Dropping the Master's Tools, Dreaming Beyond Institutional Support
For the Worldbuilders Ep. 077

Dear Worldbuilder,
I was originally going to name this episode, “Dream So Big Only Love Can Get You There” after a quote from Karen M. Rose’s recent Libra Full Moon post. But then I reflected on all the ways my childhood curiosity and traumatic undergrad experiences inspired the work I do today.
Instead of overly identifying with that trauma I tell the story about picking up new tools and tools long forgotten. Black feminist books, family stories, clay, spells, poems, gathering in the forest, rituals with the river.
My unlearning journey took many wild turns from the School of Poetic Computation to earning a forest gardening certification and digging up clay artifacts from the parallel universe of Cykofa to creating sacred databases out of JavaScript using the seed data I remembered.
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.
My intention behind recording this episode is to humbly invite us to consider what got us to our current reality might not get us to our wildest dreams. Maybe it was ambition, external validation or the perceived safety of institutional support that got us here but these postures of practice are too hollow to strike this moment and inspire long-lasting change. What if we dreamed from inside radically new and ancient sources of support? What if we dreamed from inside the ever-present validation of love instead? A regenerative force of motivation we can sustain over a lifetime, expanding into actualized dreams too wild for words. Upon further inspection, with new tools and tools almost forgotten in hand, we see it is love that got us here and it’s love that will get us there…to worlds as yet unnamed.
Tune into the 77th episode “Dropping the Master's Tools, Dreaming Beyond Institutional Support” on the podcast For the Worldbuilders via Spotify or Apple Podcast.
Let me know what you think by replying to this email. 💌
🌱 Enrollment into the Seed A World Retreat is Open
If you would like to collectively conjure and tend to the wildness of your dreams inside a cohort of other values aligned worldbuilders then check out the Seed A World Retreat.
Enrollment into the retreat is now open and closes on Monday, May 5th.
Seeda School hosts a 9-week retreat where you will learn how to develop and launch an income generating creative offer through 3 major milestones:
Decide on Offer Inspired by Your Zone of Desire: This is where we help you discover the work you came here to offer.
Create a Framework: This is where we create the structure of your offer. The journey of transformation you will take your client, customer, reader, audience, student, participant, etc. on.
Create A Sales System and Invite the People: This is where we activate the mycellial network of interdependent support already alive inside your practice. The people waiting to support or work with us as soon as we create the invitation.
If you want to learn more before enrolling then register for our free 2-PART Worldbuilding Workshop Series. If you haven’t registered yet you missed us for PART 1 but there’s still time to catch us in PART 2 where we’ll talk about resourcing a world rooted in the truth of your needs.
I can’t wait to continue dreaming alongside you.
So be it, see to it, breathe through it,
Ayana
Needed this so much rn 🙏🏽 A PhD trying to uplift historically excluded voices? I should have known the toll it would take constantly having to justify the existence of non-white folks and explaining why our experiences matter.