Becoming The Welder
Fire can kill, but without it we will die.
And yet, we must remember the character of fire, its paradoxical dimension: it provides sustenance and warmth, but it can destroy, it can kill. But the difference between those of us who fear fire and “the welder” is her knowledge that she has to become intimate with this danger zone in order to re-create, to create anew; to enter the fire not figuratively, or metaphorically, but actually, that is, in flesh and blood. The difference between the welder and those of us who fear fire is the consciousness and attentiveness she brings to the process of entering fire, and it is this consciousness that cultivates the intelligence to discern, embrace, and live that important, yet malleable, relationship between destruction and sustenance. Fire can kill, but without it we will die.
— M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (2005), “Chapter 6: Remembering This Bridge Called My Back”, pg. 265-266
The smog of necropolitics and the oxygen of the black radical aesthetic.
The violence of dispossession and the reminder that we have all we need, floating on top of birdsong.
The depths of despair and your art, a mirror reflecting the persistence of desire.
M. Jacqui Alexander calls these paradoxes, “the motor of things”. The engine of contradiction that charges our possibility in the face of completely impossible circumstances. Shadow boxing with the devil, our demons got hands. Dancing with desire, fire is always inside the ring. Will we weld or will we wither?
Tucked inside the pocket of Dawn was the closest I ever came to the promise of maroonage, so I thought. Morning dew heavy with yesterday’s prayers, a cradle of loblolly pines, horses for neighbors, inside a web of belonging that knew my name before I was born — arguing with the dead who made unfathomable demands. Finally content with the safety of silence and solitude, they demanded I enter the fire.
“Here’s some black feminist texts to keep you warm. We won’t let you freeze to death. Here’s a pen and some incense, light the ends of both objects before you begin. Here’s a ball of clay, carve the flesh of this earth and finish it in the flame. Here are leather scraps, do you remember your cattle cousins? Here is metal. Do you remember how to bend it with attentiveness?”
I spent a full year here, in this workshop of silence and solitude, (re)joicing/joining with clay and cattle kin, throwing surprise parties for my younger selves on the page. Blowing out the candles, we finally found the safety we were longing for. The festivities lasted for months then their demands returned. “My dear, that was the warm up. We still need you to enter the fire. The artifacts are merely facilitators, the practice is relation.” Ceramic vessels dotted the landscape of the house we turned into a hush harbor, colorful scraps of flesh covered the floor, sculpted metal chimed in the corner, books became mountains, complimented by soil mounds of computer generated poetry compiled into zines. I was prepared to die here, amongst the seed data of this world they called, “the warm up”.
“You’re ready to die before you’ve begun living. My love, you see, we only gave you the materials so you could create the artifacts. The process of making helps thaw the parts of you they froze. The parts of you we couldn’t get to through the ice.”
As I thawed I left a trail of water everywhere I went, dried tears created waves on journal pages, watery grief created cleansing pools. Through the process of thawing, the memory came flooding in. The artifacts are merely facilitators, the practice is relation. The practice is being a daughter who doesn’t need to be liked, but will be respected. The practice is being a cousin who picks up the phone. The practice is being a friend who apologizes and expects nothing in return after trust is shattered. The practice is being a lover who meets their own childhood needs. The practice is being a niece who designs a life that makes time for your store runs and doctor visits. The practice is being a sister you never have to pretend with. The practice is giving thanks to the trees and honoring the ecosystem of care we owe our breath to. The practice is committing every exhale to repaying a social debt1 that can never be repaid.
This entire time I thought I was terrified of being an artist, but it turned out I was actually terrified of you. Terrified of facing the contours of all I owed, all I could never repay. The artifacts are evidence of relationship but the practice is being inside of it.
The vulnerability and the potential for harm.
The terrifying ordeal of being known and the pleasure of being seen.
The frozen fear and the warm water of love.
This “paradoxical dimension”, this danger zone of destruction and sustenance, is a fiery relationship we must enter. To run away from you was to run away from myself. Although I was tired, I could’ve ran for about three more centuries if they let me. Truth was, I only entered the fire because I ran out of places to hide. Suspended between the end of the world and the fire, we become the welders. Our practice, a fabrication process that joins the inescapable paradoxes so relationship frameworks of ancient futures might emerge through the fusion. Fully thawed, in a pool of despair and desire, we ran out of places to hide so we finally rested our head in your hands. Remembering they could kill, but without them we would surely die.
Seeda School Enrollment is Now Open
Join us as we worldbuild inside the “paradoxical dimension” of our fear and desire with consciousness and attentiveness. We compost all that doesn’t serve our practice of relation cultivated inside our creative offers and beyond.
Curious about how we resource a world rooted in the truth of our needs before enrolling? Register for the last Worldbuilding Workshop of the season where we’ll dive into the 4 offer types covered inside the Seed A World Retreat and explore how we might price them using the “Offer Price Calculator” shared inside the workshop. Hope to see you there.
With despair and desire,
Ayana
What Seeda School Worldbuilders Are Saying About the Retreat…
"Seeda School gathered me and all the threads of my creative practice. I came in with an idea and left with a digital course rooted in ease and pleasure. The workbook is beautifully laid out to include a framework for building out a curriculum, sustainable marketing plan, and sales funnel. Ayana's affirmations each week are a remedy to the uncertainty I experience beginning something new. This retreat has been grounding and deeply supportive."
— Brandi Cheyenne Harper, Winter 2024
"The Seeda School is unlike anything I have experienced before. It's a mix of personal, intimate, and necessary inner groundwork, visioning for the future, and practical tools for business and financial sustainability, all within a liberatory framework of black feminism and worldbuilding. I found it to be such a necessary container for reflecting, visioning, developing ideas, dreaming up possibilities and then bringing them to life with the many tools that are offered throughout the course. Ayana is a brilliant and generous facilitator, and has thoughtfully curated a safe community of support among like-minded artists and creatives. I am telling everyone I know about Seeda School as I feel like all interdisciplinary artists and creatives need this kind of facilitated retreat experience to bring their ideas to life and offer them to the world."
— Steph Rue, Winter 2024
“I’m not interested so much in the relationship where the debt would have to be credited, because increasingly for me I see the dominance of these two forms of debt in life, and they’re both so baleful, they’re both so moralistic. You know, as Marx said, debt is the moral judgment on the man. But also the other kind of debt, you know: I owe everything to my mother, I owe everything to my mentor. That stuff also becomes very quickly oppressive and very moralistic. There has to be a way in which there can be elaborations of unpayable debt that don’t always return to an individualisation through the family or an individualisation through the wage laborer, but instead the debt becomes a principle of elaboration. And therefore it’s not that you wouldn’t owe people in something like an economy, or you wouldn’t owe your mother, but that the word ‘owe’ would disappear and it would become some other word, it would be a more generative word.” — Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, pg. 149-150