How to find & build a home in community

The magic of planting seeds with friends & serenity of immigrant grocery stores

Oct 03, 2022

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Ayesha and a friend plowing and prepping the garden soil bed to plant seeds in a sanctuary community farm on a mountain in Middle Tennessee. — Me and my friend & co-organizer, Nick, plowing and prepping the garden soil bed (with a few unpictured homies) to plant seeds to grow grains, vegetables & herbs for the fall season at a sanctuary community farm on a remote mountain in Middle Tennessee. Our goal is to experiment building a regional web of abundance in the South- starting with local autonomous food systems!

9/28/22— It’s been 3 months since I moved from Santiago, Chile to Cherokee land, now called Nashville, Tennessee under the empire. I originally moved to the U.S. at 17, falling for the illusion and thinking that this would be better than the horrors I was running from. By the time I realized it was all a trap as most migrants do, I couldn’t leave because I gave up everything to be here. This was my exit plan from an abusive household. I also thought it was my escape from the perils of colonialism not realizing living in the heart of the empire meant being oppressed but told you are free which is a different nightmare than living at the peripheries. However, at 28, my return to the U.S. after a year outside the empire has been more of a fascinating (& traumatic) experiment in political praxis. It’s made me think critically about what HOME even means and how it has to be intentionally built & nurtured with persistence & radical love for community. Rather than focusing on endless growth, climbing the ladder & endless accumulation of success- I’m now thinking “how can I build a home that is sustainable & makes my life worth living?”

A whiteboard on which Ayesha has written in cursive: “Home is not just a place, but an ecosystem, a foundation, safety net and a village of equitable, reciprocal relationships, cultural, political values and shared passions that makes your life worth living. What if your goals were defined by what you need to do to build that home in community and ground in your local ecosystem instead of seeking validation & meaning in oppressive system defined by individualism & capitalism? What if your goal was to embody liberation EVERYDAY?” — I brainstorm, process & outline ideas for newsletters by talking out loud to myself and writing on the whiteboard. Ideally, I wouldn’t even craft these newsletters in isolation. In spirit of embodying my political values as authentically as possible, I will share the unfiltered self-reflection questions I write on my board here!

For folks who are born and/ or raised in the Global North (colonial countries like the USA, Europe, NZ, Canada, Australia etc), I see that the lack of access to collectivist community infrastructure, culture and traditions breeds a confusing type of isolation, loneliness and desolation. Your governments, media, pop culture, academic institutions tell you to be grateful for the crumbs thrown at you as you are starved of community, seeking meaning & purpose in the heart of the empire. But what if you sought meaning… elsewhere? What if your personal goals & ambitions were not shaped by the values of the empire but instead were focused on cultivating deep relationships with people, plants, animals & all parts of your local ecosystem?

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Top left: Photo from a deck at Radnor Lake which is my “spot” whenever I go hike there to reflect, journal or jam to some 808s & classical Indian music. Top right: Rhubarb with rows of other planted vegetables growing in the Mill Ridge community garden where we volunteer at at least once a week to help maintain it. Bottom left: Vegetables harvested from the community garden that are shared between folks who volunteer or distributed to local food closets (no monetary transactions). Bottom right: Turkey tail mushrooms, moss & lichen growing on a tree log at Percy Priest lake, a new hiking spot I recently discovered.

So in today’s newsletter I’ll share some ways I’ve intentionally pursued community building in a new city- using colorful pictures, personal anecdotes & reflection exercises scattered along the way for you. Again, I hope that me sharing my struggles & glimmers of hope in an unfiltered way can help inspire you or catalyze some ideas in your daily pursuit of liberation. Today’s bites:

The beauty of grassroots organizing: How my utter desperation to find connection actually helped & how “home” is about creating meaning together
The magic of immigrant grocery stores: How my resentment of meal prepping & pursuit of affordable, culturally-resonant, complex food at the end of busy days helped me ground in community

P.S. Thank you to the kind souls that pay to support this newsletter, it exists because of you. Your funds will help sustain me & my political work. To upgrade your plan and become a paid subscriber, follow these simple steps.

& My calendar availability is updated for folks interested in 1 on 1 sessions to cope with capitalism while working towards dismantling it, address your trauma (systemic & interpersonal), health & mental distress thru a political, abolitionist, decolonized framework with alternative community-based/ collectivist solutions, understand neurodiversity by bridging science & social justice and navigate problems + build community by applying political values to your daily life/ relationships.

Ayesha taking a selfie in a bathroom mirror at work wearing a handmade, vibrant, yellow, traditional South Asian Shalwar Kameez outfit — A small way I’ve been decolonizing & pushing back on respectability politics in colonial institutions- by wearing more of my traditional, cultural, ethnic clothes. This is a handmade Shalwar Kameez & I always get gawked at in the hospital or around the clinical lab (that plus my curly hair, fully tattooed arms, the confusing multi-racial look etc) but I’ve realized “authenticity” requires you to disrupt dominant norms in any way that you can so you may sleep a little easier at night knowing they’ll never fully be able to take our spirit, joy & passions from us. So what makes you feel a tad bit more “home” even in your body by embodying your collectivist values, political beliefs, & cultural roots? Do the best you can.

Before, I got to the U.S. and so desperately wanted to belong in their ivory towers, be liked and admired by their authority figures and succeed in their systems by excelling at playing by their rules. But this time it was different. The moment I got to Nashville that I need to plant my roots deep and intentionally build community recognizing that our lives are structured by capitalism to breed isolation, loneliness, monotony, and exhaustion. What can I do in my day-to-day life to embody liberation?

A whiteboard with Ayesha’s writing that says “If colonialism and capitalism did not exist and you had access to alternate realities, what would you do differently? How would you daily life and relationships transform? What part of that can you try to live today? How? Break that shit down.”

Planting seeds, gardening & cultivating soil in community

Ayesha plowing & shaking off soil to harvest peanuts at the community garden — Last week at the community farm/ garden, we harvested all the peanut plants (part of the grain/ legume family) which have nitrogen-fixing symbiotic bacteria in their roots requiring no additive nitrogen-containing fertilizers (toxic & excessively used on monocrop plantations to mass produce single crops which poisons/ kills off many insect & ground animals). You can see the peanut pods growing on the roots of the plant that I just removed from the soil. The process of pouring your time, labor, love & energy into a helping with a farm or garden teaches you a lot about what it takes to cultivate relationships with plants, animals & microbes that are not based on consumption. We are maintaining a whole ecosystem by being a part of it. We sustain them just as much as they sustain us. How can you give in a way that isn’t transactional & yet sustains your life?

After bouncing from country to country my whole life as a migrant eternally in the diaspora, HOME is a complicated, confusing concept for me but I know I’m not alone in this conundrum. People use words like love, home, family etc without really pausing to reflect on what they are or if they’ve ever truly experienced any of that safety, security & unconditional support beyond societal norms & expectations. In many ways, I felt enraged when I got to the U.S. because it felt like same shit different place but now I had to be actively complicit in the oppression of my own people since my survival depended on conforming & assimilating into the empire’s systems AND be stripped of easy access to collectivist traditions & cultural values. But after all these political lessons over the years- I know that home for me as a migrant can only be re-created where community is & by me trying to embody collectivist values everyday as much as possible. From the food I eat to the clothes I wear to how I prioritize my time- I focus more now on creating this sense of home by giving to & existing within my ecosystem. To that end- grassroots organizing has saved my life. How?

Four community members preparing a new gardening soil bed at a sanctuary farm in Middle Tennessee to plant seeds for vegetables, grains and herbs that can be harvested later this fall. — A few of my co-organizers & community members at the Breathwood mountain sanctuary farm planting seeds after we finished prepping the soil bed.

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