Calling Our Power Back to Us: All Stories Rooted in Independence Are Lies
For the Worldbuilders Ep. 063
Dear Worldbuilder,
I’m coming to you with a new episode of the podcast For the Worldbuilders after a mini-hiatus and a week of being swaddled by love and questions. I scripted this episode weeks ago and recorded it days before the holiday. I’m reveling in all the ways the sentiments inside this episode were echoed back to me this week.
Thanksgiving is always a day filled with political tension for me and I’m sure I’m not alone. It’s the day I get to soak up intergenerational fellowship with family spanning 90 years old to 9 months old. It’s also the day that reminds us of the violence that produced the colonial vision of the “New World” that we are made to contend with today.
Our Thanksgivings are usually an assemblage of 50+ loved ones, tables overflowing with food and a buffet of laughs. Whenever I experience a density of intergenerational community — all at one time, all in one place — my mind often wanders and wonders, what would happen if we used these rare moments of fellowship to call in new worlds of our own; speculations rooted in care, reparations, cooperative economics and transformative justice instead of using these rare moments of fellowship to forget the violence of this world? If only for a day, right? Every year we’re reminded that’s impossible, still every year we try.
Ask me what I’m grateful for, I say abolitionists and eyes glaze like the pound cake between us. So much distance, yet no distance at all.
What gets lost when politics is banned at a place as intimate as the dinner table?
What would my 90 year old aunt have to say about transformative justice and why? What world does my 9 month old cousin want us to get to work on building right now, now, now and why? What stops us from leveraging these holiday seasons to strategize, spin up mutual aid experiments to try for the next year, hold difficult conversations, practice navigating conflict and why?
The day dream begins to fade, the call to prayer commences, I start to make a land acknowledgement but that feels disingenuous, so, I don’t. The tension builds, there’s so much work to do but for now I will make Aunt Harriett a plate and say everything I wanted to say to her, to my cousins, to my loved ones in these love letters and episodes.
Tune into the 63rd episode “Calling Our Power Back to Us: All Stories Rooted in Independence Are Lies” on the podcast For the Worldbuilders via Spotify or Apple Podcast.
Let me know what you think. Let’s hold the tension together.
So be it, see to it, breathe through it,
Ayana