This Plus That

Fractals + Free Will with Abrah Dresdale and Adam Brock

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Abrah Dresdale is a cultural artist, visionary educator, and consultant in the fields of regenerative social design, prison food justice, and Jewish earth-based traditions. She has a new book, out within the last couple of weeks, called Regenerative Design for Change Makers: A Social Permaculture Guidebook. It’s an essential guide for organizational changemakers, consultants, higher education students, and transdisciplinary educators pursuing a regenerative future for the 21st century.

Adam Brock is a Denver-based cultural artist practicing regenerative social design. For over a decade, he’s worked to create the conditions for regenerative relationships among individuals, grassroots initiatives, and institutions throughout the country. Adam also has a book, published in 2017, called Change Here Now: Permaculture Strategies for Personal and Community Transformation, a recipe book for social change inspired by the more-than-human world.

Their extended bios can be found in the show notes for this episode.

In this discussion, Abrah, Adam, and Brandi talk about the intersections of Fractals + Free Will, including:

  • How Abrah and Adam practice and teach a kind of “social biomimicry.”
  • What Abrah calls the “principle of positive contagion”—a way we create our own weather patterns and exhibit personal agency, power, and free will, even when living inside oppressive systems.
  • How healing can ripple to the past, another example of fractals.
  • How we can create a “yes” where the world has told us there’s a “no,” like one beautiful story about a man locked in prison who nonetheless found a way to run the Boston Marathon.
  • How tender and exhausting it can feel to constantly have to reassert your own agency in spaces where your whole humanity isn’t seen.
  • The alienation we’ve all experienced in our early spiritual traditions, but how we’ve each grappled with reintegrating “ancient technologies” in ways that reflect ourselves and our values today—including the ability to critique how some of our “new” traditions, even permaculture, often include problematic practices.
  • And so much more.

    • Listeners can find Abrah and Adam’s work with Regenerate Change online, at regeneratechange.org, and on Instagram @regeneratechange.

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    Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
    Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital

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    This Plus ThatBy Brandi Stanley
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