For The Worldbuilders

Healing from years of childhood trauma, where pleasure meant threat of punishment and desire meant danger. My Element X beckoned, “What if your desire became more powerful than your fear?”

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This letter is dedicated with gratitude to the bug in my code last week. It appeared as I was building a project using React in order to introduce the learners in Seeda School’s Module 4 how to build their own Community Directory using the popular library. I reflected on the library’s name, React.

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What happened? I was so focused on building the tools for belonging that I forgot to actually practice belonging. Call my family, show up for my friends, support the art shows of the brilliant folks in my circle, volunteer at the community garden, attend the programming at my local library, walk down to the bar that was literally underneath my feet. This is the slippery trap of building software for deepening connection without actually being connected. Existing on a social media platform doesn’t mean we’re engaged in a social practice, showing up on Zoom does not mean we’re present and increased awareness of all the potential events you could attend this weekend might actually increase your felt sense of loneliness. The church of techno-optimism would have us believe that software can solve suffering but there’s no solution for that, only a salve. The salve is the practice of returning to each other, ourselves and our local ecosystems again and again. Most of the time it requires a knock on the door, a phone call, handpicked herbs from your garden in outstretched hands smelling of rosemary asking for permission to hold you.

See this week's newsletter for more links and footnotes: https://seedaschool.substack.com/p/lavender-software-and-the-smell-of

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What new values and commitments do we want to seed the next generation of software inside of? How do we want to collectively tend to this soil? No, software will not solve racism, sexism, ableism and classism — only plain ol’ revolution will do that — but given the fact that software has made all these -isms exponentially worse, I do wonder how building technologies of care might be a salve in the meantime. A fractal expanding toward belonging, not fear.

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Being an artist is a commitment to indeterminacy. It asks, “are you prepared for a life long practice of improvisation?” In many ways, the word asks you to consent not to be a single being. Upon surrender, you join the beyond human swarm in an emergent choreography, a commitment to interdisciplinary practice and collective study. When you release control, another energetic current has room to flow in.

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While under a tree older than my great grandparents providing the quiet grace of shade, a spider the size of the bread crumb from my morning pastry is my only companion as I read the words of Magdalena Zurawski’s essay, “Being Human Is an Occult Practice”. Inside she reminds us, “Neoliberalism requires us to limit or suppress much of what is human in us because much of what is human in us serves no economic purpose”. As I read this essay I think about how much Neoliberal policy has paved the way for so much of the software we use on a daily basis, software created by white men celebrated for dropping out of college, never having to question their position in a world they create and dominate. College didn’t teach me how to code, this much is true. But college gave me the politic of black feminism and the practice of interdisciplinary study with others. And it is the politic of black feminism and interdisciplinary study with others that has saved my life.

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Over the summer I’ll continue gathering seed data, collaborating with computer kin, and thinking about why we’re all turning to writing at the same time. Meditating on what affordances, shelter, breath, code allows inside this practice. In September, I plan to invite you into a creative coding for writers offering and that’s when live virtual programming inside of Seeda School will resume. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts on creative writing alongside code or would like to collaborate around this topic — please get in touch. I would love to hear from you and continue thinking through this together. Consenting not to be a single being, the carrier bag theory of fiction explodes when non-humans are also the authors.

What are our collective ceremonies?

I decided I didn’t want to disrespect the question by providing an answer.

When searching for the “official language” to address the question, the only thing that came out was a poem. A poem about how poetry has saved my life. How it preserves life and provides oxygen when suffering is the ground and time is a trickster. Maybe the poem is the collective ceremony? The reading, the gathering, the singing, the sound, the performance of the poem. Maybe the poem is the only ceremony we need?

- See this week's newsletter for more links and footnotes: https://seedaschool.substack.com/p/it-comes-in-waves

This week's episode is about the practices that help us remember the world we need is the world we have. What came up is the realization that I am more skilled than last year at tending to the garden of my internal and eternal possibility — no longer a captive to external validation — I have cultivated practices that return me to myself, my body, and my values again and again. What also came up in this letter is the realization that I am craving more practice inside collective ceremonies that require somatic engagement both online and off (if there is a such thing as “offline”). In the next few newsletters I am looking forward to swimming underneath the question, How might software (in)form somatic practices of collective ceremony that deepen belonging? What are our collective ceremonies?

This week's episode is about the ecosystem of creative practice, mycelial media stewardship, and it’s containers. When I think about the next decade of my creative practice and how I imagine making room for my breath — I want to continue to move away from content creation and launches and move toward mycelial media and stewardship where my writing practice is the mother tree. What's the mother tree in your ecosystem of creative practice and study?