The Garden Salon

I’ve hatched a new baby for the sleepy heads, freedom dreamers, and lover makers!

Rest as resistance was a gift given to me in 2018. A woman I adore shared the Nap Ministry with me; though I’d been following the Instagram account, I had not really taken in the message until she told me about a nap she took.

The scene she painted was beautiful. An altar to Black women’s rest was built in Philadelphia and Black women were invited/allowed to rest. Simple. Profound. This scene affirmed thoughts I’d felt in my heart: if Black women just stopped laboring en masse, for even 6 hours so many systems that are destroying us would come to a halt.

Tricia Hersey, the founder of The Nap Ministry, gave me the language and a model of how relentless we should be about resting to defy white supremacist, capitalist torture, but most importantly to rest. Period.

I love that for us. Let’s wreck capitalism by not doing shit. It sound so exciting.

Practicing rest has taught me so much about my trauma and conditioning. This post isn’t about those lessons, but know this – I used to get sleep paralysis every time I tried to nap from my tween years well into my late twenties. Deep guilt, shame and anxiety caused my mind to try to scare me awake, just because I wanted to sleep.

How and why the fuck? A story for another day.

This post is a support I created for your rest resistance practice. I made something for you.

Leftist Lullaby is a narrated audio experience of speculative fiction/prediction bedtime stories for freedom oriented sleepyheads.

This project is inspired by the work I’ve done as a game master in Dungeons and Dragons, engaging with play and world building to explore possibilities, history, now, and the future.

I’m thrilled to be announcing this podcast, because we really need it. We could all use deeper and better sleep. While I am not promising the podcast will fix your insomnia, I am proposing what could happen. Speculatin’.

Many of us dream of or wish for a better world. How often do we visualize it, .hear it, taste it, feel it? When we get settled down for a nap or bed, do we picture this place or do we start anticipating what may be hard about tomorrow? Or what was fucked up about yesterday and the last 32 years?

This podcast offers any listener a thirty-ish minute visualization on the life of free people, how they play, work, live, and grow together.

Designed to soothe the minds of those of us, especially us who refuse to ignore the horror of the systems we live in, the Leftist Lullaby is an offering to engage in dreaming for leisure and revolution.

I don’t subscribe to getting free as a struggle. I would love if more of us dropped that language, I think it’s damning. I think freedom is rooted in play, rest, and growing. The things that nourish us in a world trying to kill us are liberation.

You can find Leftist Lullaby on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and Youtube right now.

(I think episode one is a little too fast (my bad) I have taken this note however and previous episodes will be better paced!)

I love you, get really good rest. Commit to it.