The politics of "slowness" and engaging "the slow work" amidst urgency, ft. Abby Reyes

How do we tap into a deeper current of change?

“The times are urgent; let us slow down.”

This is a quote from my interview with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe from a few years ago that has really stayed with me since. The paradox but also the profound truth, of needing to slow down amidst times of urgency… really spoke to me.

But I’d like to unravel the meaning of “slowness” more in this newsletter. Because I sense that there has been a growing trend of a sort of de-politicized, individualistic “slow living” that is untethered to anything larger than itself.

Reactivity vs. responsiveness

In my latest interview with the author of Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice, Abby Reyes invites us to engage “the slow work” amidst urgency, amidst crises.

For Abby, this potent lesson came after years of navigating grief while demanding justice and accountability from Big Oil — for the 1999 murders in Colombia of her partner, Terence Unity Freitas, along with two Indigenous activists, Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa (Menominee) and Laheʻenaʻe Gay (Kānaka Maoli). The tragedy took place after the trio had just left U’wa territory where they were visiting to support the U’wa people’s Indigenous education efforts.

One of our past alchemize participants had asked me about the difference between reactivity versus responsiveness. I loved the nuance that the question asked for and posed this as a prompt to Abby.

As Abby reads from her book:

“Back in 1999, which is when the murders took place, many of us were still learning how to move in relation to ‘the slow work.’

The cultural norms and protocols that informed mainstream international environmentalism did not match the depth called for by the U’wa.

We said ‘Yes’ without comprehending that the U’wa communities asked more of us than reactivity. Yes, there was an urgent threat. But there was more. […] We did not yet comprehend that to walk alongside Pueblo U’wa as they requested could mean changing the ways we walked.

Terence foresaw this and sought more than a shift from the anti-oil campaign to a community-driven development agenda. He sought more than a shift in our ways of seeing. He sought a shift in our ways of being.”

Re-politicizing “slowness”

I remember asking Bayo about his invitation for us to “slow down”: Is it only people with the privilege of having more time who would able to do so in the way he invokes?

He told me that years ago, a German brother of his wrote to him sharing about his experimentation to slow down — that he went back to work and tried to do everything more slowly. And he said “it wasn’t working” for him.

So Bayo elaborates:

“Slowing down is not a function of speed. It's not, ‘let's take a break’, ‘let's go on vacation’, ‘let's leave it all behind.’ It's none of that. Slowing down is a function of deepening awareness, noticing the others in the room.

For my book, These Wilds Beyond our Fences, I needed to go to a place where there was, I felt, a deeper privilege that modernity does not know how to recognize.

I spent some time in the slum, which is what a UN expert or official would say is an impoverished, horrible place. And I'm not trying to romanticize the dark issues there, but I'm trying to say there's a strange sort of abundance in the liminality in those spaces, that is missing when we raise our rulers of GDP and measure people in that way.

Slowing down is not a function of privilege. It's a function of intimacy with a world that is agentially alive. […]

This is minoritarian politics we're speaking about here. In fact, those who have ‘privilege’ might have difficulty slowing down, in the shamanic senses that I invite.”

This form of slowness is not visible nor measurable in temporal terms. It can't be reduced to an aesthetic.

For Abby, transforming her ways of being has required active, daily practice:

“The allure of urgency, of responding at the clip and intensity of the harms that are coming our way, is strong. So my community and I do a lot of physical somatic practice with each other to make sure that we’re tapping into a deeper source, a deeper current, a stronger current than the urgency.”

This has been a part of Abby’s journey of slowing down to entangle her “outer” with her “inner” work. It exemplifies a depth, and a radical rooting, that I feel is often missing from the growing trends of “slow living” that are de-contextualized from anything beyond itself.

It reminds me of Alnoor Ladha, in a previous interview, critiquing the ways that New Age Spirituality and other forms of emerging spirituality, or even institutional religions, are often practiced today with a disregard to broader political, environmental, and contextual understandings.

The same can be said of a New Age “slowness” that has become a “tuning out” rather than a “tuning in more deeply” — a de-politicized slowness that is unrooted, unresponsive. In the pursuit of a personal pace and peace, we cannot forget about the entangled highways that created these yearnings to begin with.

This post from Slow Self highlights the subversive, politically informed foundations of slow living — and how, as with most things that gain popularity and become capitalized off of, “[it] has quickly morphed into a watered-down, aesthetically pleasing version of itself.”

“There's this strange chasm between those who have a deeper understanding of coevolution, becoming, multiple layers of reality and mystical truths, etc., who have had embodied experiences of these things... with people who are doing the important, essential work of being activists. These two worlds need to come together. […]” – Alnoor Ladha on sacred activism, via Green Dreamer EP324.

Deepening into “the slow work”

As always, I feel drawn not to either-or thinking but to yes-and invitations. Yes, slowing down is important. And still, rapid response work is nevertheless vital to meet certain states of emergency.

But if we zoom out, we might see that a lot of such crises of urgency are merely the more visible mushrooms fruiting from deeper mycelial webs of extractive, colonial-capitalist relations. As I write in “The Mushrooming of Catastrophes,” unless we can chip away at the actual underlying network of power relations, the same conditions remain — making them ripe for another similar crisis to bloom someplace else, sometime else.

I think this is what Abby's invocation of “the slow work” speaks to — a recognition that the depths of larger-scale, longer-term systemic transformation require us to tap into different ways of being and responding — that do not replicate the crises in form, and that do not burn us out before we can even arrive to the roots.

As a tangent, but perhaps as one more relatable example, I remember Farmer Rishi sharing, in our mini video documentary, that regenerative gardening should feel regenerative for the gardener as well. And that if the process of healing lands does not also feel healing for the caretakers, we must reassess our “how.”

Today, after decades of sustained solidarity work, Abby, her community, and the U’wa people, are celebrating the fruits of their labor:

“In December 2024, after a 25-year legal case, the U’wa won in the highest human rights court in the hemisphere. The U’wa won protections not only for their community, but also for all Indigenous people across Latin America.

It's a beautiful story in which the slow work has prevailed.”

I welcome you to join us in slowing down and tuning in to this full conversation (Green Dreamer EP450) here or via Spotify, Apple Podcast, or any podcast app.

And if you are a supporting subscriber, you can also watch the extended, bonus video version of our interview here.

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Episode artwork by Lorena Arévalo; episode musical feature by Adrian Sutherland

“Truth Demands is a love story at its core — dedicated, not only to Terence but as a tribute to Ingrid Washinawatok and Laheʻenaʻe Gay. It's a love letter to the U’wa community and to the Earth itself.

I was turning grief into resilience and, in some ways, love into action.” —Abby Reyes

About Abby Reyes

Abby Reyes champions community climate solutions. She started out conducting rural environmental legal assistance in the Philippines, her father’s homeland, and walking alongside the Colombian Indigenous U’wa pueblo in their fight against big oil — an experience at the heart of her first book, Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice. Learn more about Abby here.

Invitations into reflection & action:

• What are your reflections on the difference between reactivity and responsiveness? How would you like to deepen into “the slow work” in your community life?

• In what ways would you like to further entangle and enrich your personal “inner work” with your “outer work”?

Dive deeper via these conversations…

• Alnoor Ladha: Sacred activism and contextualized spirituality (EP324)

• Bayo Akomolafe: Slowing down and surrendering human supremacy (EP317)

• Mitch Anderson: Join the Amazon’s resistance against oil expansion (Ep449)

What’s next?

Paul Hawken, of Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration, is one of those prominent climate experts whose work I came across in my earlier days of learning about environmental issues.

So I was honored to hear that he has been listening to and inspired by Green Dreamer over the last few years, and I was excited to get to chat with him about how his perspectives and learnings have shifted and expanded since his earlier publications — moving much beyond the dominant views reflected in mainstream climate science and environmentalism.

Stay tuned for this discussion coming soon!