Reimagining Hibernation
| by Evie Muir |
It’s that time of year again - pumpkin spice season, spooky season, or, as far as Peaks of Colour’s concerned, hibernation season. For the past four years we have been experimenting with seasonal organising, rejecting Capitalism’s conditioning by allowing periods for emergence, abundance, harvesting and rest. Following the delivery of our spring-summer walkshop series’, each October we commit ourselves to the out of sight work required when building resilient infrastructures and strong movements; healing, caring, tending, visioning, both organisationally, and personally.
Though we have found hibernation to be an expansive, forgiving temporal practice, there has remained a tension that’s been difficult to articulate - I try to do so here, so our community can join us on our experimental journey towards discovering how we can do this work without replicating systems of harm.
The Personal
Our decision to explore hibernation as a practice was largely influenced by my own experience of seasonal depression. I knew how incompatible the Capitalist clock was with our seasonal bodies, and wanted Peaks of Colour to be a place that allowed for softness and adaptation. While hibernation permitted me the space and time to navigate my own needs with agency and self-determination, I came to feel really lonely and isolated. And, when Peaks of Colour and I would emerge from this period of deep rest in spring, I’d feel like a fraud, having to wear a mask of someone who has their shit together, when in reality I’d spent the winter months falling apart.
This, I now realise, is because I’d inadvertently created the grassroots equivalent of the Capitalist message that we’re only useful if we’re productive - I only felt useful when I had the capacity to care for others.
My contradictory relationship with hibernation had in fact been rooted in shame - a deep and unacknowledged self-loathing of the person I became when my trauma presentations felt uncontrollable. Through Peaks of Colour I was accidentally reinforcing the internalised belief that I was unworthy of care myself, and so for almost six months of the year I retreated into the shadows of autumn’s darkened days, telling myself that a system built to ensure I would not be a burden, was all I could let myself imagine.
The Organisational
Seasonal depression has meant that I have always associated autumn - and therefore hibernation - with survival and powerlessness. But when we zoom out and consider our role in the global fight for racial, gender and land justice, submitting to helplessness no longer feels like an option.
This October for example, marks one year of a genocide in Palestine and, also, one year of Palestinian resistance against this Western-backed occupation. That our period of hibernation coincides with so much ongoing suffering is not something to be ignored, and so in our reimagining of hibernation we are considering how this can be a tool of resistance rather than retreat.
Can hibernation enable us to transcend timelines and geographies in order to build global solidarities?
Can hibernation be a space where the bereft mourn, where caregivers receive care?
Can hibernation unite and strengthen the efforts of organisers whose energies may be depleted?
Can hibernation be an opening, where we lean into the work that thrives in underground and unseen conditions?
Can hibernation help us mould disruption, compassion and disobedience out of the parts of ourself that are disassociated, disregulated and depressed?
Can hibernation offer the embodied fuel and emotional clarity that allows us to practice discipline and resilience?
The Reimagining
So, this autumn we approach our period of hibernation with intention and vulnerability, knowing that we have capacity for more than suffering whilst also acknowledging that it is unreasonable for our nervous systems to be regulated during a global genocide. While we will still be sowing the seeds for Peaks of Colour’s immediate and distanced futures, (watch this space!) it will include exploring ways I as a founder can also be held and energised by the ecosystems of organisers I’m grateful to be surrounded by - and how we as a community can lean on and learn from each other to maintain momentum.
In ‘Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock’, Jenny O’Dell writes “maybe ‘the point’ isn’t to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, to be more alive in any given moment - a movement outward and across rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track.” Hibernation, therefore, is not an inactive place where we allow ourselves to be recipients of the pain it has the potential to inflict. Nor is it a place where we bury our heads in the sand and allow our own needs to distract us from the responsibility we hold to our human and more-than-human kin.
It is a time for togetherness. A time to honour the aliveness that is both in and around us even during a season that in many ways can be associated with decay. A time to commit to connecting to our bodies, our communities, our local environments and our global solidarities, so that we can ultimately nourish ourselves in service of a collective fight for liberation.
Earlier this month I held a workshop as part of my Radical Rest book tour. It was called ‘Radical Hibernation’ and took place at Sheffield Botanical Gardens during Off The Shelf Festival. The hope for the workshop was to invite my local community to help me mould this reimagining of hibernation and though our respective relationships with autumn may have been complex and conflicting, together we created a collective poem that solidified our intentions for the season ahead. Drawing inspiration from ‘Turning and Returning’ by Malika Ndlovu’s and ‘Paul Robeson’ by Gwendolyn Brooks, this piece serves as a reminder that our hibernation should never be a lonely one.
Radical Hibernation
This season we are returning to the parts of ourselves that are feeling the hurt and rage of abandonment…
We call in Black love, maternal love to hold us in transition.
This season we are returning to the parts of ourselves that have been silenced, held tight, hidden…
We call in our well ancestors to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that can know the thinnest of veils between things…
We call in the departed to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that are open to receiving nourishment…
We call in our higher selves to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that have been told do not matter, are not true, are not real, are not worthy…
We call in the water to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that demand us to embody courage for the greater good…
We call in disobedience to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that have been waiting for the winds of change…
We call in the earth to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that we lost as children…
We call in stillness here to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that are in tension…
We call in our power to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that have been wounded and ache…
We call in nature, love, spirit and our witch selves to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that may have lost sight of the importance of our place in this story…
We call in women no longer here to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that see what we couldn’t see, hear what we couldn’t hear, and feel what we could no longer feel…
We call in our Feminist sisters, Black, brown, trans, intersex, two spirit and beyond to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that the long, warm summer days neglected, and the inner quiet workings of mind and body, ready to be discovered in silence…
We call in magic to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that hold us, guide us, nurture us, rest us, love us…
We call in nature’s wisdom to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that have been taken by someone else…
We call in community care to hold us in transition.
We are returning to the parts of ourselves that reminds us that no revolution was easy, and that it is always in community that we overcome injustice…
We call in a global solidarity here to hold us in transition.
