The Garden Salon

Taking our art into our hands can save the world.

I disagree that this is a rise of fascism.

Imagine if I had been putting dog shit under your dinner table for 249 years. One day, I decide to start put it on top of the dinner table instead, would you call that a rise in dog shit? The terrorism that is the United States is out in the wide open (it has always been if you are Black).

Overt terror on more of the privileged population being considered an emergency now is still an exercise of privilege and worse; this attitude is a display of the disregard for the most marginalized, and what we have survived.

The United States exists to violate the dignity of Indigenous people everywhere, Black people everywhere, poor people everywhere and the Land. None of the systems are broken, this place is meant to break us all.

We aren’t finished though, we are still here and there will be life. What matters most is what we do with this life. The antidote to a destructive, hateful, fear-based system is creativity.

The world needs the Garden Salon. Any salon or writing circle, journal pages, meditation minutes. When I am creating, I free myself. When you are creating, you free yourself. When we are the medicine we’ve been looking for, liberation is real.

I created the Garden Salon to honor African American and Lesbian community building practices. The salon is a space to come together share ideas, feelings, analysis on the world around us and our selves. What I’ve learned is that the salon culture goes back even deeper to village dynamics of our ancient ancestors.

White supremacy preaches and pushes this idea of “modernity”. Which is what? In many ways it is a violent severing of our human selves from the non-human life we rely on. Not only to live in the form of resources like food and water, but also from whom we learn. Convenience at the cost of our connection to each other and our animal, plant, fungal, microbial, and chemical relatives. For what? To make and keep us weak, exhausted, and desperate for answers that replicate the terror dynamics of the modern world. All the while we are our own medicine, when we are making.

Make art.

Make stories.

Make love.

Make memories.

Make connection.

Make pottery.

Make jewelry.

To make is more powerful than to destroy. To adorn our existence with poetry, something dazzling, to make living beautiful as an outward manifestation of the light we are within. The Garden Salon invites you to make as practice, meditation, and medicine.

In the writing sessions, we sit with a prompt with no pressure to perform. We create something that has never existed before. Is this not divinity in action? What has the government made for you and those you love lately? To complete the writing sessions, we finish on discussing the process. Reflecting on the writing itself, the prompt, what was uncovered or beginning to reveal itself. We lean in to what we have allowed ourselves to be curious about.

Capitalism will fail you. Your creativity will not. Lying politicians will sell you out and prey on our children. Your creativity will not.

The United States weilds it’s power by keeping us afraid. Fear of living/ dying on the street(again) or winding up in jail, being hated for not having what you can’t afford. Art is the antidote to this destitution.

When you create with no expectation to produce or impress an audience, you allow yourself to tap in to something deeper than the paradigms an unsustainable empire has offered. When you create freely and share your findings you spread the medicne.

We need you giving your art a chance, ritual space, an altar in any capacity. The Garden Salon is rich soil in which your seeds are welcome.

Check out the offerings here.