Melissa: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. At the end of July, the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W Mellon Foundation announced a new cohort of Disability Futures Fellows. The fellows are supported by a grant designed to spotlight a group of visual and performing artists and writers who live with disabilities. This week, I spoke with one of the new fellows.

Naomi: My name is Naomi Ortiz. I'm an author, a poet, and a visual artist that focuses on disability justice and relationship with place.

In the desert when the monsoon storm clouds

Unleashed hard unrelenting rain upon the sandy soil

Only so much can be absorbed

The wombs of the desert are dry washes that swell

And carry the overflowing abundance of nourishment down river to areas that are still dry

Part of becoming aware is learning to surrender to nourishment when it arrives

If I let go and allow myself to be filled,

I can carry this nourishment through me and out to others

I receive enough to share

Melissa: As Naomi is reading the poem titled Monsoon Nourishment from their book, Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice. You can hear their deep connection to the desert. This is where they were born and raised, and it was a childhood, they shaped their relationship with climate change and with ecojustice. These are major themes in Naomi's next book too, and I asked them to tell me about it.

Naomi: It's called Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice.

Melissa: Talk to me about a ritual for climate change.

Naomi: I was thinking about the ways that I come to things that scare me, and that I am really scared to touch in with. Oftentimes, I personally really appreciate some container. I like the idea of a container of a ritual in engaging with something that just feels so scary because you can lean back, there's a structure, there's a flow that one is going through. I structured the book as a ritual, as basically a way to touch in, and just sharing my experience with trying to have conversations with the land I live on about how to be in relationship with it as these terrific and huge changes are happening.

Melissa: What is ecojustice?

Naomi: I feel like ecojustice to me, maybe being a little bit different than I think to a lot of folks. As a disabled person, I often think about ecojustice as justice that is reflectant of equity versus equality, where resources are divvied up based on need. Ecojustice to me is how we can live and balance the best we can and honor the fact that we have different needs.

Melissa: Give me an example of what it means to be a person living with disability, who is approaching climate justice, environmental justice work, but also is engaging with different kinds of needs than perhaps folks not engage with disability work might recognize.

Naomi: I think a good example of this, I care very deeply about the way the plastic is permeating our world from the oceans to the deserts where I live, the desert. It's showing up in all these different wild ways, which are pretty scary. As a disabled person, in order to drink water by myself, I need to either use a plastic cup or straw, and that's a matter of functionality. I actually have a poem in the collection, it's part poetry, part essay, which I often find for me, sometimes poetry is easier also to touch in with things that are scary.

I like to bring a lot of gentleness to my work, so that's something another place that I can play with that. I think that the idea of plastics and functionality, how do we hold both of those realities is true that some people may need plastic in order to function, and other folks are very right in the pervasiveness of plastic in our environment is radically altering our bodies, our environments, animals, and plants. All those things are true. It's like, how do we hold these multiple realities and think about how to move forward together.

To me, that's a lot of times thinking about equity versus equality, or having that lens of how we go to think about policy or what we're advocating for.

Melissa: Even as you are responding, I'm still mulling over this notion of things that scare me. I realized that when you said it initially, I thought, "Oh, I know exactly what you mean," but as you speak, I realized, "Oh, this might not be scary like things that go bump in the dark or bats that fly into your open window." I think you might be talking about a broader sense of what is terrifying. Help me to understand when you say approaching or entering into things that are scary, what's scary?

Naomi: This really is a really interesting central theme in all of my work, everything from talking about self-care for activists to climate change, is like how to touch in with things that scare us. Oftentimes, that's for me, internally, it might be things that I need, which is very scary to try to figure out, especially in the society we live in, where I spend so much of my energy advocating for literally basic access, to things that are really out of my control, which is climate change and how it's impacting this place I love and the place that I live.

Really it's like, how do you touch in with things that scare us is talking about grief, it's talking about anger, it's talking about fear, it's talking about surrender, it's talking about witnessing, it's talking about all of these really complex subjects that take a lot for us to grapple with. Then, there's just the reality of when do we have time to grapple with things that scare us? Where's that carved out in this world we live in? And it's not. We have to make that space, which is challenging.

Those, to me, the things that scare me are it's like a huge lovely pot of a ton of stuff that just takes a lot of time to take out, sniff, smell, taste, engage with, put it back maybe for a little while.

Melissa: I want to dig in on self-care a bit here because you, in fact, maybe struggling for ecojustice, but I have been struggling with self-care for more than a minute now. What I mean by that is, I was getting so annoyed with-- this is all-pre pandemic. I kept getting these. I'd go to give a lecture about politics or voting or whatever the things I talk about. Invariably, there'd be some lovely well-meaning late millennial, early Gen Z in the audience would say, what are your rituals for self-care? Being the cranky X Gen that I am, I would just say, "Look, I don't believe in self-care."

I take a shower every day, I get my nails done on occasion, but none of that is self-care, that's just basic self-maintenance, and I don't believe self-care is possible because when I'm truly broken, I can't care for myself. That's the whole point. I need you to care for me. That's the thing that makes it care, is you got to help. I had this whole narrative about Squad Care over self-care, then the pandemic came, had to encounter a little self-care humility.

Can you talk to me about the connections between self-care and social justice, which is a prior book sustaining spirit self-care for social justice that you've written because I got to say, I worry that self-care is so atomizing, individualistic, and commercial in our understanding of it that I wonder if it can be a tool for social justice.

Naomi: That's such a great question. I actually read your piece on Squad Care and I really, really appreciated it a lot. I think self-care has been totally commercialized. When I started writing about this 12 years ago, it was a brand new term that people were trying to grapple with and maybe pull out as something that could be a tool to build capacity.

I feel like it's been commercialized and now it's really oftentimes portrayed as self-indulgent and pampering, and really as a way to withdraw from society, which I think can be appropriate, of course, and it's for me coming up through social justice, I was wondering, could self-care be a tool to engage deeper with the communities that we're working within? I came up through doing different kinds of social justice, youth work, I worked with incarcerated folks, I ran a national youth-run, disability activist project for a while, and I'm really coming to self-care through a lens of disability. There's a few things with that. One is that, as a disabled person, I often have to advocate, like I was saying before so much just to meet some basic needs within systems, so getting dressed, getting to the places I need to go, all require advocacy. As a kid growing up with this, for me, it became I think I internalized that I couldn't have needs outside of these basic things because that just was taking all of my energy to advocate for. The other thing is that disabled folks in general, I think that as we call non-disabled folks abled.

Melissa: I got it. [chuckles]

Naomi: Ables got a taste of some of the isolation that oftentimes disabled people will really live in all the time through the pandemic. It's very, very difficult to develop relationships. It's an interesting paradox, really. Like, I am a disabled person who cannot live without interdependence so I have to have that squad in some respects, in order just to survive and I didn't understand what I needed in terms of emotional, spiritual. I didn't know how to have boundaries. I think it's disabled folks sometimes, lots of people approach these different ways, for me, I turned into a real people-pleasing person, I wanted to have people like me.

I had no boundaries, I would show up and be there for other people all the time, and then that wasn't reciprocated. I had this personal experience and then I was seeing people just burning out all kinds and movements staying really young because there weren't elders that were maintaining these movements. We are losing all this wisdom all the time and resetting back to that initial identity politics coming into understanding who we are and our place in the world, which is super important and profound. That's just like the doorway into this house of collective liberation and we need elders in this house.

How do people maintain? For me, I was curious if self-care could be a tool in order to maintain and if that's something we could actually integrate into our movements. I interviewed over 30 people doing all really different kinds of activist work, reproductive justice work, I interviewed a lot of border activists, US-Mexico border activists, folks doing all different kinds of stuff, disability justice, of course. I think I came out with a pretty complex understanding of self-care which looks at what do we need? That being a really basic thing and something that's actually very difficult to answer often.

How do we build awareness around what we need? How do we have a relationship with where we live? What can we rely on and brace on besides other people? What is around us to give us strength and how do we figure that out? How do our relationships impact us? Are they reciprocal? It's not like being completely where you do something and then somebody does something back for you where it's totally equal. It may be you show up for somebody and then they show up for somebody else. Really, examining how relationships are impacting and how they're balanced in our life.

Then, learning from these lessons in order to grow and having that time for self-reflection which we are not encouraged to do. That's the opposite of what we're encouraged to do. For me, self-care is more than bubble baths and a glass of wine although that can totally count, I don't mean to diss it.

Melissa: Although sometimes, especially at my age, I've discovered that restraining from the glass of wine is actually the self-care moment. Like, "Let me have this glass of water instead." So much better tomorrow morning. I want to dig in on place. I love this idea of what can we lean on. What can be our touchstones? What can sustain us in the scary that other than human animals or maybe even our non-human animals, our pets, who we might lean on? Talk to me about place and particularly the place where you're living right now and how it is doing some of that self-caring work for you.

Naomi: I love this question, thank you. I do not live on my ancestral lands so I want to make that clear because I think a lot of times people can get really scared of having a relationship with place or don't know how to approach it when they also feel like they acknowledge being a squatter on the land that they're on which is very real, very true. I just want to throw that out there but I was born here and I was raised here and I live in the snow and desert.

For me, growing up here, I was able to have a very deep relationship with this very dynamic land that oftentimes people who don't live here just think about in terms of extraction, what can we mine from it? What can we take from it when it's actually this beautifully intricate and diverse ecosystem? I want to just also say Syren Nagakyrie, they run disabled hikers and they talk about this dichotomy that often gets presented between wild spaces and urban spaces, and that is not true. Through this lens of disability, it's like we can enjoy nature, of course, in urban spaces, it's everywhere.

It's coming up through the cracks and the sidewalk, it's in the sky, it's in the clouds, it's in the sun, it's in the ways we feel the wind against our skin so these are all elements of place. For me, bracing against place has often been a way I've survived really difficult situations in my life, whether it's been just going outside to my little patio or it's been actually being able to get out to a parking lot because I can't do those rugged wild trails and just enjoying more intricate natural environments. That's always been a place that I braced against.

When I was noticing a lot of changes because of climate change, that's really what brought me to write this next book, Rituals for Climate Change because I didn't know, I was scared. It's like this is my safe place and this is the place I've gone to when people have let me down or systems have let me down or other things when I've been hurting. How do I have a relationship to this place where it's going through changes? It's experiencing disability. What does that mean as a person who loves this place?

How do I show up and support that mutual survival? That's really the question I've been sitting with and something that I just feel so deeply about.

Melissa: Can you read us something?

Naomi: I actually have a really short piece from Sustaining Spirit. This is titled Monsoon Nourishment and it's from the Water Section within Sustaining Spirit.

Clouds pile on top of each other from behind the mountains

Slowly building expanding upwards,

Reaching up and then out across the sky

This is my favorite time of year in the desert

This unpredictable monsoon season

With the miserable humidity and soaring temperatures

And then sudden explosions of rain bringing cool relief

In the morning, I never imagined looking out towards the mountains

That there will be rain

Monsoon clouds build slowly

It's always the surprise when the bright blue desert sky is suddenly smothered

With dark clouds and heat becomes so unbearable that

All I can do is send urgent pleas to the clouds begging for rain

When rain comes, it's never on my schedule

One minute, I'm crabby and I cannot cool off

The next minute, rain is pouring down from the sky

Flooding the streets and washes

There's a lot of things in my life

Nourishment feels like it's all or nothing

Days and weeks of frustratingly willing words

Out of my body and heart are suddenly saturated

With great conversations and new tools

Never when I demand, never when I want

Nourishment comes in its own time

This teaches me something even more important

How to be patient and aware of when I have a choice to receive

Choice is such a decadent thing

When I have a choice, I like to savor it.

Rolling a piece of chocolate over my tongue,

Letting it melt and inhaling the flavor

I'm not sure if it's a North American thing or what

But I like to think I'm entitled to a choice

A choice about when I can receive nourishment, help, or attention

But in reality, I don't have a right to choose those things

Choices created either from having resources

Or from my own awareness of knowing what I need

Resources aren't something I can count on

Awareness is all I've got to access choice Awareness is a slow process of learning what it feels in my body, mind, and heart when I need something

I have to listen and learn a little bit at a time

One part of this process is to realize when the rain is coming down

When nourishment suddenly appears, I can make a choice to receive it

This means letting go of whatever I'm doing when nourishment is raining down on my head,

Purposely pausing to enjoy and soak it up,

Choosing to let go of what I thought I wanted my agenda in the moment

In order to have what I need

A random gift of nourishment

In the desert when the monsoon storm clouds

Unleashed hard unrelenting rain upon the sandy soil

Only so much can be absorbed

The wombs of the desert are dry washes that swell

And carry the overflowing abundance of nourishment down river to areas that are still dry

Part of becoming aware is learning to surrender to nourishment when it arrives

If I let go and allow myself to be filled,

I can carry this nourishment through me and out to others

I receive enough to share

Melissa: Can you tell me what you're planning to do with this fellowship?

Naomi: I'm so excited about it. I'm really excited to connect to other disabled creatives and to continue to work towards the projects that I have been working on. I think the really beautiful part of this fellowship is that we can do whatever we want with it, which is pretty amazing. It's like an award of like, "Here, we got you, we support you. We want to support, we want this work that you're already doing to succeed." I'm really looking forward to having it just support my work that I've been so diligent about over the last 10, 15 years.

Melissa: One of the things we're doing right now on the show is a series about play, and how we can bring play into our adult lives, and the ways that play has value but also is just part of the fullness of our humanity.

I'd love to hear from you about how you play and also one of the things that's been, I don't know, nagging at me a bit is so often when we talk about play, I have noticed a kind of abled muggled approach to it where like immediately we go to riding bikes and jump roping, and these very particular kinds of ableist notions of play that come from our own childhoods. I'd love to hear both what you do for play, but also how you think that we might be able to have a more inclusive definition and understanding of play.

Naomi: I love that point so much and I really appreciate it. Play is so funny because it's something that I can't not do. It's really integral to my work. I feel like I play a lot, especially through my visual art. It's always like an experiment, but I also think about play as like laying in bed and listening to records. I think that that's really an amazing way for me to expense some energy and do something that feels very playful.

I also really love learning about plants and a story comes to mind. A wash is a dry, mostly dry avenue for water, which the rest of the country would normally call a river, but it runs very sporadically with the rains, but things grow more in there because that's a channel where water exists. One time, I had seen a post on Milky Oats and I was driving past the wash in our neighborhood. I saw what I thought was Milky Oats so I made my partner pull over the car and got out. I was like in the wash, picking these weeds basically because I was very excited.

I was going to make a tincture, do something like wonderful with this gift that just happened to be there. My poor partner, cars are driving by and they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is so weird." They're rolling their eyes like, "Okay." I bring this stuff home and I try to make a tincture, then I try to use it and share it with friends and stuff. That stuff's really playful to me.

It's like these little gifts that we get that we can just take in and have some fun with, not take our lives so seriously, I think really oftentimes approaching life as a disabled person, as a crip has to integrate play. If we took everything seriously that worked or didn't work in our life, it's like we'd be miserable human beings. Play has to really be part of how we function.

Melissa: I love that. I try to play a lot. I probably as has been said to me since I was a child, I just play too much.

Naomi: Good for you. Yes. I love it.

Melissa: I am definitely you-play-too-much kind of person but I'm down for that. I'm very comfortable with that. Thank you so much for the time, for the conversation for reading and sharing your work. Naomi Ortiz, poet, writer, visual artist, and self-care, perhaps guru for activist, disability justice, climate action, and relationship with place. Thank you for joining The Takeaway.

Naomi: Thanks so much, Melissa.

 

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