.362 | to Sara Lee Coffey, from YTSES

Sara,

You collaborate and create with me: cooking, collage, clothing swaps, community building, supporting Scrabble Cat, bringing me into your work. You encourage my schemes and make actionable plans with me. You share your dreams, processes and stories with me and empathize with mine. You do cool and impressive things, self-employed and volunteer creative-professional things. You are still one of the most relatable and accepting people. You are both talented and down-to-earth, both strong and vulnerable, both values-driven and yet you don’t take life too seriously. I feel trust and comfort around you, and freedom to be myself. You get my idiosyncrasies (including my passion for the many flavors of repurposing, redistributing, and organizing things), and you’ve got an open mind and a sense of self.

You validate what I do, you show up for liberation, learning, and local community action, and you called me to continue taking steps on my anti-racist journey as a white person. You put so much effort, time, thought, cooking and love into cultivating intentional community with Open House. Even though that communal identity is mostly a thing of the past, its consequences - friendships, safety, delicious dinners, connections, and growth - still resonate with me, and I’m sure with many others. I hear you, and I felt for you when you shared that not many of the folks that you nurtured through the years still nurture you back. And you keep moving forward, moving house, not dwelling on but building on the past, working on the future you want, knowing that health and healing are constant processes and not an end, grieving and growing, giving back to yourself.

Thank you for being you. Thank you for being my friend. I am so grateful to have you in my life. Let’s cook and make collage again soon.