People of listserve, what a beautiful day to be writing to you. And what beautiful people you are.
I’ve been thinking about why it is that your email each day means so much to me. The best I’ve come up with is that back in the old days, before tweets and tags and status updates, we’d have had a lot more opportunities to strike up conversation with each other. You know, face to face. You’d have told me your yarn, I’d have shared mine.
I feel like the Listserve is the closest we get to that now – an unmediated insight into each other’s lives.
Keep on sharing. I like hearing you tell me your ideas and experiences, your adventures, victories and defeats, your hopes and despairs, weaving our collective story.
The stories we tell ourselves are important. As individuals, as communities, as societies. How and who we want to be matters. This weekend just gone, hundreds of thousands of people around the world took to the streets to tell the story of our ability to shape a better future. I took part in London. People from all walks of life, marching together against climate change. I often feel powerless reading the newspaper and watching the news. But walking together with others, knowing there were multitudes of other people out there sharing the same vision, made me feel powerful individually and to believe in our power collectively.
Too often we’re taught that we have to accept the world as it is. That the structures and systems of our society, our economy, our politics are unchangeable.
This is not so. Apart from the laws of physics, we create just about everything else. Our world can be the world that we want it to be. It’s time to stop being afraid.
On which note.
Here where I live, in London, BP sponsor the Tate Gallery, one of the UK’s best known art institutions. The Tate Gallery has refused to reveal how much exactly they receive from BP (anything to do with an ex-CEO of BP chair the Tate’s Board of Trustees?) but every day the Tate scrubs BP’s public image clean, soiling the integrity of the arts for a negligible amount of money. While BP feed our addiction to fossil fuels and fuel the climate crisis.
But seeing nearly a million people march, I know it won’t be long until oil companies are obsolete. A blip on history, as archaic as the fossil fuels they depend on.
Were you on the march? Drop me a line and say hi. Next time maybe we can march together.
Thanks to Nic for introducing me to the Listserve (even if he doesn't read it any more) and being my best friend.
Neva
[email protected]
London, UK