Soft, Where? is a weekly-ish podcast and oral journal where I reflect on finding softness inside of business ownership and artistic practice for myself and paid subscribers of the Seeda School newsletter. I invite you to reflect on the questions at the end of each episode in the comments or via email. Below you can find a loose outline and essay version of the episode to read while you listen or share screenshots of on social media.
You can also open this episode in apple podcasts or your preferred podcast streaming service — which is also an easy way to take a screenshot and share the episode.1
Introduction
It is Friday, October 28th and I woke up at 4:30am to put my contacts in, stretch, make green tea, and write the notes for this podcast that I am recording at 7:24am.
I am currently in Dawn, Virginia co-working while muted in a zoom room with one of my best friends Amanda who is currently in Miami.
First off, thank you for being a paid subscriber it creates so much space in my practice to allow me to feel and explore my urgent and delicious questions.
Quick note: You can listen to this episode in the apple podcast app through your own private feed of the Soft, Where? podcast. Which will also alert you when there’s a new episode.
I’m going to try to get in the habit of recording these every Friday. A Monday newsletter to start the week and a Friday podcast to punctuate the transition into the weekend which is when I spend most of my time with loved ones or in the studio.
We’ll see what happens but I do like the cadence and practice of being in continued reflection and sharing both written and orally.
Let’s dive right in.
Business and/or Art Practice?: The claustrophobia and divinity of binaries
(Y’all know I love a title…liveeee for a title)
In Rog Eglash’s TED Talk, the author of African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, talks about binary code as a kind of “deterministic chaos” — adjacent to or relating to a sort of “divination through the earth”. On page 96 in African Fractals, when talking about Bamana divination there is a sentence that sticks with me, “The fifteenth symbol is called “this world”, and the sixteenth symbol is “ the next world,” so there was good reason to separate them from the others”.
For the past 3 years I have been giving myself permission to think more expansively about the binaries I come across in my everyday life. Inviting fluidity into my imagination of gender, financial decisions, relationships, time, and how I am framing the work I came here to do.
It’s a curious thing, since 2016 my practice has been informed and shaped by the research of Black feminist labor. Til this day something that still confounds me is this sensation of freedom I feel when I am doing work that feels most erotically aligned with my creative spirit and calling.
It’s a sensation I get from nothing or no one else.
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