For The Worldbuilders

I hope you’ll Discover your Weekly Dispatch with us this Thursday, July 25th at 12pm EST in the last live Worldbuilding Workshop I’ll be giving on the Treehouse for the year. The Treehouse is a monthly membership holding you accountable to weekly returns to your Zone of Desire through live workshops, open studios, guided meditations and black feminist worldbuilding tools. And enrollment is now open! It’s $67 bucks a month, enrollment closes on Monday, July 29th. Join us inside the free workshop on the 25th to learn more.

Who are we outside of white supremacy culture? Perhaps the simple answer is healers, holders, stewards. Perhaps the simple answer is the people that refuse, repair and restore. And perhaps we don’t have to go anywhere to learn these skills, perhaps the best teachers and stories are already embedded in our intuition and ancestry. Perhaps the stories they’re whispering invite us into a culture with more bearable and breathe-able characteristics where perfectionism becomes improvisation, individualism becomes collectivism and “right to comfort” becomes “right to transformation”.

I too, have put more value in the things that hurt because suffering is familiar. I know her. I know suffering. And I have plenty of evidence that the shelter of suffering has kept me safe, kept me “out the way”. But at what cost? There is rent for living underneath the shelter of suffering. As with everything, there is a sacrifice. The cost was often my inner child who needed me to tend to her wounds but I couldn’t bear her pain so I just kept looking away. The cost was often my body which needed my attention, my care, my tenderness, my grace but was often treated as a liability instead. The cost was often my dreams that needed my power, my protection, my faith but seemed too wild to be safe, too pleasurable to count on, too gooooood to be true.

I just want us to consider, if only for this moment, how exhausting it is to be in perpetual disbelief of our power.

I almost titled this podcast “On Aligning Your Practice with Your Capacity and Surrendering to the Air”. Both work. A question for you: What would it feel like to pause and breathe into a deep, longgggg stretch instead of a sprint? I need to continue challenging myself. Rigor, change and curiosity are the electricity of my life, I’m clear on that. Capricorn rising, Gemini Sun over here. But what might it look like to prioritize the steady over the surge, the flow over the wave? What might it look like to prioritize the practice over the launch?

I’m sure you’ve seen it and maybe even felt it, experienced it. Manifestation is everywhere. Folks are talking about it on TikTok, Instagram and I wouldn’t even be surprised if it’s reached LinkedIn. Point being, the gospel of the woo-woo crew is spreading. We out here y’all! And thank goodness. I think this is a good thing, that we are learning how to see without images as Toni Morrison puts in her Nobel Lecture in 1993 when invoking the power of language. But how might we take this practice even further…how might we listen to the images while practicing a grammar of black feminist futurity?

Seeda School Links

Citations

Recently I had the absolute honor of being in conversation with Seeda School alumni, Ravon Ruffin Feliz. Ravon who goes by she/they is a cyber anthropologist, writer, educator and founder of Citation Studio, a Black feminist experimental thinking studio mapping the possibilities of computing, archives, and nature with/on/for/at the internet. Born in Chicago, now based in the Bronx — she has worked in the arts and culture sector for 10+ years, tending to public engagements with art, archives and the internet, URL and AFK (away from keyboard).

Ravon is also the steward of the “Glossary for an Anti-Colonial Black feminist Critical Media Ecology”, tenderly referred to as the ABC Glossary as a short hand. They are building the glossary inside “New Terms and Conditions”, a newsletter they launched in January of this year.

In the Preface of New Terms and Conditions, they speak clearly stating, this is “an attempt to define terms like cloud, seed, garden, and data, that make visible the exploitation on our land, our resources, and our communities, and to address the exploitations that are hiding in plain-sight. and even more so, begin to liberate these terms from the lips of our oppressors.”

Inside this Episode:

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These are just some reflections I jotted down during my birthday week and writing retreat in Shenandoah Valley. As the podcast title suggests this was my golden year. I turned 31 on the 31st of May and after being away for a few weeks it felt right to punctuate this moment of return with some reflections ahead of the release of the guest podcast episodes. Let’s go…

Here's 1 reflection out of 31: Artist is starting to feel like an insufficient title (for me) because it’s becoming clear you can be an artist and not dedicate every fiber of your imagination to black trans future. You can be an artist and stay silent on the overlapping genocides. You can be an artist and not wear a mask. I want to live into what it means to be an abolitionist instead, this is the framework I want to be accountable inside of. Moving forward, I want not living in alignment to my values to be incoherent against the backdrop of what I proclaim to be.

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The invitation of “safety as relation” (Mariame Kaba) is a huge one in a world that has taught us safety is the opposite of relation. A world that tries to convince us, with all it’s tools, that safety is domination, exploitation, segregation, etc. We are being called to be creative in a context where control and certainty are not introduced as triggering, but surrendering to each other’s gaze and no longer being strangers is taught to be the most triggering act we can imagine. Can we see how the core trauma of these systems of oppression is making us terrified of each other? THAT'S its animating, organizing framework. Being so terrified of the other that we can’t see the paralyzing fear of ourselves. What happens when we turn this creative bind into a creative prompt?

Only YOU can create the offer calling on your spirit. Some creatives will say, “if you don’t create your idea someone else will”. That’s bullshit. There’s only one YOU, with YOUR unique lived experience and YOUR journey of transformation. So, no. No one else can create the offer calling on your spirit. Join us this spring, take your offer from spirit to material and witness the magic that’s been begging to be actualized all along.

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"May our visibility be an offering of gratitude to those we dedicate our practice to. The ancestors, past selves, younger cousins, teachers and non-human creatures we owe our breath and possibility to. We didn’t come from nowhere. We come from the freedom fighters who took their imagination to the streets, we come from the parents whose direct action was reading us Tar Beach at night, we come from the hands that prepared the meals for the meeting. Praying hands. We come from all the black feminist theory we now get the privilege to rehearse in theater of the street, the home, the classroom. I show up if only to say thank you, thank you, thank you. It wasn’t in vain, it wasn’t in vain because of you I am possible. It wasn’t in vain. Because of you WE are possible." — Ayana Zaire Cotton

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