We meet Wednesday evenings from 7-8pm CST except the last Wednesday of each month from May to December of 2021 to read a chapter a week from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer as a sacred text.
Our goals are:
- to integrate the teachings offered throughout this book into our daily lives and practices.
- to collectively imagine through the process of Contemplative Futuring, which roots us in self sovereignty practices, uproots our own white supremacy and envisions a future based on respect and reciprocity for all.
- We will lean on ideas and imaginings based on an article by Anab Jane and Alex Taylor in their article, Experiments in Feral Futuring, from October 2020.
I have taken some ideas from the Feral Futuring article and paraphrased and quoted them in the bullets below as we begin this journey of interweaving conversation possibilities with Braiding Sweetgrass as sacred text, guide to healing, and visioning a future for our descendants.
- Through our weekly discussions we will collectively hold space for each other’s imaginations using the teaching and practices in the chapters as a jumping off point.
- During our time together each week, we could “encourage each other to let our minds wander, to challenge, question, and reflect on what other, different worlds could feel like. A space where we could speak up, share, and overcome the powerful sense of powerlessness that such a crisis can bring.”
- Let us offer ourselves “untamed accounts of patched-together pasts, presents, and barely imaginable futures.” Allowing the “absence of hope” and for it to feel “absurd’. Hope as wild, loss as obvious yet “felt differently and unevenly worldwide. These are feral futures.”
- Connecting how we felt in pandemic to the climate crisis which is truly one in the same in so many respects. “We learned how precarity can envelope life and be marked not by world-changing hopes and dreams but by a question mark—just a question mark. The conditions of the pandemic revealed, alongside its many other stories, what a privilege it is to imagine a future with hope.” Can we imagine a future through this book of hope since we sit in privilege to have time to commit to this work when so many in our world do not?
- “The futures we imagine rely on the possibility of change and the possibility of worlds fundamentally better (or, indeed, worse). To ask, “What next?” or “What if?” is to believe possibilities exist, and that we can dare to ask how the world might be otherwise.”
- “The imagining of a future tames the future and its present. It turns on a logic that one follows on from the other. It is to hold a place in the world where the possibility exists to live without isolation and loneliness, without disease, without prejudice, and without fear.” We are privileged to have these conversations because so many are just trying to survive and we acknowledge this privilege.
- “The tools for navigating precarity and crisis and unknown futures will not be the tools we have used to maintain the certainty of progress, or the tools we have used for the pursuit of novel futures. And, while unfamiliar, these feral tools are deeply uncontroversial: acknowledging vulnerability, collective listening, nonrivalrous collaboration, and dreaming at the edges of im/possibility.”
If you would like to take part in this weekly connective, I ask that you commit through joining this $5 a month tier through Patreon which helps support a virtual platform for connecting weekly, as well as an energetic exchange for the preparation and facilitation I will offer throughout our sacred readings.
Once you sign up here, you will be automatically signed up for the group and will receive emails regarding our time together. You can also check in here for updates as well!
Finally, the words of Adrienne Maree Brown, visionary author of Emergent Strategy, offers the energy of imagining beyond current circumstances, which is exactly what we are tapping into in choosing Braiding Sweetgrass for sacred weekly reading.
“Harriet Tubman did not wake up one day with a strategy. She woke up from a dream. She saw that her people were free. They were, like, 7 to 8 generations into slavery at that point. There was no guideline for people to be like, yeah, we can be free. She imagined it and then she bent reality. And I think we all have to do that.”
Indeed.
#rootdown #riseup #totherevolutions #alldefinitionsapply
Revolutions Imaginarium 