For The Worldbuilders

Our favorite black feminist was most likely an entrepreneur because for many of our ancestors black feminist entrepreneurship was simply a synonym for “the practice of surviving with our dignity in tact”. Many of us have heard the stories if we listened closely, the auntie, uncles and cousins who spun up hair salons, barbershops, daycares, restaurants and classrooms inside living rooms, kitchens, gardens and basements. Businesses that experimented with mutual aid and refused to replicate the carceral choreographies they might have witness or experienced in their neighborhoods or at their jobs. These stories are not new, disability and complex trauma sometimes renders us unable or unwilling to hold "traditional jobs". Entrepreneurship and creative lives of refusal aren't always born out of courage, sometimes they're born out of necessity and needs capitalism just can't hold. What creative strategies can black feminism teach us about surviving systems designed to fail us?

Resources

• Register for the Free 2-Part Worldbuilding Workshop Series and Download the Spring 2025 Syllabus: https://www.seedaschool.com/program
• Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠
• Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠

Citations

• Freedom Farm Cooperative
• Why Harriet Tubman Is a ‘Powerful’ Choice for American Currency
• 'Nurse, Spy, Cook:' How Harriet Tubman Found Freedom Through Food
• Sojourner Truth, "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance”
• Sankofa Symbol
• Black Utopias: Speculative Life & the Music of Other Worlds by Jayna Brown
• Cover Art: Lauren Halsey, Untitled (Parliament) (detail), 2021. Digital collage. Source: MFA Boston

Rigor doesn’t equal hard work and ease doesn’t equal work that is easy. Asking for help, refusing to resent our capacity, honoring the needs of our body and moving at the speed of creative flow is rigorous work that might require practice if our learned impulse is to habitually bring ourselves to the edge of our capacity in order to feel worthy of the ease of our creative expression. Our art flows out of us like our breath, sometimes the hardest work is to let and protect it.

Resources

• Register for the Free 2-Part Worldbuilding Workshop Series: https://www.seedaschool.com/program
• Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠
• Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠

Citations

• “you’re not a perfectionist, you’re internalizing capitalism” meme by Ariana Brown (@arianathepoet)
• Cover Art: Book Scan from Your Satisfaction Is Our Future (2017) by Ayana Zaire Cotton

My intention inside this episode is to reflect, alongside you, on my own journey toward softening inside the sacred practice of bearing witness — both to myself and to each other’s becoming. Witnessing myself was painful at first. I was confronted with all the ways I had invented masks sacrificing my comfort while prioritizing the comfort of others, who oftentimes were loved ones. Parents, friends, partners, co-workers, peers, teachers, family members, roommates, the list goes on. When confronting all the layers I had assembled out of survival, I realized I was unrecognizable to myself. I cycled through periods of shame, rage, grief, and ultimately grounded inside compassion. When I stopped running from my authentic self, I was able to face her and in that stillness become a compassionate witness. No longer afraid of my own darkness, longings and desires — terrified that they were threats to my survival — another way forward opened. Inside this compassionate witnessing I realized all my fears held keys to something beyond survival, something like belonging. Through this witness work I began to create safety inside myself. Through this witness work I began to collaborate with loved ones, instead of hide from them, and created safety in my home. Then it spilled over to our neighbors, our streets, our schools. But it started with bearing witness inside the sacred act of coming home to myself again and again. My intention inside this episode is to remind us, worldbuilding happens on various scales of intimacy.

Resources

• Download the Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself: ⁠https://www.seedaschool.com/questionnaire⁠
• Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠
• Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠

Citations

• Dear Mazie, exhibition curated by Amber Esseiva
• Dear Mazie, program “IT’S ALL OUT OF MY ARMS: An Activated Honoring”
• “Dropping the Mask”, Hidden Brain episode
• Brendane A. Tynes’s Instagram post on mirror and witness work
• Karen M. Rose’s Instagram post on Venus retrograde, mirror work and ancestral veneration
• Cover Art: Written (2021) by Lorna Simpson. Materials: Collage on paper Dimensions: 15 15/16 x 11 1/16 in (40.5 x 28.1 cm)

My intention inside this episode is to invite us to put some respect on our nervous system. We have done the journaling, we’ve cultivated all our embodiment practices on our walks and by the water. We’ve done the divination, breath and mirror work to bring us to this moment where our nervous system is prepared to hold us at our next level of practice. There are new invitations, new calls, new assignments we desire to expand into, but moving in fear might be sneakily disguising itself as “honoring our nervous system”. Our craving for predictable outcomes and comfort can encourage us to play small inside the vision for our creative practices and lives. Inside this episode I invite us to consider the ways we can honor our nervous system by welcoming the transformative discomfort of desire.

Resources

• Download the Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself: ⁠https://www.seedaschool.com/questionnaire⁠
• Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠
• Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠

Citations

• Myleik Teele’s Podcast — 219: Do The Work: Stop Researching, Start Moving
• “June Jordan Solves the Energy Crisis: Love is Lifeforce” (March 23, 2016) by Alexis Pauline Gumbs published by The Feminist Wire
• Cover Art: Nick Cave (b. 1959, Fulton, MO; lives and works in Chicago, IL), Soundsuit Series

My intention inside this episode is to ground us inside the reality that we are constantly changing. Our motivations are changing. Our values might be experiencing a re-boot. And the things that kept us going in the past might no longer be a reliable fuel source. Instead of resenting or resisting our desire to slow down, prioritize our most meaningful relationships, or operate from a place of wholeness….What if we used these changes in our capacity, goals and desires as our new navigation tools and fuel to get us where we actually want to go instead of the destinations we were told to go in search of a false sense of safety? In this episode I’m going to share 5 approaches for staying motivated when ambition rooted in external validation has left your body.

Resources

• Download the Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself: ⁠https://www.seedaschool.com/questionnaire⁠
• Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠
• Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠

Citations

• “i am not done yet” by Lucille Clifton. Published in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, 1987
• Cover Art: Kerry James Marshall, When Frustration Threatens Desire (1990), Dimensions: 81 5/16 x 73 1/16 x 2 inches, Materials: Acrylic and collage on canvas

You dream of serving folks through your process not your personhood. You are an artist, not an influencer. But your process can sometimes feel illegible, even to you. We’re clear there are life affirming benefits to illegibility, opacity, poesis and abstraction. We’re also clear if we want to serve communities we care about through a creative offer that resources our practice, there needs to be an outline of the transformative journey we will take them through. This is your framework. In this episode I want to go over the power of frameworks and it’s creative capacity to build worlds that extend far beyond us.

Resources

Citations

My intention behind this episode is not only to advocate for the practice of weekly dispatches but to encourage you and empower you with resources to advocate for your song — aka the work that is uniquely yours. Philadelphia-based prison abolitionist Stephanie Keene says people often ask her, “How can I get involved?” Her response is, “Do what it is you're good at”. Right? WE need you inside what you’re good at, which is to say YOU need you inside what you’re good at. What is your daily, weekly, seasonal practice for showing up inside the chorus of collective liberation? Let’s find out together.

Resources

Citations

In this episode I’m inviting you into this question with me: “Is It Burnout Or The Energetic Expense Of A Spiritual Breakthrough?” Now let’s be clear, sometimes it really is burn-out. Sometimes, no…a lot of the times, capitalism, the patriarchal refusal to compensate care work and the lack of a state sanctioned social safety net can really bring us to our knees and leave us feeling burned out. I want to acknowledge that, but what I also want to be emphatically clear about acknowledging is sometimes it is spiritual severance, self-denial and self-negation that is at the core of our exhaustion. What creative invitations have you been resisting? Let’s take a look at that and try to answer these questions together.

Resources

Citations

In this episode I want to make the case for breaking away from institutions and creating communal containers of healing instead. And because we’re all about the spell and the strategy at Seeda School…it is also my intention to make the argument that if you are already writing countless grants, drafting applications, making pitches and proposals and making bids for fellowship in institutions that sometimes (or usually) gets awarded, then you are already good at sales. Through this episode I want to invite you to turn that skill toward creating deeper pathways of empowerment for yourself and your communities, not institutions who siphon our worldbuilding capacity for their own survival. This episode is about our survival, our collective ability to thrive.

Resources

Citations

So who is perfectionism for?

What stops us from hitting publish or inviting folks into an offer?

Are we waiting for the somatic safety, self-trust, or sense of belonging we’ll magically feel on the other side of a new title, degree, or wave of applause?

So often we stall, hesitate on pressing publish, resist releasing an offer we’ve already thought about so much we could design the entire thing in a weekend, because we want to project the patriarchal premise of expertise or “thought leadership”.

But what if we centered our lived experience instead?

Resources

Citations