Feeding and Healing

I’m carrying the January tiredness that can lead to lowness. It’s so cold out there.

Today I was truly humbled listening to a local person talk of their experience of hosting community conversations with neighbours. She was able to secure commitment and accountability in ways that only those who live in the place can.
Not only could she secure commitment, but her relationships took her deep, so quickly.

‘A lot of the people, adults around here, their parents were on heroin. So they are close together because as kids they had only each other.’

This touched and broke my heart at the same time, remembering how heroin was flooded into many low income neighbourhoods in the 1990s, and the trauma that it created, that we are living with today. I suppose if we can begin to talk about it, and create the safe conditions, we might just start the healing process. All in good time.

We got together with our investors today and invited other like minded people into the space. People who have become friends, who work towards liberation, healing and justice and who we’d like to share the resources that might come our way, with. A nurse, who is being harmed by both the toxic system she is working within and the impact of the intentional destruction of the NHS on nurses, and, the cost of greed crisis, on the children and families she works for, on a daily basis. And, another woman too, who is passionate about providing alternative support to women, particularly single women, who find themselves in a revolving door of service provision and trapped in toxic systems. It made me wonder how we use the connections we have, and the expertise to amplify the stories, as well as providing healing spaces, therapy, homes and possibilities for economic liberation for the women.

I spent the evening in the company of local women at the food share. Feeding my tummy and my soul. Making sense of and letting go of the pain I’d heard and felt today. Who’d have thought the Food Share was a healing space.