Moving From Convincing Institutions to Convincing The People
For the Worldbuilders Ep. 066
Dear Worldbuilder,
In this episode I want to make the case for breaking away from institutions, opting for creating communal containers of healing instead. Because we’re all about the spell and the strategy at Seeda School, in this episode I also make the argument that if you are already writing countless grants, drafting applications, making pitches and proposals or making bids for fellowship in institutions that get awarded, then you are already good at sales. You are already skilled at drawing narrative connections and inspiring us to join you in collecitvely realizing audacious visions. This is an essential worldbuilding skill, as worlds cannot be built alone.
Worldbuilding has a way of thrusting us out of practices of self-isolation and into practices of interdependence. Don’t it feel good?
Through this episode I invite you to turn your desires and storytelling skills toward creating deeper pathways of empowerment for yourself and your communities, not institutions who siphon our worldbuilding capacity for their own survival. This episode is about our survival, our collective ability to thrive.
If we are inside our rituals of setting winter solstice intentions might they sound something like that.
Tune into the 66th episode “Moving From Convincing Institutions to Convincing The People” on the podcast For the Worldbuilders via Spotify or Apple Podcast.
You have trained as a grant funded artist. You have trained as a burned out artist working multiple gigs. You have trained as a full-time employee with no capacity for her art practice. What you have not trained for is life as an interdependent artist.
The quote above is from inside a journal entry I wrote when I first embarked on this journey of an interdependent art practice. Overwhelmed at all I did not know, all I hadn’t allowed myself to feel, all the ways I gave my power to institutions and organizations who couldn’t hold our fire.
The truth has always been we know what to do with it, with our desire, with our fire, with our erotic power. May we let it light the way, may we let it hold us as we hold it, may we let it warm our malleable bodies and make us teachable.
May we let our fire clear pathways to new worlds and burn the bridges to ones that no longer serve us.
So be it, see to it, breathe through it,
Ayana