Fighting Without Burning Out

A Black Feminist Ethic of Sustainable Struggle

I learned how to live by watching the sky change colors.

When I was a child, my grandmother and I would sit on her porch in Augusta, Georgia, as the sun lowered itself into evening. The light softened into peach-gold, warm and deliberate, as if the day were rocking itself to sleep. We rocked with it, our chairs moving in the same slow rhythm the tide uses on coastal shores.

She taught me about time on that porch. Not clock time. Not productivity time. The kind of time that listens to the body and the land.

We did not speak much. We did not need to. The air carried its own language. Cicadas humming. The wood of the porch settling. A breeze moving through pine and magnolia.

In that stillness, I learned my first lesson of care: presence is a form of protection.

If I came to her overwhelmed, she did not ask for explanations. She did not ask what I had failed to manage. She simply said, Come be still with me.

I know now those words were not casual. They were instruction. They were inheritance. They were pedagogy.

The porch was not only a place to sit. It was a classroom. It was where I learned how to stay human in a world that teaches us to outrun ourselves.