(Oh, how I like walking with you, BFP.)

A few years ago I wrote an essay about Ladyfest for an anthology by and about “the next feminist generation.” I titled my piece “Making Space for Movement, DIY-Lady Style.” Then, sometime after I signed off on edits, a copy editor or proofreader or someone added a direct article to change the title to “Making Space for the Movement, DIY-Lady Style.” I didn’t see that the till the book came out, and so I just had to live with it. But it made me sad, because I really meant that thing about movement-without-an-article. It wasn’t just a nerdy bit of grammar play, it was meant to say: what Ladyfest and other social-justice projects, in their best forms, are doing isn’t creating a single event or representing a single movement. Instead, they’re making all kinds of space in which movement (plural, different) can occur; they’re parts of a continuous process in which people collaborate in moving, together, for justice, for community, for freedom, for …

I agree with BFP that “a movement” or “the movement” tends to refer to something “immediate,” goal-oriented, and insular. Whereas movement—action—is a process: continuous, fluid, happening all over the place and in many different ways, all at once. It is not “a” or “the” movement that will make a world that’s sustainable, a world free from violence. It’s change- and justice-oriented movement, different and multiple and constant, that is makingthat world. It’s “long-term,” as BFP has said, and it’s also present. It’s happening always, now.

And we’re all doing it in different ways.

BFP describes herself as the person who’s often jumped ship when the movement-making got hard or scary or too much. Who I have been in the past (just ask anyone I worked with on Ladyfest LA or the radio show Feminist Magazine) is the person who insisted that people need to show up at every meeting, need to put in more time, need to step up their commitment, etc., etc., etc., because we have SERIOUS WORK TO DO. And I’ve been the person who feels like all the work is being dumped on me because everyone knows I can’t see it not get done and I haven’t spoken up about my limits. I’ve also been the person who keeps pushing hard in a futile situation instead of knowing when it might be time to gracefully move in a new direction, make movement in some other place, in some other way.

After sometimes tough but transformative organizing experiences with Ladyfest and Feminist Magazine (and before that a peace lobby, and etc.), I realized that demanding that other people work-work-work just like I was work-work-working simply wasn’t going to, uh, work. Yeah, I am a hard worker who likes the feeling of getting things done, and I love putting that effort toward social justice (among other things). But I also need balance, and breaks—and so does everyone else. Social-justice work that feels like a job or a chore, that replicates dominant (capitalist) culture’s ideas around “efficiency” and “productivity”– and/or hierarchy, discipline, and the like–is not liberatory work. Our process needs to reflect the kinds of worlds we’re collaborating to create.

Yet I bristled a little, felt some fear creep in, when I read BFP’s words down there about how I had talked about commitment. “But I wasn’t talking about a ‘job’!” I wanted to clarify. And not all work is capitalism-reifying work. Certainly the projects I was talking about are not economically profitable (and profit is pretty much the limit of capitalism’s concerns), and certainly there is work and there are ways to define work outside dominant conceptions of it. I got sidetracked from all the other amazing things BFP said in her post by my own defensiveness and fear around that one point (O f*ck! Why’d I go there? We’re gonna publish this and no one’s ever gonna respect a make/shift deadline again! My schedule’s going to be hell!), and then I recognized the fear, tried to let it go, and realized what I really wanted to say in response.

One of the many ways we’re all different in the world is in how we show love. Some of us show love through acts of service, some of us through physical affection, some of us through kind words … most of us through a combination of things. As someone who has often struggled to articulate that there are limits to my capacity, to say “no” and speak up for my needs while being attentive to others’, one thing that’s important for me to ask of people I’m loving and collaborating with is, how are you showing that you respect my time and my boundaries? When I’m working with BFP, I am trying to show her that I respect that calendars and detailed plans aren’t her thing, and I am happy to do that because she’s told me clearly that that’s the deal, and I’ve accepted it—and I can count on her coming through, in her ways, if I bend in the ways she’s asked me to – nudging her sometimes, being patient with her about this thing. But if she hadn’t been clear with me, and if I couldn’t count on her to come through if I bent in the way we’ve agreed, where would be her commitment to and willingness to bend a bit toward me and our collaboration?

I think the point is not to replace dominant culture’s rigid, hierarchical boundaries (and disciplinarian consequences for broken boundaries) with no boundaries or accountability whatsoever, but rather with flexible, collaboratively developed boundaries. Our commitments to each other do matter, I think, whether they are in the form of a schedule on a collaborative project or a promise not to hold too fiercely to that project’s deadlines if one of the participants gets sick or sinks into depression or has to handle unexpected an family emergency or just needs some more time this week. We do need to be accountable and to hold each other accountable … we just need to do it in ways that are more flexible, collaborative, horizontal, and creative than the ways we’re used to from jobs, school, and the like — community-determined ways, to riff on BFP’s riff on Paula Rojas’s thoughts on creating community-driven structures.

I couldn’t have said that five years ago, when I was convinced that the reason the Left is so weak is people’s “flakiness,” lack of commitment, unwillingness to dig in and do the hard work of movement-making. I’ve gone through a few cycles now of organizing, getting burnt out on organizing, taking some space to heal and rejuvenate, and diving back in. And I’ve learned a few things, and changed in the process of collaboratively working for change. Sticking it out, organizing with lots of different people on lots of different projects, has helped me break out of some of my earlier ways of seeing–rigidities, norms I’d internalized from a lifetime in Type A cultures (at home, at school, etc.).

Instead of staying in that rut, I’ve learned and grown a lot in the continuous process that is making movement – on different projects, in different groups. So (I hope) I’m never again gonna lecture a co-organizer about how she needs to put in as much time as I’m putting in. What I am gonna do is (well, first, check myself by remembering how privilege informs who has what kind of free time for volunteer work, and also how white-supremacist, capitalist, and other specific cultures are built on certain narrow notions of work, etc., and then) figure out whether, and if so how, our movement-making habits can complement each other. And if it feels like we really happen not to be the best collaborators, together we’ve got to figure out how to work around that the best we can, while focusing our respective energies on collaborations that do work well. Cuz any given co-organizer and I don’t need to drain each other because of our differences. We need to figure out where and how we can make movement together, and also where we (and movements) might be better off if we each worked with other people. That’s okay. Again, part of the process.

BFP is someone I’m excitedly choosing to collaborate with for a whole slew of reasons. I believe we can make something together, and I’m excited to do it, in real time, in conversation with all of you reading and commenting.

So what are we doing here, with this collaboration? In what way are we attempting to make movement together in this space (among all the other ways we are each making movement)?

Our initial conversations about a collaboration, as we’ve mentioned, envisioned this project as having to do with, first, feminism and race, and then, radical media. We bounced ideas around on the phone, in a face-to-face meeting at last year’s AMC, via e-mail, and in posts at a private blog. We came up with a whole concept for a zine about radical media. Time passed between all these conversations. We hadn’t done anything new relating to the zine since our summer meeting, and now it was winter.Should we get on the phone to brainstorm about the project? Yeah, let’s get on the phone.

It was another week-ish before we could both be on the phone at the same time, and then there we were talking about our thoughts and feelings about the still-nascent collaboration. BFP talked about how her focus right now is on health and bodies, and the work she’s been doing about the outdoors and movement, and she wondered, knowing I’m into being outside and exercising, if I thought there might be a way to take this collaboration in that direction. I loved the idea. And I thought back to the thing BFP had said to me about how we might collaboratively write an introduction to our as-yet unwritten zine about actively decentered media: “If we’re going to walk together, first we have to agree that we’re walking in the same direction.” We’d been talking about movement, in different ways, for a long time.

I mentioned a self-identified “slow blogger” I’d heard about who posts very occasionally (by blog standards), and who ties her posts to walks. Once a week or once a month or whatever it is, she takes a walk, and then she blogs about her walking reflections. Of course she’s part of a long tradition of literary walkers, and I wondered if there was a way for me and BFP to do something like this with social justice in mind.

We decided to start a blog-based collaboration that considered movement, and public space outdoors, from a politicized perspective. We would each post every other week, and our writing would be related to offline walking that we would each do.

We needed a name for the project, one that reflected our desire to make this a collaboration centered around “walking” without shoring up ableist or otherwise narrow definitions of that term. The word walking, Webster’s tells me, comes from the Old English “to roll, toss, journey about.” Among its contemporary definitions are to “roam, wander” and “to pursue a course of action or way of life.” Even within the limited realm of the language we both happen to primarily write in, walking is a lot more than moving straight ahead, erect on two feet. We want to use this space to walk sometimes together, and sometimes divergently, in a collaborative pursuit of new ways of moving in the world—new ways of locating our bodies outdoors, new ways of understanding or actively using our movement through public space in a social-justice context, new ways of making movement and through that (re)making our worlds.

For the rest of this series, see here.