summer solstice brightness
pleasure, pride + sunshine
✺ musical peppering through this INKLINGS: celebrating lgbtqia+ expression and joy this pride month, and every month. Full summer 2024 playlist on Spotify
The shortest night and longest day are upon us. Almost out of the blue, with how comfortable the fleeces and wooly socks have been worn of late with no complaints from me; I am a refreshing breeze and layer lover.
With the full moon burgeoning to its peak on Saturday, deep darkness is a memory. The blackbirds sing long after I have retired to bed and wake hours before I am fully conscious. They really put in a shift, these beautiful beaked beings, eh?
Whether you are marking this high summer point with dancing naked around a burning pyre of medicinal tree branches or letting it wash by without note, or somewhere in between, I greet you warmly.
There has been a lot of reading, writing, thinking, feeling and talking here over the last few weeks. The incessant itch to make it all make sense and share a helpful thing has been rumbling along in the background. Even with stepping back from directly using Instagram the instant draw of “have an idea - make a thing - talk about the thing - share the thing” is hard to shake. This isn’t wholly because of the Gram, and feels to me to be a real part of creative practice.
Being in the unknown part of developing work is scary. Being in the unknowns we are facing collectively is terrifying.
The mind wants that fear to be neatly organised sorted out and understood so that it can be safe again.
By safe, I mean known.
I am safe.
But there is also psychological unsafety, and the emergence of identities and lived experiences that are not wholly comfortable to own and claim in the world.
I am challenging ideas, beliefs and habits and working with new material, making new connections with other people and moving forward into new territories. Seeking out and spending a while in places where unmasking can happen. Where wholeness is welcome. Where there can be breath and unclenching.
This all requires support. Uncomfortable, wonderful, joyful support.
I cannot do this alone. We cannot do this alone.
Support comes in the form of conversations with friends, voice notes, text messages of accountability and asking for care, sessions with mentors, with my therapist, with new to me people, with old to me people, time spent with the reassuring is-ness of the trees, with the peace of a late evening walk, containers of time made and supported by the aforementioned humans to help focus the spicey brain on one (or two) things rather than attempting to make ALL the things happen at once. (As is the spicey brained want, particularly when it feels afraid.)
Support is also coming more in the form of exploring pleasurable hobbies.
I found my old, dusty guitar and have been hesitantly strumming along with the blackbird sitting at the top of the apple tree. Simple chords leaving the satisfying tingle in my finger tips. Air rushing through my lungs and vocal chords bringing and peace in my skin.
When your job is creating, hobbies and making can fast become part of work. A new making process to explore, an interesting book found, a spot of writing. What an utter privilege and blessing it is that this is my job. I heartily celebrate this this Summer Solstice, in the heat of the sun of the first day of summer, and thank you all for being here. It means so much to me to have you here.
Part of the reason so few of us have a helthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating false scarcity and then trying to sell us joy, sell us back to ourselves. Some think it belongs to them, that it is their inheritance. Some think it a sign of their worth, their superiority. On a broad level, white people and men have been the primary recipients of this delusion, the belief that they deserve to have excess, while the majority of others don’t have enough… or further, that the majority of the world exists in some way to please them.
And so many of us have been trained into the delusion that we must accumulate excess, even at the cost of vast inequality, in order to view our lives as complete and successful.
A central aspect of pleasure activism is tapping into the natural abundance that exists within and between us, and between our species and this planet. Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and the humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous.
So rather than encouraging moderation over and over, I want to ask you to relinquish your own longing for excess and to stay mindful of your relationship to enough… Do you understand that you, as you are, who you are, is enough?
✺ adrienne maree brown - Pleasure Activism.
With a naturally wired problem-solving, challenge-focused brain, that is working out how to make a financially and physically sustainable working life, actively seeking joy feels like a radical act. In this aging, queer body claiming a deep wholesome love for all it is, does and appears is an ongoing love story.
This brain is fixated on working the world out. Working out ways to join the dots and make sense of things and act accordingly. AND I want to feel joy and bring joy. To not shy away from the peaking sunshine in favour of the shadows, the known crunchy mulch. To claim the joy of expression as is, getting to know pleasure as it is and not as how I think it ought to me.
This INKLINGS is an honour of this joy seeking and the connection and nourishment it brings in this high summer time.
This all needs peppering with simple joys, just because.
A list of spaces for joy:
✺Good long hearty chats with good (long?) hearty folks.
✺Sea swimming.
✺Playing the guitar slowly and badly.
✺Singing. Sound making. Vocal noodling.
✺Gigs! I need music gigs.
✺Dancing. As it comes.
✺I would like to overcome the nerves and go along to local climbing/bouldering class.
✺Touch with and from my safe people
✺Asking Masha to take me skating.
✺Asking local folks to take me surfing.
Music, song, movement in playful, connecting and people-y ways.
Consider this a joyful note to self - and to you - to check in with the joy-ometer.
✺Where do you find your joy?
✺How do you find this hyper-bright time of the year?
✺Do you need a mini-winter with the curtains drawn?
✺Do you need to get out and melt in it?
With warm solstice camaraderie,
KJ
(Proudly) they/them
✺ g e n t l e a t t e n t i o n ✺
✺ I am chuffed to be part of this great project with On Your Face Artist Collective in Wales, spanning over 2024-2025. See below for details about online sessions with a whole host of queer welsh artists.
Queering Wales, Connecting people! A series of online workshops and talks by On Your Face Collective in partnership with Glynn Vivian
Wales is home to a diversity of queer people. For this project, On Your Face want to make a space and put the spotlight on those lives, stories, and voices that are often overlooked, to showcase the diversity and intersection of identities within the LGBTQ+ community of Wales.
Over the course of one year, On Your Face, in partnership with Glynn Vivian, will be running monthly online workshops and talks led by queer creatives.
Running on the last Wednesday of each month, you will hear about their creative practices, learn new skills and different ways of working with materials and making art.
From writing workshops and making your own inks, to sculpting with cardboard and having a go at performance art.