that we describe the heart as having 'strings', because we can feel them pulling in times of grief and overwhelm.

This week has us revisiting the difference between urgency and speed that we explored last July in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and still too many - always too many - more. It seems strange to need a reminder from yourself, but that is what we are seeking in a time of overwhelming loss. The pull between the joys and mundanity of daily life, and the monumental weight of how many systems need to change and how many problems need solving, simply disorients us. 

In my dizziness, today, I thought of the idea of a 'calling'. It bears resemblance to the concepts of 'calling out' and 'calling in' (the difference between them nicely illuminated in this resource from Seed the Way) but is ultimately about your individual, personal pull - the voice you hear or experience somewhere in your physical body, a magnetism toward something that you want to do.

Last week, while listening to the last available episode of Treacherous Waters, Ashtin Berry and Maggie Campbell reminded me that the idea of sitting down and evaluating what your own personal morals are can still feel revolutionary. The fact is, we live in a society of distractions, and those distractions lead us toward complacency. They are also compounded by social and cultural learning that tends to turn us away from sitting with ourselves, but - ironically - toward self-interest.

But if 'self-interest' is defined as 'concern for one's own advantage and well-being', then what if we were to focus less on advantage and more on well-being? The evolution of intersectionality, as coined by professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, tells us that the well-being of one is the well-being of others. This is a principle that helped us to found GFJ in the first place: a desire for a certain kind of job, a desire for a certain path forward, a place to meet on common ground (food) and know that we were not alone there. A belief that if we felt a calling, we could find a way to answer it. 

The thing about connecting with your calling is that it takes time and space to do so, and then it takes a lot of hard work and resources to continually move toward it. This is hard to reconcile with one of the signature aspects of a 'calling' in our current culture: the feeling of urgency. The great thing about listening up for what matters most to you is that it will speak, loud and clear. But you may not be able to respond to it with the same urgency. There may still be many questions and barriers.

We are learning, over the years, to be okay with a slow response to an urgent call. In days that can feel panicked with everyday requests for one's time and energy, consider feeding your calling with one small act of kindness toward yourself or others. A sustained response ultimately has more magnitude than an immediate one. Tomorrow may be quieter, and more clear, but even if it is not, we'll still be listening.
 

Yours in food justice,

Dor + Tay

photo by Azra Sadr for GFJ Stories