To Crave Certainty is to Crave A Lie

For the Worldbuilders Ep. 047

Torkwase Dyson, Liveness and Distance, 2022, acrylic and wood on canvas, 90-1/2" × 72-1/2" × 2-3/4" (229.9 cm × 184.2 cm × 7 cm) Source: A Liquid Belonging

Paul Robeson

by Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 – 2000)

That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.

From The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (Library of America, 2005). Copyright © 1970 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Reprinted By Consent of Brooks Permissions.

Dear Worldbuilder,

I don’t need a vacation. I need a revolution.

I almost didn’t press record on this one. Why? Because I’m so damn tired y’all. It’s not my calendar, I’m not over extended, I’m not burned out, I’m not at max capacity. This isn’t a tiredness a nap or a vacation could address. I’m tired because I’m heartbroken. The apathy is what’s draining, but witnessing how we’re collectively showing up for each other is fortifying. Watching us literally fight for each other’s lives is the only thing giving me strength these days. Thank you for being my magnitude and bond inside this lifetime of struggle and refusal. Another world isn’t only possible, it’s being practiced right now on college campuses across the globe, inside virtual workshops spanning multiple time zones, at masked community meet-ups and on top of mutual aid flyers making their rounds on social media and in group chats. It is only here, inside the rehearsal of being each other’s harvest, being each other’s business, that I find a resting place worth fighting for.

Inside This Week’s Podcast Episode

As always, we have more questions than answers:

🔎 What critical decisions am I not making because I can’t predict the outcomes?

⏳ What project am I procrastinating on because I can’t control how it will be received?

💡 How is my fear of uncertainty restricting access to the life altering lessons I’m meant to learn and share? How am I denying myself wisdom?

🔮 How is my craving for certainty blocking the beauty and abundance ancestors, spirit, god is inviting me into as a counterbalance to the pain?

🕊️ How is this thirst for control inflicting violence and harm on myself and others?

Inside this episode, I work through these questions as I embark on a writing project that is begging me to surrender to a level of vulnerability that will surely change me. Tune into this week’s episode, let’s work through these questions together. Maybe you can relate?

This Week’s Journal Prompt

The invitation of “safety as relation”¹ 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, occupation etc. We are being called to be creative in a context where control and certainty are sold as safety, but surrendering to each other’s gaze and no longer being strangers is taught to be the most threatening act we can imagine. Can we see how the core trauma of these systems of oppression is making us terrified of each other? FEAR is the organizing framework of colonization. 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?

This week’s journal prompt:

What would I create if my body believed safety was relation and not predictable outcomes?

Perhaps the process of creating 👆🏾 that thing 👆🏾 is the only portal of permission that will get our body on board. This is the journal prompt I’ll be working with this week. I invite you to work with it too! Let me know how it lands by replying to this email or by sharing in the comments section below. I’d love to hear from you and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Until next week…

So be it, see to it, breathe through it,

Ayana

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