Hard to Love

Meet Camille: The Artist, The Human, The Grief-Tender

Some conversations you plan, and some you just fall into. This one was the second kind.

In this episode, we sit down with Camille Sapara Barton, author of Tending Grief, and instead of going straight for the big ideas, we let ourselves get to know the human first. The artist. The person behind the work. We talk about how grief found its way into Camille's life and practice, what it means to make art out of loss, and how tending to what hurts can become a form of creativity rather than just endurance.

We touch on grief, yes, but gently, the way you would with someone you're just getting to know. What emerges is less a lecture and more an invitation: to see grief not as a problem to solve but as something to be with, to make room for, to let shape us. Camille reminds us that grief and aliveness aren't opposites, and that the most tender parts of us are often where the realest connection lives.

This is a conversation about being human out loud. About the courage it takes to feel things all the way through. And about why, even when it's hard, we keep choosing love and each other anyway.

Come sit with us.

Consider supporting Camilles work https://camillesaparabarton.com/

If this episode benefitted you consider giving a donation to our collective: https://give.socialgoodfund.org/seedingliberation

Whiteness was a trade. The trade was never grieved. And an ungrieved loss cannot imagine, it can only defend or destroy.

Quotes:

" No one was white before they came here, and becoming white cost people their own history. James Baldwin

“We need ritual because it is an expression of the fact that we recognize the difficulty of creating a different and special kind of community. A community that doesn’t have a ritual cannot exist. A corporate community is not a community. It’s a conglomeration of individuals in the service of an insatiable soulless entity.”  Malidoma Patrice Somé 

myisha t. hill, Heal Your Way Forward: The Co-Conspirator's Guide to an Antiracist Future - the guidepost of the Heal Your Way Forward Collective 

James Baldwin, "On Being White... and Other Lies," Essence (April 1984). The spine of the episode.

Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community (Swan/Raven, 1993; reissued by Penguin/Arkana, 1997

Sobonfu Somé, Falling Out of Grace: Meditations on Loss, Healing and Wisdom (North Bay Books, 2003)

Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1995), and Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks (1998). Whiteness as an acquisition, with dates.

David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (1991). What the trade paid.

Thandeka, Learning to Be White (1999). How the trade is transmitted inside families.

Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands (2017). The untransformed trauma European peoples carried here before they carried it out on others.

adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy (2017), and Imarisha & brown, Octavia's Brood (2015). Imagination as political capacity, which is your segment 5 in reverse.

If this episode benefitted you consider giving a donation to our collective: https://give.socialgoodfund.org/seedingliberation

What does it actually take to not walk away? myisha and Jen talk about the difference between rupture and rejection, and the quiet, unglamorous choice to turn back toward someone instead of away. 

They get into the stories we tell ourselves when we want to leave, the difference between a boundary and a wall, and what staying asks of our nervous systems. A conversation for anyone who's ever loved someone and wanted to run at the same time.

"Relationships are treated like Dixie cups. They are the same. They are disposable. If it does not work, drop it, throw it away, get another." — bell hooks

If this episode benefitted you consider giving a donation to our collective: https://give.socialgoodfund.org/seedingliberation

We open the season with the premise the whole show is built on: none of us is easy to love, all the time. In this first conversation, myisha and Jen get honest about the ways we guard our softest parts, push people away right when we most want to be held, and mistake self-protection for strength. This isn't a love-is-a-feeling episode. It's the case that love is a practice you return to, on purpose, even when it's hard. Come meet your hosts and the heart of Hard to Love.

Consider donation to the HYWF Collective here

If this episode benefitted you consider giving a donation to our collective: https://give.socialgoodfund.org/seedingliberation