Every Friday, two of my closest friends and I get together and we practice world-making.
We call our weekly gathering “Wind Down.” There is no rigid agenda. No set time, nor set place. Not even pressure to attend. But every Friday, we find ourselves together prefiguring and shaping ourselves for the world in which we hope to one day live.
“What time we winding down tomorrow?” someone will text the group chat around 8PM on Thursday evening.
“Trellie’s? 6 o’ clock?” someone else will respond. (“Trellie," a Trey and Kellie, my wife, sandwich.)
While we try to rotate houses, we often end up at our place huddled around the kitchen island, even though there is ample seating in the living room (a fact that Kelz is quick to bring up). But y’all know Black folks and kitchens. There’s a gravitational pull that we become acutely aware of at a young age when the smell of pancakes (or Pinesol) and the sound of Soul Music gently shakes us out of our sleep to investigate (or contemplate hiding in the case of the latter).
Regardless of the location, whether it’s our kitchen or one of our friend’s living rooms (or patio), we are intentional about coming together to practice making worlds on Friday. Our gathering has been life-changing. Better said, it has been life-saving for me.
You see, these last couple years were the hardest years of my life. I turned 35 recently, and I used to say that when I turned 23—the same year that I graduated college and moved back in with my Mama in our small, rural town of New London, North Carolina—was the hardest year of my life. Well, the years between 32-35 (yes, all three years because Covid Time Warp) looked at 23-year-old Me and said, “Hold my beer.”
In a span of those three years, I managed to lose my grandfather to Alzheimer’s Dementia. A global pandemic, in which the federal government and major corporations nationwide completely abandoned people in favor of profit, turned all of our lives upside-down. During the earlier portion of the national lockdown and social distancing, my grandmother fell and broke her hip, and a year later she was diagnosed with an aggressive terminal illness. (Mind you, prior to all of this my grandparents’ mortality was not yet a real thing to me despite both of them getting up there in age. Neither of them ever got sick.)
To top it off, my wife began having issues with her thyroid. (I don’t know if any of you have ever experienced or been around someone who is experiencing thyroid issues unknowingly but it is scary as hell.) My wife was also diagnosed with hyperplasia, precancerous cells of the uterus, necessitating that she undergo a hysterectomy to reduce the likelihood of cancer in the future.
I place ZERO value in resilience. Often it’s thrust on marginalized folks, Black Women especially, to “celebrate” our/their ability to endure the unjust suffering wrought by white supremacist capitalist imperialist cisheteropatriarchy. But man, these past three years were a resilience marathon.
Nevertheless, in the midst of it all, Friday Wind Down took shape serendipitously, as if the Universe knew exactly what I needed. At first, it was just my wife and one of her girl friends/sisters. They began meeting every Friday evening after work. Sometimes at our place. Sometimes at her friend’s. And much like the gravitational pull of Black kitchens as children, the pull of their friendship was infectious. So needless to say, two became three, including myself. Now we jokingly call ourselves “The Crew.” We have also been called “Lil Fires Everywhere” (by Qurissy, the photographer whose work is peppered throughout this post). Two of us are fire signs, and the other, an air sign. During our "Framily Photoshoot" with Qurissy at Reparations Club (a Black-owned, woman-owned book store and meeting place) in South Los Angeles, we collectively determined that my wife, the lone air sign, was the common denominator and the proverbial glue that brought us together.
But what binds us together is our shared principles and values (and our shared interests in good music, good food and good company). Also, we all feel connected to abolitionist principles. Abolition is both a political framework and a practice or a way of living. At its core, abolition focuses on dismantling the harmful, carceral, capitalist structures that exists within us and impact our social relations and also exist outside of us more broadly, i.e., the prison industrial complex (PIC) and other systems of oppression that shape every facet of our daily lives, limiting our capacity for true safety and well-being.
Abolition has a dual focus. It also invites us to build a world that centers community over individualism, deep reciprocity over self-centeredness, restorative justice over punishment, self-determination over unilateral power and control. It is the creation of a world in which everyone has everything they need, a world in which everyone can thrive.
When I say we are in the business of world-making, what I mean is that we are practicing for the future right now so that we are ready when it comes, knowing that it may come long after we are all gone. And as We (“We,” Big W - denoting marginalized folks worldwide) take power away from The State, we (“we,” lil w—denoting our little community, and other interconnected communities like ours) can take those resources and invest in what we know actually makes us safe and whole (safe housing, ample food supply, the arts, more time to spend with loved ones, access to green spaces, well-funded schools, access to quality healthcare, universal income, etc.) That’s what Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie mean by abolition’s dual power approach of “making power” or creating radical community practices right now, and “taking power” or funneling resources away from the State and into our communities for greater self-determination.
In a more practical sense, the three of us show up at Wind Down on Fridays, and all the moments in between, as our most vulnerable, messy selves with a shared understanding that we are accountable to one another. In the words of Gwendolyn Brooks, “We are each other’s harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond."
We are flattening the hierarchy between romantic and platonic relationships and working toward a place of "friendship anarchy" (a term used by Mia Birdsong) in which all relationships are of equal importance. The same way my wife expects me to show up for her, I hope and want my friends to expect and demand the same of me.
We pool our resources and make sure that one another is sufficiently fed, literally fed, yes, but also mentally and emotionally fed. We communicate openly about everything from Beyonce to family to work. We read books together and have tough discussions about fatphobia and capitalism and environmental racism and disability and transphobia and cannabis, colorism, abolition, etc. We get it wrong. We try again. We practice healthier ways of handling conflict with the intent to call-in and not out, and to restore instead of punish. We affirm one another. We listen. We problem-solve when asked, and sometimes when not asked (see again: we get it wrong). We dream aloud about buying land together, and starting a community-based farm, and inviting others in. We travel together. We listen to lots and lots of music. We anticipate each other’s needs. We ask. We listen some more. We celebrate. We mourn. We grieve. We question. We doubt. We re-affirm. We sit in silence, together. We make it up as we go along, experimenting, re-assessing, deciding what works best for us. We practice making worlds.
But mostly, we just show up. And we show up with intention. And over the past 3 years we have managed to create something special. The way Mia Birdsong describes it is this:
“We create more love and time and energy together than we hold individually. At our best we don’t function based on reciprocation. It is not about getting as much out of it as we put in. It’s that our output is transformed into a wholly different material that’s not possible to create alone, like spinning gold from straw or transforming paper cups into nebulae. It’s only in an environment with others that this generative, multiplying power can be created.”
On Friday, we practice world-making. And it has literally saved my life. Now every morning I wake up it is my intention to make an offering at the altar of Community. It is my intention to stretch and move my abolitionist muscles until the world we are trying to create becomes as real to me as the world we are simultaneously trying to dismantle. I want the practice of world-making to permeate every fiber of my being like a salve and settle deep into my bones. I want it to transform my relationship with other folks, and my relationship to everyday life—because, as Dean Spade puts it, “all aspects of our lives (work, transportation, food, entertainment, etc.) are sites of injustice and entry points for resistance and transformation.”
Whenever I have the time and energy, I spend it reflecting and writing and talking about the world that we’ve built, the world we are currently building. When possible, I invite others in to experience it in hopes that they feel alignment. I hope that what we’ve built ripples beyond us a group and into the relationships that we each have with others. And I hope those ripples continue to grow and spread, and that others gather around their own kitchen islands regularly, being fully seen, fully heard, and deeply cared for, until the entire world is made anew.
Thank Yous
To Reparations Club in Los Angeles: For allowing us to use your space during our vacation to take Framily Photos. Visiting your space felt like coming home.
To Qurissy: For holding us with tenderness and thoughtfulness, and agreeing to take photos of us.
To The Crew: Needless to say, I love y'all to life. See y'all on Friday?
Reading Suggestions
"Mutual Aid" by Dean Spade
"How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community" by Mia Birdsong
"No More Police: A Case For Abolition" by Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie
"Set Boundaries, Find Peace: a guide to reclaiming yourself" by Nedra Tawaab
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