“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”
― Toni Cade Bambara , The Salt Eaters
Welcome to sunday meditations, an open journal on the personal and political, a weaving of the interpersonal and collective. This is a public inquiry into the impossibility of wellness under capitalism, in pursuit of our collective liberation, which is also our wellbeing.
I’m just another tired Black girl, yearning for ease, chasing wellness, and writing to make sense of this pursuit. Black feminist thought has taught me to see the personal as political, and through that I am learning that my wellness is not possible without wellness for the collective.
As an African woman, my survival and wellbeing is intimately shaped by the legacies of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and their reverberrations across the world. So how can we pursue wellness, if not through also pursuing the end of these systems of domination?
This newsletter is my attempt to practice in public an exploration of what it means to be well, to pursue our personal and collective wellbeing. This is a collection of my personal meditations, musings, archival research, Black feminist thought, theory, and resources for pursuing a world in which we can all be well. Consider this a space for shared sense-making, thinking, archiving, knowledge-mapping, dreaming and imagining a new world in which we are collectively well.
What can you expect to read?
sunday meditations is a seasonal newsletter, meaning I will often write about the things I am learning, studying, paying attention to and thinking about in this season of life - through a Black feminist lens.
In this season, these are the questions I am meditating on:
pursuing wellness and the impossibility of it under capitalism and interlocking systems of domination
how we build community and organize towards our collective wellbeing, and vision of liberation
what practices and rituals we can embrace from our ancestral and indigenous lineages, to support our wellbeing
what can we learn from Black feminist thought to guide us in building new worlds
Different editions of the newsletter will include: personal musings, essays with ample citations for you to map your own knowledge, wellness resources for the personal and collective, journal prompts and healing imagery for our wellbeing and imagining new worlds.
Subscribe to receive sunday meditations in your email inbox or on Substack. If the words resonate, consider sharing this newsletter with a loved one, or with your community.
In solidarity,
Stephanie M.
