What keeps you going when life is too hard? What consoles you? What inspires you?
It is hard not to fall into despair.
Sometimes it feels impossible to resist.
And yet, we need hope.
Behaving as if we believe a better world is possible, collectively dreaming futures in which we’re thriving, and everything we do to make those dreams real.
Community gives me hope.
What community means to me
By community, I mean multiple communities in many and varied forms. Informal groups, collectives, cooperatives, online networks, local and global friendships. And so much more: aligned values, radical care, peer support, mutual aid, and ubuntu — I couldn’t exist without you.
In his book The New Saints, Lama Rod Owens says:
“We each struggle individually to experience wellness. Living isn’t easy. However, not all of us understand what it means to struggle as part of a community that has been disenfranchised from the necessary resources we need to survive. […]
When we struggle, we develop a profound resiliency that helps us move through the discomfort of gathering resources and being free while focusing on cultivating values of collective care in the struggle. People who have not experienced collective struggle do not know collective resiliency, nor will they understand real solidarity.”
That’s what community means to me.
In a recent workplace needs assessment, I was asked “Do you have unwavering resilience in the face of difficulty?” My autistic brain almost exploded. Unwavering resilience in the face of difficulty? Who has unwavering resilience in the face of difficulty?
Every being has limits. Even superheroes.
Resilience is born of necessity. I’m livid that the conditions of so many people’s lives are so difficult we are forced to keep overcoming them, unless and until we can’t any more. I’m heartbroken. I’m devastated.
Many of us are really struggling.
Sometimes that’s me.
Sometimes I remember community can hold me. Sometimes community reminds me.
Blackness, neurodivergence and mental health
When I think community, I think ADHD Babes, a community group and membership organisation devoted to supporting black women and non binary ADHDers, by us and for us.
Health inequalities being what they are, and systematic defunding of the NHS exacerbating barriers to healthcare, there’s no way I’d have been able to access an assessment, never mind a diagnosis, without the intervention of ADHD Babes — just one of the ways it’s changed my life.
When I think community, I think Misery Party, a sober mental health collective by and for queer people of colour. It’s one of the most inclusive and nourishing and nurturing organisations I’ve ever worked with, with so much love and care from the other facilitators and organisers.
Misery Party leads Misery Medicine nature walks and gatherings outdoors. These were my introduction to medical herbalism. I feel so blessed getting to meet and know so many amazing herbalists and connecting with different ways of healing.
Queer Botany built my knowledge and experience of queer ecology, work opportunities, and connected me with organisations. Through them, I’ve been offered more work, including a sound installation of my poem queer echoes in the canopies, which played in the Temperate House of Kew Gardens throughout October 2023, as part of the Queer Nature Festival.
Nature and movement
When I think community, I think We Got To Move, a primarily Midlands-based radical cooperative of strength training, care, and strategic organising. One of the few workplaces that actively encourages and supports each of us to rest and to show up as we are. Our vision is to create a healing and training centre in nature. Our ways of working are aligned with our values around care and being compassionate to ourselves and others. So we embody working in sustainable and regenerative ways. It’s a relief to know that when I’m exhausted, I can show up for meetings from bed. And I say this as someone living with chronic fatigue and pain, for whom working when I need rest is part of my reality living under capitalism.
When I can’t work, I know the work will continue to move forward, because we share the load and work according to our capacity. That’s the whole point of working alongside other people. We need each other.
Wanderers of Colour is a grassroots collective by and for people of colour increasing access to being outdoors. Last year I was awarded a bursary to take swimming lessons and to participate in an activity weekend in Dorset, oriented around water. I’ve been terrified of large bodies of water since I was 11 or 12, so it was a big deal for me to go to swimming lessons, never mind kayaking in/on the sea. What made it possible for me, in addition to the financial assistance, was being in a community of people who were so supportive and encouraging.
I wouldn’t even be a massive nature nerd now if it weren’t for Wild in the City, an organisation by and for people of colour, dedicated to supporting our connections with nature.
In April 2019, I participated in their Nature Connectors programme, in which we visited woodlands and forests in and around Croydon, talked about our relationships with the more than human world, and learned bushcraft skills.
And I became obsessed with trees.
Creativity
When I think community, I think With Many Roots, a small business that catalysed my climate action. Its climate fiction writing events were my introduction to learning, and then teaching, climate science with the Climate Fresk collaborative game.
Creativity is so often my way in and it’s so often what keeps me going. Creativity exists in the context of community.
When I think community, I think Morley College, one of the few institutions I associate with community, I joined the Textiles Foundation course in 2023. On day one I felt overwhelming joy layered with a surreal grief because I didn’t want the course to be over. My time travelling brain was already at the end of this thing that was just beginning.
I feel like the course was designed for my brain. It hits all the motivating factors of my interest-based nervous system — interest, novelty, challenge, urgency, passion (Secrets of the ADHD Brain: Why we think, act, and feel the way we do by William Dodson, free download at ADDitude magazine).
Shoutout to the WEA too, a charitable organisation which exists to provide financially accessible education to adults across the UK. This is how I started learning to create with textiles in the first place.
Spread the Word is a writer development agency based in London. In 2019, I was selected to be one of 10 participants on The Future is Back programme, for queer writers, designed and led by the author Olumide Popoola, with writing workshops and practical industry knowledge. It’s when I started to believe that maybe writing could be more than a hobby for me, I’d never entertained that thought before.
In May 2021, Spread the Word was a catalyst for my switch to self-employment, when I left the tech industry to prioritise my writing. I was a writer-in-residence for a nature writing collaboration between Spread the Word and the London Wildlife Trust, a charity looking after and educating people about woodlands, parks, and commons. In 2022, I worked with the London Wildlife Trust delivering nature writing workshops for the Great North Wood project and the Nature Nurtures programme.
Writers’ Hour, a free, international, online writing space that happens 4 times a day, 5 times a week, and helps so many of us actually write, and be in community whilst doing it.
Local and global
Where I live in London I have access to many groups by and for marginalised communities in person; that’s not true everywhere. Sometimes I’m not able to access community in person, due to the capricious whims of capitalism and ableism.
Community exists in many different ways. Lama Rod Owens’ reminds me that I/you/we don’t have to be in close proximity to people and places in order to be supported by them. (I recommend his Seven Homecomings practice for those reminders, it’s available online and in his book Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger). Another wisdom text that supports me is Rest Is Resistance: Free Yourself from Grind Culture and Reclaim Your Life by Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry.
There are more books and podcasts and online groups than I can count that provide different ways of accessing culture and community.
What keeps you going when life is too hard?
It sucks that we need to be so resilient in order to survive oppressive systems and structures.
We don’t need to do it alone. Communities of care exist for our collective benefit. My website cherrytreewalk.com includes links to all the groups I mentioned, with a few more.
I’d love to hear from you. What nourishes and supports you?
Book a 15 minute chat with me via my website. Otherwise, get in touch with me on Instagram @cherrytree_walk.
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LiLi K Bright is a writer, facilitator and textile artist. They write poetry, prose, and weird hybrids that defy boundaries of genre and form, mostly about city nature. LiLi is enthusiastically exploring poetry using textiles and botanical imagery.
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From Magma 89, Grassroots
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