“…in a world where being quick to aggression is the norm, gentleness is a badass act of rebellion.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about compassion fatigue recently. About how so many people who read here, who listen to the podcast, who identify with the bone-deep desire to slow down, are also the same people who care so deeply about the world. So deeply, often, that it hurts.
Sadness, frustration, burn-out – these are all symptoms of carrying with us a mighty tension – between needing to slow down and needing to make a difference.
The question, though, is how can we show up in a meaningful way that doesn’t further empty our already-drained proverbial cup?
We can try gentle activism.
Gentle activism can take many different forms – cooking a meal, having a conversation, writing a letter, making a banner, creating a garden, sharing home-grown produce, making a personalised gift and sending it to someone, dropping seed bombs, writing and sharing a poem – the what is not as important as the why and the how.
In other words, gentle activism is first about clearly understanding the change we want to see in the world, and then being kind, thoughtful, empathetic, steadfast and values-aligned in our efforts to achieve it.
But here’s the trick. We also need to go about it in ways that are personally sustainable, because what feels good and cup-filling is different for everyone, depending on our circumstances, preferences, accessibility, health, capacity and skills.
Perhaps you’re just beginning your activism journey and need to know where to start. Maybe you’re conflict-averse and avoid situations where emotions could run high. Or you’re deeply introverted and have always thought that traditional activism wasn’t for you. Or you might live with a disability, chronic illness, anxiety or depression and have never been able to participate in marches and in-person protests. Then again, perhaps you’re just exhausted.
First thing – it’s okay to be just plain exhausted. Three years into a pandemic, in a world that is increasingly hard to live in, exhaustion is an entirely understandable, human response. If that’s where you are, then please know you are not alone and you are allowed to rest.
Second thing – please don’t think that ‘gentle’ is just another way to say ‘passive’ or ‘weak’. In fact, in a world where being quick to aggression is the norm, gentleness is a badass act of rebellion. If I find myself in a room full of people shouting their opinions at each other, I look for the quiet ones on the edge. They’re usually my people. Maybe they’re yours too?
What does gentle activism look like?
It can be many things, but I want to focus on a few broad categories. Partly because this post would be a solid 20,000 words if I didn’t, and partly because the three categories below slot neatly in to “slow living” anyway.
Gardening
I have a distinct memory of playing in my pop’s backyard veggie garden when I was a little girl. The sun was white-hot and the grass was crunchy under my feet, but there he was, growing lush, green spearmint bushes and huge tomato plants. I can still feel the soft, spiky spearmint leaf in my mouth and taste its toothpasty flavour. I remember thinking he was the most amazing pop – he knew how to grow food! What a genius! We only got our food from the greengrocer.
He could never have known that leading me by the hand around the garden and letting me wander around his immaculately organised garden shed would leave the impression it did. And to be honest, I didn’t know for the longest time either. Pop passed away before I started my first garden, but now, when I chew on a mint leaf or dig in the soil, I think of him. Growing, sharing and swapping as much of our own produce as possible is one of my long-term goals (and a form of activism), and I know that came at least in part, from my pop.
Gardening – even if it is only a pot of flowers on the windowsill or a tiny, shared plot in a community garden – is a beautiful form of gentle activism. It’s about hope and growth and beauty and soil regeneration and putting carbon back into the earth. It helps us to think about how long it takes to grow something, to value those who grow them for us, to feel a sense of responsibility to a place, a plant, a growing, living thing. And all of this adds up to wanting to do more to protect the natural world.
Perhaps growing something leads to a conversation about reducing food waste, or no longer buying flowers that have been drenched in pesticides and flown halfway around the world (not to mention the chemicals used in their farming, and the impact that has on the people who grow them). Maybe it leads to you making your own worm farm or buying a kitchen composter and using the compost on an ever-growing jungle of indoor plants, filtering the air of your apartment and reducing your stress levels at the same time.
It might seem like a stretch to suggest that all of these seemingly disparate things could come from growing something in a pot, but that’s exactly where I started and now I’m on a mission to learn how to grow as much of our own produce as possible. My house is full of plants, we compost obsessively and do everything we can to regenerate the soil on our block of land. Our veggie garden is in our front yard (just because it’s where the sunlight is best year-round) and that’s lead me to have dozens of conversations about gardening with neighbours, discovering a huge network of like-minded green-thumbs.
All from wandering the garden with my Pop.
Never doubt that every little moment of activism matters.
Cooking
Now what, exactly, about cooking says ‘activism’? You’d be surprised.
You could choose to cook a meal using in-season produce. Or locally-sourced ingredients. Or you might even be able to cook a meal from foraged wild food or produce grown in your own backyard. All of which qualify as gentle activism, as far as I’m concerned.
Learning about seasonal availability means you’re opting out of the extractive, capitalist mode of the Big Supermarkets, who will have you believe that you can eat peaches in winter and those apples you buy in summer are ‘farm fresh’. You’re embracing seasonal food, you badass, you.
Cooking a meal made of local ingredients similarly thumbs your nose at the corporations that control the majority of our food. You’re supporting local growers (activism) and by sharing that meal (gentle) you’re spreading the word about the importance of buying and eating local when we can.
Foraging is super badass too. I mean, heading off to your favourite mushroom-foraging spot in the forest and coming out with baskets of pine mushrooms and slippery jacks, ready for a toss in the frypan? Very cool. (Just be sure you’re a responsible and safe forager – leaving the wilds like you found it, taking only what you need, leaving plenty for others and Mother Nature, and only ever eating things you are 100% certain are safe.)
Similarly cool is pulling some veggies out of your own backyard (or some herbs from your patio pots) and adding them to your dinner. Once you’ve eaten a homegrown cucumber, after watching it turn from a flower to fruit, willing it to ripen over many weeks, you will never look at the humble cuke the same again. Farmers become magicians and those vine-ripened, locally-grown, bumpy green delights at the farmers market are suddenly worth every extra cent.
It's not only the act of cooking that can be a form of gentle activism though. Sitting down to a lovingly prepared meal with someone you care about (even if that someone is yourself) is an opportunity for connection – to self, to others, to the seasonal nature of the world we live in. And by practising these tiny moments of gentle activism, we’re also practising what it looks like to tap into the rhythms of nature. It’s in these moments that we deepen our relationships and our understanding of the world around us, learn things about each other, share ideas and connect.
We can never know how important these moments of connection across the table might end up being – that doesn’t mean they’re anything less than significant. Life-changing, even.
Craft
I love craft. I’m not particularly good at it, but it has a punk-rock, DIY, anti-capitalist vibe that is 100% my JAM. Craft is also anti-sweatshop, anti-consumerist, anti-convenience, and therefore, by its very nature, slow.
Making something takes time, it’s sustainable and creative, and during the process of making, you develop an understanding of exactly what goes into the creation of so many of the things we take for granted.
I had never thought about the resources that went into making a basic dishcloth until I crocheted my own cotton versions a few years ago. Not only did I get a huge amount of pride from finishing that first cloth (seriously – you would have thought I’d crocheted a full-size, 3D model of the Mona Lisa) but I have never taken the humble dishcloth for granted since. Plus, I talked so relentlessly to my friends and family about my little dishcloth that I ended up making a stack for each of them to use at home. Some of them even started making their own. So from one act of slow, imperfect craft, I kept a whole heap of factory-made, non-compostable dishcloths out of landfill, armed my friends and family with their own eco-cloths and started multiple conversations about making/reusing/upcycling/composting.
So, if we harness the inherent slowness of craft and pair it with activism, we end up with…craftivism, a movement with roots that stretch back to the suffragettes and branches that reach into today’s at-home, pandemic-era, burnt-out-but-still-caring type of activism.
The new guard of craftivists includes people like Sarah Corbett, who founded The Craftivist Collective in 2009 after burning out from years of relentless protesting and campaigning. She was convinced there was a kinder, slower way to make a difference, and she was proven right.
Back in 2015, she and her fellow craftivists successfully campaigned Marks & Spencer to pay their workers a living wage, by engaging them with gentle acts of craftivism. This included hand-embroidering handkerchiefs (so wonderfully British!) with messages to each member of the M&S board and relating the importance of a living wage to people and causes that the board members could more readily empathise with.
Side note: I don’t share this example because I think we should all take on massive campaigns against huge corporations (gentle or not, they take a huge amount of effort and energy), nor do I share it because I think all forms of protest need to be so mindful of the egos of those we’re protesting against. I share it because so often we only ever think of activism in terms of big, loud, in the street protests, and the truth is it doesn’t need to be.
Craftivists can:
stitch a mini-banner with a values-based motto and leave it in a public place
take a leaf out of the Craft Collective’s book and embroider a hanky with the words ‘Don’t blow it!’ then send it to your local MP, along with a hand-written letter acknowledging that their job is difficult and encouraging them to use their power to support create long lasting positive change
host a knit-in – like the awesome Knitting Nanas
simply use your craft time as an opportunity to reflect on fast fashion, hyper-consumption, inequality or climate change. These moments of quiet reflection are also powerful as they often lead us to make changes in other areas of our lives.
No act too small or gentle
These acts might seem small and insignificant, but what we so often fail to understand about small acts of change is that they become the foundation on which we build. Once we realise something, once we learn something, we can’t un-realise or un-learn it. They fundamentally change us. So even when we feel too burnt-out or incapable of ‘big activism’, by committing to regular, cup-filling moments of gentle activism we can continue to make a difference.
Plus, if you share any of these gentle acts with someone else – your housemates, kids, family, friends or neighbours – you’re tossing a pebble into the pond. You may not ever see where the ripples extend, but let me assure you, they’re there.
Rippling out in to lives and hearts, making change.
Brooke xx
PS. My third book, Care: The radical art of taking time is all about the different layers of care, and if you’re feeling burnt out by the world at the moment - and who could blame you - it might offer some gentle ways forward.
Brooke is back and not a moment too soon.
Thank you for providing this new platform to share your thoughts.
Monday morning and this handful of sunshine as a reminder that we can keep on doing the little things but because they do all add up.
Share your joy and brighten someone else’s day.
thank you for your words, and for adding crafting in your list of gentle activism :)