Bread and roses
I’ve long been interested in the idea of delight as something we need to embrace if we are to create the world that we want. When I was a kid I spent a lot of time at anti-war protests with my mum and I remember at one point deciding that I wanted to be a butterfly dancer on stilts so that I could get on the front page of the paper as a positive news story. Even at six, I remember caring deeply and passionately about the pain war was causing in parts of the world, and yet still as a kid I wanted the joy that existed to also be seen.
There has been a lot of recognition this year that while we’re all facing the same storm of covid, our boats are different, and it feels wrong for so many of us to celebrate the summer holidays while others are sick, dead, out of work, or working so hard on the frontlines.
For those of us worried about the future and lucky enough to get to spend significant time working to create one where people and planet come first, I think it can be hard to feel ok about things like having fun, resting and finding joy when there is so much work to be done and so much injustice to be addressed.
Yet if we don’t do this work of creating the world we want in a way that makes space for the delight and the joy already in the world that we have, then what is the point? While anarchist Emma Goldman is often misquoted as saying, “If there is no dancing it is not my revolution,” her sentiment captures the importance of a revolution where everybody has a “right to beautiful, radiant things”. Indeed surely, these beautiful radiant things are why we do the work we do.
Years ago, I was a Sustainability Officer at the Australian National University. It was my job to convince staff and students to reduce their environmental impact. It was very much a time when effort was focused on individual behaviour and, without meaning to, on a model of deprivation (CUT your paper use, REDUCE your travel options, SHORTEN your showers). And it was hard. It felt like I was fighting for big important change but the tools for the job were shame and increasing individualisation of problems that were increasingly enormous. It was hard, a bit exhausting and often depressing.
I attended a conference on sustainability. And among the sessions on how to change university policies on dual flush toilets, or legal frameworks for composting systems, I found myself listening to a woman talking about delight. And in many ways her presentation changed the course of my life.
She stood up and said: “We can change by delight.”
Photo by Source Catering
She talked about how she used to be an angry activist and how she’d go to parties and yell at people eating meat, angrily attempting to shame them into different behaviour. She said, “people stopped inviting me to parties! And I love parties!” So she started making cakes. Beautiful cakes made of environmentally-friendly in season ingredients, beautifully presented and totally delicious and of course the party invitations returned.
But her story didn’t stop here. She took this model and ran with it, offering cooking courses for dairy farmers’ wives who wanted to get more vegetables into their children’s diets. As a result of cooking and talking and celebrating good food, she said that nine out of the ten women went back to their farms and made changes to their farming practices to ensure greater sustainability.
She said, “We can change by delight.”
For me, this was a lightbulb moment. I went back to the depressed office and told my boss I was throwing my work plan out the window and was going to run a sustainability festival. The result was Celebrate Sustainability Day, a day-long festival that began with an early morning free breakfast of pancakes for cyclists and ended with a movie screening and dinner made from the community garden. And in between we had a festival of positive sustainability stalls. Anyone doing any good sustainability work in the community was invited to show off. The only rule was that this was a day to celebrate success, not to fight against what we had not yet won.
And the result? Our tired team was inundated by student volunteers who offered to help on the spot or followed up the next day wanting to volunteer. We felt energised. From a mindset of battle, deprivation and shame we’d shown that joy and fun and success were actually possible and powerful, even within the hard work that had yet to be done. We’d brought some kind of metaphorical dancing to the frightening space of tackling climate change and sustainability.
2020 has been a year of fright. It began during the summer bushfire crisis as thousands of people were evacuated, precious people; land and wildlife were lost, and smoke filled our cities and our bodies. And then again with covid. Rather than being evacuated people were locked in. More lives were lost. Livelihoods were lost. The lucky ones had to navigate the welfare system while the unlucky ones were denied access to this common form of care. We’ve been afraid for our health, frightened of being alone and far from those we love. We’ve been stressed by uncertainty and deeply worried for those in other countries facing a far more extreme covid situation.
We've grappled with the legacy of colonisation and the ugliness of racism — both here and overseas.
The US election then brought its own batch of stress and anxiety.
Some of us have been far more affected than others, but all of us have been touched.
How, in this context, can we even begin to think about revelling in delight?
In his poem, A Brief for the Defense, Jack Gilbert writes:
If we deny our happiness, resist satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
Dare we take this risk? Personally, I think we have no choice.
2021 promises, if nothing else, to be different to 2020. The midnight tick of the clock is a symbolic moment for us to reset, reflect and rethink how we face the year — and how we face it with the skills and insights we’ve worked hard to gain in 2020.
We know that we will need to be organised and work together as we push back against activities that put profits and power ahead of people and planet. Delight of course, is only one ingredient, but one we often forget to bake into our work. So what would it mean for us to end 2020 and begin 2021 cultivating delight, knowing that we’re also facing another year of virus, another year of climate impacts, another year of reckoning with the impacts of racism and colonisation?
We’ve long known as people that we need more than food and shelter for a good life. We need celebration, community and purpose.
Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash
The end of the year and the coming of Christmas are often times when, regardless of our religious or spiritual beliefs, many of us in Australia gather to celebrate our families and communities. We reconnect, we reflect and we step outside of normal routines to be together.
Covid has made end of year celebrations challenging, particularly for organisations and networks who are geographically dispersed. And yet, the need to get together is still strong. Recently I was at an online end of year gathering which included speeches, socialising, awards and performances of poetry and song. It was surreal to be gathered with a bunch of other women, over Zoom, looking into someone’s living room as she played the piano and sang to us. I wanted to cry at this mix of old school musical connection and 2020 digital distance cobbled together with love and creativity.
Part of what moved me was the song that we were singing. A song sung by women over the last hundred or so years calling for more than basic survival, but the means to live a good life; singing to the rights of working women to also include access to art and beauty and a richness beyond mere bread. This song is called Bread and Roses and includes the lyrics “Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.”
The term ‘bread and roses’ was first used by Helen Todd, an American suffragist and workers’ rights activist, when she said in 1910:
“Not at once; but woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life's Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.”
I love this song because it reminds me that while we need a safe climate and secure housing and access to healthcare, we also need lives full of meaning, and beauty and purpose. We need what these women were fighting for, along with the basics of survival. We need dignity. We need, as feminist and unionist Rose Schneiderman said, “life, and the sun and music and art.”
When we developed the vision of Australia reMADE, people from all across the country talked about the lively communities they wanted to live in. The nine pillars of the vision capture this desire: “We love our startling wildlife and awe-inspiring vistas… Cultural and creative work are valued and we fund them well… We live full and meaningful lives in and out of the workplace… Our communities are places of music, fun and playfulness, kindness and generosity… Artists, musicians and storytellers have pride of place in our culture: we relish the joy, insight and meaning they bring to our lives…. And… We have time. Time to care and be cared for. Time to enjoy our families and each other, to savour this beautiful earth, to be creative and to rest.”
Indeed the whole point of the vision was to give voice to what we wanted, the delightful reality we want to celebrate, protect and create for people and planet where everyone and every living thing is valued.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
And this year as I’ve listened to people talk about the importance of the public good, asking them what they want for themselves and their communities, I’ve heard time and time again that once basic needs of housing, health and work are met, they want community, participation and belonging. They want joy. They want basic needs met so that they can reach out fearlessly to the delight of simply being together, enjoying each other; enjoying art and culture and connecting with place. I haven’t heard cries for jewel-encrusted bathtubs, or power, or glory; rather for time and space and safety to participate and meaningfully belong.
Bread is important, and roses too. But not just because it fulfills individual needs. As the woman at the conference showed with her delicious cakes, and as I found with the creation of Celebrate Sustainability Day, the delight of roses brings us together in powerful ways. As Audre Lorde writes in A Burst of Light, “Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.”
Singing together, eating together, celebrating together — these activities create unity physically and emotionally. With that unity comes the courage, strength and ability for us to do the hard work of creating the world we want.
Joy itself is an important act of resistance. As Ingrid Fetell Lee writes:
“Joy is a sign of vibrant life, of thriving. It is one of the things that makes us truly human. So depriving a group of people of joy, whether through an outright ban, or the denigration or shaming of their sources of pleasure, or through economic means, is a method of dehumanization. Reclaiming those sources of joy is a way to refuse to be dehumanized, to reassert our vitality.”
2021 is not necessarily going to be an easy year. We know this. We know that we’re facing active resistance and systemic barriers to the world we want.
But we’re not facing it without insights or existing strengths — without good and beautiful people to stand with and good and beautiful things to stand for. We know what needs to be done and we know that we must all be in this together. And to take on the systems change needed, to face the coming decade with energy and capacity, we’re going to need to bring delight, rather than fright, to the fight.
Let’s use the pause that many of us get over the summer holiday break to flex those muscles of joy, of community, of connection; and revel in the time we take to thrill in the reality of being alive on this beautiful planet. This is not just about having a delightful rest and switch off over summer. This is about empowering ourselves for all of 2021, and the years to come. After all, this is why we do the work that we do: for the bread (or cake if you prefer), and for the roses.
DR MILLIE ROONEY
Millie is the National Coordinator for Australia reMADE. Millie has a qualitative research background and has spoken in-depth with hundreds of Australian's about their lives, communities and dreams. She has worked in and around universities for over a decade building student capacity and enthusiasm for tackling wicked problems. Millie is also a carer for her family and community and is passionate about acknowledging this work as a valid, valuable and legitimate use of her time.
Other blogs by millie: From trepidation to transformation: democracy, indi- style
Making space for utopia: the power of knowing and saying what you’re for
Listening in: using the election results to create a better Australia
