because of that expectation, desire for ease, need and expectation for coddling and comfort.
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In the birthday week celebration FB live, Lace mentioned that there’s always a lesson (after being asked a fun question in the “ask me anything”). I’m connecting that to what we’re talking about here as adults that we forget to look for the lessons and learning even though it’s in everything. We might as adults identify an issue and make a small change to address it but so often it’s superficial or avoidant because we see it as the other person’s problem (blame) or as something out of our control (a system or event). So we don’t do the digging and we definitely don’t dig internally.
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I love this reminder. ‘There’s always a lesson’ that’s the treasure we are digging for and sometimes there are multiple little treasures in any given situation. I can’t stop at my first reaction to a situation or a micro aggression that I catch myself committing or witnessing. There are often multiple layers to what is going on.
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Rebecca, I can relate to what you said about trying to do it on your own. I definitely have a tendency to do that often, thinking I can or should do something independently. But antiracism is the work of community – community is at the root of antiracism work which is in direct contrast to white supremacy which is individualistic at its core. I know now that I need community. If I’m doing this work quietly or in secret, keeping it to the confines and the safety and privacy of my own home, then how can I be doing the work?
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I continue to unravel new layers of how the independence of white supremacy is intentionally created to sustain it. If we’re silo’s we never challenge or support each other in change, and I’m self-policing as a silo instead of my actions being taken to account in relation to their impact on others. From a supportive standpoint, my well dries much quicker on it’s own than when a bunch of wells are sharing of their contents together. Still learning, and glad to be walking with you here as we tackle it together.
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Society definitely wants to toughen the soil and make it hard to dig in. White supremacy wants to keep us thinking and being shallow because it keeps us from wanting and taking action to change the system.
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This is beautiful Lace. Thank you for sharing yourself with us. You paint a vivid picture. I could smell the beach and feel the sand in my toes. I could smell the earth as you described working and digging in the garden.
This is work and I love that you said it doesn’t have to be joyless and tedious. Yes they’re will be broken tools and aphids and sometimes roots won’t take after the first or second planting. That is all part of it. We learn each time and get better as we continue to Lean In and Dig Deep.
The beauty of working in community is that we can share and learn from each other. We can lend each other a hand when things get heavy. We can provide encouragement and correction. We build a connection and truly learn what eye to eye and shoulder to shoulder means.
Digging in us required daily for a healthy orchard.
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When we mend the broken tools or treat and fend off the insects we find, we can find the joy that Lace talked about. I need to remember the joy of just digging and digging side by side specifically.
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I like how you pointed out that in the digging there is growth, “we learn each time and get better as we continue”. There is so much to discover and there is so much growth to be had from the digging.
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There’s a strength built from digging over and over again and in that strength, there’s a joy as well. It’s never “easy” per say (and shouldn’t be), but I think over time there’s a sense that makes it easier to find the beauty in it.
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I appreciate the way this new tenet puts an emphasis on the tangible and the arduous. I think when I started my walk here, I was very much in my head, and I think I’m the sort of person who always does start out in my head. I’ve been used all my life to that being enough. But this realm of endeavor required me to push that headspace learning down into my heart and gut. I have to dig deep in myself. I couldn’t plant roots until I’d done tilling and mulching. I *thought* I could plant roots, but it was the kind of planting that doesn’t last.
By digging into me, and turning over what I found and placing it here in this space with my engagement, I’ve grown so SO much more durably, reliably. It’s a very good metaphor, and an excellent addition to our metaphor. I never actually liked being sandy or dirty. But I can’t grow good fruits from my work here if I don’t dig deep on my own racism.
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I like your visual of the internal work. It seems like it really has to start with the head and part of the digging is getting into the heart of the work. We need to have a good understanding of things before we can get into the heart of it. I like the idea of digging deep without the production in mind because whiteness focuses on production and wants an immediate fix. The tilling and mulching take time and sometimes is a quiet and slow process but the results will be much more sustanainable.
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I can’t take credit for the head -> heart -> gut progression. @laceonrace wrote something calling out those three realms, but I don’t believe it’s on the website. I appreciated it very much at the time because it really illuminated to me the arenas where I was NOT excelling. And for someone used to excelling, it was a pretty strong goad to get right on it. 🙂
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ack, so true how easy it is to get stuck in my head and stay there, and come up with all sorts of excuses for doing so, ‘yeah buts’. The brain is the body part we know the least about, it’s interesting that it’s up there I get stuck. Similarly, it’s so easy to get stuck and perseverate on things I don’t know perfectly rather than acting on the bit I do know. Same in this work…getting stuck (intentionally) on the thinking aspects of things rather than the action steps staring me in the face.
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I was thinking about this too. How many excuses I’ll make to get out of digging before even picking up the shovel. But once I get over myself and just start somewhere, with whatever I do know, then that digging usually begets more digging. When I’m finding reasons to avoid picking up the shovel, I have to remember that those reasonings are white supremacy in action (or inaction would be more accurate?) To get out of that rut, I have to go straight to community. I have to look out at our orchard and see others doing the work, then join for my part. No reasons, just actions.
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‘no reasons, just actions,’ love that. That’s a great way to help shift the focus from head to heart/action. If I put even half the effort towards action that I do towards the thoughts in my head, think of the things that could get done.
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That’s a good point that it takes effort and energy to come up with and keep ruminating on all the reasons. Effort and energy that’s needed elsewhere, and that too often I claim not to have when really I’m just using it up on the wrong things.
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Love this new tenet because completely analyzing and prepping the soil makes all the difference to what you reap. Self-reflection and self-interrogation are hard things to do and knowing that I’ve been raised on and immersed in white supremacy means that with each shovel full that I overturn I need to continue deeper. I think I started my walk at LoR trying to do more planting of new roots without the digging and soil prep and then had to pull a reversal to analyze and prep the soil. I do find joy in stopping to looking at the progress from the digging and knowing that community members are digging their own soil around me also makes it more enjoyable.
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When I first started my antiracism journey I would place my palms on the hard ground, analyze it, and intellectually process what it meant to dig my palms beneath the soil. I had the desire to dig, but that desire transpired only into thought rather than action. My palms barely got a dusting yet I thought they were covered in soil. I talked about thorns I had not really experienced. In doing so, I unintentionally participated in erasure of the Black and brown people who were kneeling on the dirt next to me – except the difference was, they were elbow deep, digging hard. My palms were clean. It wasn’t until I acknowledged the soft cleanliness of my own palms (AKA my white privilege), that I began my own digging. Figuratively, what put the shovel in my own hand was that I came to realize, through hard conversations with Black colleagues and a few white people who were doing their own work, that the digging deep, standing with Black and brown people, involves doing my own internal work and acknowledging my privilege. Another important piece – becoming a part of this community was what brought my hands into action to truly start digging. Watching others dig, witnessing their palms coming back to the soil with relentless reliability, hearing and absorbing Lace’s words and praxis into my being, helped me to dig my palms deeper, to take steps to change my own praxis and to kneel beside all of you, shoulder to shoulder, as we dig. I will not turn ⠃⠁⠉⠅⠲
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Dig deep, whew…..that’s the hard part. It is tempting to want the answers, a quick fix without the work. I’m thinking about when I first began on my anti-racist journey, how I had questions. Things that confused me and I WANTED to ask the questions for a quick answer. I did know better than to go around just asking questions and so I kept walking and wondering. What I am learning though is that many of those questions seem like simple questions on the surface but they really aren’t simple questions. They require work on my part to understand the concepts and dig deep and look at it from a nuanced way. As I do more work, research the topics and dig deeper I can find multiple points of view and then the answer may be based on individual situations. Even in taking a “101” class, questions might be answered but the answers should just be a starting point for further digging. I like the idea that the digging has no real end. As I continue to do the work and parts of it becomes easier with practice, there will always be new depths to be met. When it comes to my actual yard, it is mostly dirt. And yet each fall/ winter, rains will come and weeds will grow. I can’t have dried weeds in the backyard especially because they can injure the dogs, so I must dig them out before they dry out. I keep meaning to figure out something to plant in the yard but I still haven’t got to that point, I am still working on the digging. Each year I do seem to be able to get to the weeds sooner and I have a blank canvas again during the summer. Well, I have really enjoyed the process and getting out in the sun and in the earth and learning new things each year that I didn’t know before about yard work. It does make me think that there is value just in the digging, without even considering the production.
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I realized when reading your words how yet again it’s so easy for me to shift to focusing on the end results and outcomes. It’s an ongoing digging, day by day, shovelful at a time. The other thing focusing on outcomes sets me up for is going to the other binary of ‘why bother’.
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Finding the joy in addition to the purpose of a task goes a long way toward sustaining the effort. So important when the effort is hard, and lengthy – maybe even never-ending. Here, the purpose is the North Star: to lessen and mitigate the harm endured by Black and Brown people, perpetuated by white people (including me) and white supremacy. I do find joy in that work, digging deeply into my own tarnished humanity, into the actions and beliefs of my skinfolk. Into my bank account and my social capital, my time and energy. To serve the purpose.
White capitalist supremacy has brought me, brought us to a place where there is no joy in work. Mostly, I think, because there is no real purpose in the work for so very many of us as we serve nothing beyond the system. When I turn myself away from the system’s purpose, joy in work is easier to find, even when the work ruins my shirts and grimes my fingernails. The purpose is fundamental.
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Good point about how our society has made the idea of work toxic. Our society wants to have all work be a means towards making money or gaining power, which reinforces white supremacy. In contrast, this work is all about giving up privilege and building relationship. Work isn’t inherently bad (nor is it always good), but the purpose and effect of it is what makes it bad or good.
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I appreciate your analogy Lace. I did some sandcastle and related digging as a child, and I have helped a bit with my husband’s organic garden in our yard.
The main point I see here is that if you don’t dig and nourish the soil for a tree, in this case for anti-racism, it cannot grow or bear good fruit. I am walking alongside you and a number of other people here to uproot my racism and replace it with fertilizer more conducive to building community.
The keys are that we are working together and are posting publicly in order to address and work through our issues and misconceptions. I truly love this group of people.
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I now see this as pretty shallow. Let me “dig deeper.”
I tend to lend verbal support very easily. However, getting in the trenches and participating alongside Black and brown people is something I have not done very much. I have allowed fear for my personal safety to take the place of standing with others. I need to do much more and much better than that.
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No outsourcing. Digging deep in order to plant roots is my work and my work alone. Digging in community makes that work lighter, though. This community is a rehearsal space because digging IS hard work. I’m not here for the theories, the academia, I’m here to affect change by getting my hands dirty.
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Reading this, some of the lessons I’m aware of are around simply doing the work and around the allure of half-measures. For instance: “Rather than park at Kroger, we park on our couches and read and read, and then forget what we consumed before the book even goes back to the shelf.”
If I want to avoid forgetting what I’m learning about racial justice, it takes practice and engagement with the information over time, repeating it, using it, applying it, and reinforcing it. I can’t simply read it once or twice, or stop at self-reflection – there also needs to be “getting it out” at the same time.
The parts about the joy and the pride in work done also stood out. The work may be hard, but it’s not punitive, it’s toward a goal. If I approach racial justice work with toxic shame as a form of self-punishment, it’s still about me and not about the task or about the Black and brown people I say I stand for and with. It’s about practicing in this sense, too, digging frequently so I can become more durable for what needs to be done long-term.
Lastly, I hear the point about engaging with how the products or content I consume are/is produced. If I’m not directly doing the gardening/producing, I can investigate or inquire about who is actually doing the work and their working conditions. If people should be compensated more, I can look for ways that I can support that work, especially where I am benefiting from it.
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I’m appreciating your takeaways, Grace. I’m contemplating what you said about how application and reinforcement keep you from forgetting what you’re learning about racial justice. This reflection reminds me that, just as digging and tending to the soil is repetitive and cyclical work, so is the work we do here. Just because I’ve dug deeply into the pinned posts/starters and cultivated healthy soil last season, doesn’t mean that my soil is good and ready for this new season. No, I have to revisit the same exact foundational material and concepts to build up my soil over years and years. But each time I do this, my soil is evolving. I’m not starting over at exactly where I was last reading, I’m in a new season now and will have new applications to continue reinforcing my learnings here.
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Rereading my previous responses to the pinned posts are treasures, too. There is a joy in knowing that you have been consistently digging with this community for awhile. Continuing the focus on the North Star. Consistent, dedicated, humble digging as a step towards mitigating harm to brown and black people.
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Coming to mind is Lace’s phrase “nothing— nothing— tastes as good as living out your praxis.” I’m reminded of the summer I worked as a farmhand. It was HARD. So much stooping, digging, walking, and lifting. My neck was burned, hands calloused, back sore. My spirit was full. At the time, nothing tasted as good as the “reject” vegetables I picked myself, with perpetually dirty fingernails, just to snack on for some midday nourishment. The digging was hard, but temporary. I think this is how I approach racial justice work sometimes. I’m adjacent to those doing the real digging, the reliable, unglamorous, painful digging that is truly their life’s work, not just a naive summer adventure. I have confronted and rooted out many limits to how deeply I will dig, but I continue to limit how long I’ll dig reliably. Focusing on my own aggrandizement, my own growth, I may fail to pace myself and flame out. I go through seasons of extremes and then slip too easily back into the comforts of leaving the digging to others while still enjoying the nourishment of their labor. At worst taking some kind of credit or social capital for it. But I don’t flame out when the digging serves a purpose bigger than myself and my own nourishment, and I’m reminding myself of that purpose constantly. We do that walking and digging here together, shoulder to shoulder.
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This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by
Jessie Lee.
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I am thinking about the choices we make in terms of where we do our own digging too. I have always liked the idea of homemade, homegrown, but there is a limited amount of time in the day. If I build the table and grow the food and mill the flour and bake the bread and serve it and clean it up all by myself, then there is no time for the North Star. I may save money on ingredients and labor (maybe), but what then am I doing with the money I save? Am I hoarding it? Last year I grew a sizable garden for us, a pandemic garden, and it was satisfying and educational for the kids, but it took a lot of time too. Since at that time I was not driving the kids to school (virtual school), I still had a lot of time to dedicate to LOR and the North Star. This spring I decided to prioritize differently, knowing with vaccines and the world opening up, there would be less time. I decided not to grow a garden other than the perennial things that mostly grown themselves. Homegrown can taste great, but it tastes great to employ others as well as long as they are being paid well and treated well. Digging deep is important. That is why I chose not to dig deep in my garden and instead to dig deep at LOR and with the North Star.
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Emily, I appreciate your example of prioritizing the North Star in the gardening example. I didn’t put in a vegetable garden this year either and volunteered instead for a community garden with a local organization to be in service to the Black community here. That resulted in lots of digging for me in places I might not have otherwise found to dig. I’m also feeling the pull of things opening up which takes me away from engaging here at LoR and have been thinking about how I will re-prioritize.
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Wow. Coming back to this space after (another) absence, reading up on the six tenets to try to dig back in — and this metaphor. So vivid. And so resonant.
I’ve done a lot of digging in my life — my dad is a landscape architect and gardener and his kids were his laborers; in my early-to-mid twenties, I worked in nonprofit construction, until a bad back injury ran me out. I was digging when I was injured.
As others have mentioned, the digging in community is so key. When I was with Habitat for Humanity, putting in fenceposts was never as tedious as it should have been, because there was always someone with whom to trade the shovel back and forth. We were digging together.
When I was injured, I was digging with someone else. He was extremely buff — like someone who won bodybuilding competitions. I prided myself on my strength, but this man was a wall of muscle, and I couldn’t keep up. I tried. I tried until my back gave out, and it’s never been the same since.
But of course that’s what happened. I wasn’t paying attention to what I was digging. I wasn’t paying attention to myself. I was competing. I was trying to show off, to keep up with the patriarchy (which is always invested with white supremacy). I was trying to go fast and get it done, to dig with the values of capitalism.
But those values will have us burning out — or injuring ourselves — before we can ever dig deep.
(I’m sitting with this as I write, thinking of the past couple months in my life, of how this just played out for me, again; or almost did. How patient and committed this work has to be. How much I struggle with that. How evident that struggle is in my own intermittency here. How days away from LoR are like the twinges I still get in my back a decade later; an indicator light that I might be moving too fast, or paying attention to the wrong things.)
Digging deep is patience. To prep the soil. To trade the shovel. And to come back, again and again, consistently, or else all that effort will be washed away.
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Glad to see you here again, Isa. Happy to dig alongside you toward relentless reliability
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Thank you for staying in the car with me, even as I repeatedly stall out!
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Your description of digging made me think of the parallel of learning, which is I think what the metaphor is referring to anyway. Children typically love learning and it comes naturally to them, especially if it’s outside of school. Whereas adults often don’t like learning and see it as a chore. I think we see it that way because learning requires us to let go of our assumptions and be curious. Those are traits that the world ridicules and tries to take for granted. In racial justice learning, it also requires white people be willing to question our views of our own privilege and the systems that build that privilege. It may mean we have to rethink our entire life story and what led us to where we are.
But as you point out, you have to dig to be able to move past a certain point. We put a new fence up for our garden this year to keep out the deer. I hated pulling up the old fence posts and needing to dig much deeper holes for the new ones. But I also knew that we’d just keep repeating the same problems with the deer we had and wasting all of the time and effort we’d put into our garden. I think that can happen with social justice work too. If we keep making the same mistakes over and over again – or people tell us we’re causing that harm and we’re denying it – it may be a lack of doing that dirty work to really question those assumptions and learn.
Clare Steward.
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