Living Well
Living Well
Every Fruit Has Its Season - Season 1 Finale w. Ezi Odozor
In this last episode of Season 1, Ezi bids goodbye to the podcast and shares her thoughts on the question so central to this show and her own work: What does it mean to live and be well?
As with all things, Ezi does it her way, with a lovely little bonus as she says bye, for now.
What does it mean to live and to be well? It's a question I created for the work I want to explore and it's one that I brought into the space of the Well Being Collective. I've had the pleasure of hosting many people on the show, who have explored that question from their point of view, and who have given us much to think about over the last few episodes. What does it mean, to live and to be well? There isn't. And there shouldn't be, in my view, a single answer. We are not uniform beings. We are not uniform in our experiences. Wellness has no standard, whatever they may say, whoever they may be. For some, it is by all contemporary definitions an impossibility, due to the realities of their lives. The chronically ill will not get well soon, in the ways that we often issue that well wishing. That does not mean that their lives are not fully lived or deserving of dignity. So, to me, asking the question, "what does it mean to live and to be well", is about being unrelenting about the fact that we all deserve dignity, and that wellness is communally, and situationally, determined. It is, for me, about thriving
social worlds:the worlds we create, and live in, through our relations with each other and the systems that we uphold or dismantle. It is, for me, about thriving social worlds as much as, and perhaps as precursor to, any individual sense of well being. When I think about wellness, I think about my Blackness, I think about my fatness, I think about my work life, I think about my relationships, and I think about my love of boxing and lifting weights. But I also think about the scourge of living in a society that so readily and ubiquitously condemns bodies like mine, fat and Black and woman, and specifically, as a fat, Black woman. I also think about bodies
deemed worse than mine:fatter, Blacker, Differently-abled, Trans and Gender Nonconforming. I personally think that to label those things worse or bad is rubbish. More than rubbish, it is a stain on our collective being. Imagine thinking someone is less than human, less than deserving, because of their very human way of being. Anti-fat bias is not wellness. Transphobia [irritated sound] is not wellness. Ableism is not wellness. Racism is not wellness. When I think about wellness, I think about the challenges of working and schooling in a predominantly white institution that has always treated me and people like me as a casual inconvenience or, at best, a
case for exceptionality:proof that our kind can be good for something, sometimes. Wellness is about food justice. It is about our built environment. It is about our artistic expression. It is about racial justice. It is about our Indigeneities, our sovereignty. It is about fat liberation. It is about accessibility in the ways seen and unseen. It is about gender diversity. It is about ALL of that, and so much more. For me, wellness is about
being able to be yourself:a self that lives in dignity AND that affords dignity to others, in a society predicated on equity and justice for all. Not through charity, but through systems and ways of being. Thus, wellness exists and thrives in a society that has thrown off, and continues to close the door on, white supremacy. To me, that is the work of wellness. When I think about wellness, and it's converse on wellness, if you will, I think about all the things that raise me up, and all of the things that bury the shiniest parts of me; that try to anyway and that sometimes succeed. When I think about wellness, I know what the word is loaded, lied about, hoped for. When I think about wellness, I think about what is possible as much as I think about what has not been. What does it mean to live and to be well? It means to do and do again, that would Gives you cause not only to float but to swim. To kick your toes in the water and feel the sun on your skin and shoot up from the waves and tickle the warmest parts of the sky and laugh in your favorite colour *chuckles*. To live and to be well is, to me, to do what makes you smile. Not from your lips but from the inside place that feels warm when you laugh, full when you cry, and boundless when you feel loved. To live and to be well, to me, is to embrace the glorious in the moments when it comes and the sadness in the place where sadness is necessary, AND to have people in your life who will hold you in either time, and in all the ones in-between. And so I leave you, and this season of Living Well, with this final thought. Come. Come to me in my hiding place. Do not root me out. Let me shine and bow in my little ways. Sit and sip me in whatever flavor drink what I have offered without poison. A fruit is not sweet in every season. But in its season, taste and see! Hold me up under sunlight, and moonlight, and no light at all. Hold me, for I am me whether seed, or bud, or flower or wilted thing. When I asked what you see ask who I am, to me. That is the mirror always! Come to me in my hiding place and sit. Wait on me, and I on you For every fruit every season. Every fruit is it season....