For The Worldbuilders Ep. 032
Season of Surrender: Writing a Love Letter to Our Fear
Hey fellow Worldbuilders,
How’s your heart? Mine is simultaneously breaking everyday and being mended by loved ones everyday. The grief and rage that has been swirling around in my body over the past few months is entirely too much to hold alone. These days I often find myself collapsing in gratitude during mediation, morning walks and bathing rituals for the collectively held tenderness inside the Fall 2023 Seed A World Retreat and intentional time with family and friends during this time of year.
In the face of overwhelming gratitude for the fortifying community support enveloping me, my response is always to create an offering in return. My black feminist spiritual praxis compels me into reciprocity as a way of being. This week I want to share the latest podcast episode For the Worldbuilders, titled “Season of Surrender: Writing a Love Letter to Our Fear”. Inside is another mini-workshop, this time we’re writing a love letter to our fear to help us navigate our “season of surrender”. This time, we remember fear is love’s opposite; and love is the only landscape abundant and generative enough to hold and compost the endless grief.
Inside this podcast episode we address the following fears:
Fear of abandonment for the audacity to prioritize our desire
Fear of being “seen”/“perceived”
Fear of getting called out/“canceled”
Fear of causing harm
Fear of endless financial precarity
Fear our pleasure won’t and can’t provide to meet our material needs
Fear of complete undoing, unraveling and psychological dismemberment
Fear of grieving identities that helped us survive up to this point but are no longer serving us
And more…
Strategy: Inside this episode I ask you to write your own list of fears that might be animating your action (or inaction). Then we make space for grace by countering all those fears by writing a love letter to compost them. This love letter is your map inside your season of surrender.
Tip: This mini-workshop is deep nervous system activating work! I recommend making your list and writing your love letter in a sensory soothing environment like in the bath, in the bed with lit candles on the nightstand, during a meditative walk in nature or on the porch with your favorite tree in view.
Remember: The season of surrender feels impossible, because we’ve run away from it for so long. We’re running because surrender might require we abandon beliefs that were key to our survival up until this point. Abandoning these beliefs feels like abandoning the possibility of survival which rightfully feels physically and psychologically impossible. Let’s hold tender space for that while remembering, it is through this abandonment of false belief systems that we return to deeper parts of ourself. It is through the mourning of belief systems that no longer serve us that we get to an expansive place of possibility where there is nothing but abundance waiting to catch us.
In 2021, I walked through the portal of surrender and now my wildest dream is for us to successfully pull you through for it is here that collective liberation is the animating force. For it is here, that we can accept nothing less.
In maximal commitment and minimal loneliness,
Ayana
We might escalate this narrative terrorism towards a constant aesthetic terrorism; we might pursue infrastructural damage to the arts and to the structures of publishing. This might mean, among other things, clogging submission portals, hijacking the space of the bio, as Rasha Abdulhadi has modeled, hijacking the interview and the podcast and the craft talk and the classroom and the call for submissions and the $75 payment via Venmo for the poem. It might mean writing things that are unpublishable and forcing publishers into doing it anyway; it might mean circumventing or ignoring the structures of publishing in favor of means of circulation outside the bounds of capital and therefore free from the grasp of the invisible hand. It might mean boycott, pressure, and refusing to allow the return of the oppressive dailiness in any space we inhabit. It might mean being loud, annoying, and resolutely steadfast in our refusals and our insistences. It might mean joining with writers who are extending solidarity beyond the page and into direct actions against the complicity of our institutions, literary or otherwise. It might mean, too, building alternative and sustained networks of support for our fellow writers who lose jobs, opportunities, or face harassment. Like a net, we tie ourselves to one another to stop the dailiness from getting through; we tie ourselves tight enough so none of us get lost along the way. Maximal commitment, minimal loneliness, to paraphrase a comrade.
— Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” published by Protean Mag on December 8, 2023