Cultivating Self-Trust As the Only Way

We Took Flight With Our Feet On The Ground

Julie Mehretu, Untitled (2004) from the series “Landscape Allegories”

“The rufous hummingbird travels five thousand miles from summer home to winter home and back. This hummingbird can fit into the palm of a hand. Its body defies the known physics of energy and flight. It knew its way before all known mapmakers. It is a bird whose origins and paths are the blood of its small body. It is a bird whose desire to find its way depends on drops of nectar from flowers.”

— Dionne Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, pg. 8

I feel us flying. I feel us flocking, returning back, back, back to ourselves.

I feel us remembering. I feel us singing…

It’s the only way.

It’s the only way.

It’s the only way.

I am dispatching to you from inside a book I am calling “part memoir, part map”. I will admit, I am struggling with the memoir part. What does truth mean in a context where you were invented¹ for the purposes of capital and Enlightenment? I still don’t know the answer to that question but here’s what I do know, my desire to find my way depends on drops of nectar from flowers. Like when you read your poetry, like that. Or when you stroke your instrument, like so. Here, here, here your nectar is nuance not nuisance. And it don’t make me no never mind how far I have to go. I will find my way back to you every time. In every life. I’ve flown this route before all known mapmakers — before Enlightenment, before Truth, before Language — there was Desire.

I pray you believe me when I invite you to follow it. This is the best I can do, becoming nectar while watching you. Folding your longing into dispatches that surrender to the air², making paintings with the mop water, playing chords that bend time, your quilted collages became maps, your music became drops and we started flockin’. Sticky and sweet, we started dancing. And the dancin’ turned to hummin’ and the birds flew.

I feel us trusting our wings now, because our legs are tired.

We hummed and hummed, choosing to take flight instead. Leaving behind Logic and Reason and Truth and colonial compromise after compromise after compromise. Finally, we are surrendering to the air for drops of nectar from flowers. Flowers that remind us of Big Ma and Aunt Harriett and Honey and Hoodoo and pound cake and mutual aid and art and possible. We are the nectar. We are the birds. And everything inside the distance between them. Looking for eachother with needles as mouths who mean well but are sometimes sharp. How might we make it sweet again?

Cultivating trust is the only way. Otherwise we’re suspended here between flight and nectar, never quite making it to each other. As we follow Desire and move closer to the nectar — oh the sweetness of our innocence — doing a thing for the first time we remember, learning how to trust ourselves is a crucial step on the flight back home. We really are creatures and for some reason we’re terrified of that. Let’s redirect our distrust, away from ourselves and toward the systems that taught us how to distrust ourselves in the first place. The systems that taught us me vs. you. This return home is going to cause some chaotic collisions but it is the only way. This insistence on relation. How might we make it wild again?

I wish I had less terrifying news, but we really cannot continue being strangers to eachother³. I know, I know, now come along, what's your name? Perhaps colonization erased it so we will name ourselves anew. What story will we choose? The one where we fly back to eachother or the one where we fly back to eachother? Tell me now, I must know now because time is thinning, I can feel it in the air⁴. No need to worry, we are hummingbirds piercing through space and defying physics so that buys us some coverage on the clock. There’s no need to worry, but please don’t dawdle. How might we trust our bodies before the clocks, before the maps, before the fear, again?

Inside the nectar there is no me vs. you, only a vibration of a soft “phew!” We would do this all day long if they let us. But here’s the wide open secret, the letting is our gig. So here I am committing to 1,000 words whenever I sit down to build this book. Why? Because 1,000 words is the benchmark I’ve chosen to let it be enough. What will you allow today? A 3 minute freestyle, 2 quilt squares, 1 page, 1,000 words, 4 drawings, 1 poem? Find your benchmark and let it, let it, let it. This is our gig. And the sooner we learn to trust our inherent creative agency, the sooner the map appears. No, not to the door of no return but to the door of no empire. No jails. No cops. No prisons. No judge. No law. No fear. Only love. Only nectar. Can we trust ourselves long enough to let it?

A 3 minute freestyle turned into a freedom school, the quilt squares illustrate fugitive praxis, the drool of 1,000 words turned into a sea that became a passage and the letting created a world we could bear. No police became resources for food producing community gardens, that turned into playgrounds, which turned into housing and that eventually turned into a sigh of relief we worked our entire lives to know.

We can develop the creative relational skills we need to build new worlds as soon as we let them. This was, our gig. We found a benchmark for expanding our window of tolerance for vulnerability and uncertainty and let it. The sticky and sweet.

Our needle beaks piercing through time and space and we’re dancin’ and we’re hummin’ and we’re flying with our feet planted squarely on the ground. Dreaming while staying rooted in the present. Abolition is a creative prompt we let. Abolition is a script we rehearse⁵. Abolition is the story we tell. Abolition is the song we sing. Abolition is a world we can choose, but first we have to acknowledge our desire and shake hands with our power. In a context that insists on making strangers of us all, this greeting is the first step into a world where we haven’t built the stairs yet. We’re trust falling into the nectar, a viscous web of belonging we pray will catch us. For no logical reason other than…

It’s the only way.

It’s the only way.

It’s the only way.

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📰 Seeda School News

🌐 Worldbuilding Workshop Series

Registration for the Winter 2025 Worldbuilding Workshop Series is now open! Join us for this free, 4-PART Worldbuilding Workshop series where you'll learn more about the Treehouse and resourcing your interdisciplinary practice through an income generating creative offer aligned with your values and desires.

• PART 1: Seed A World Rooted in the Truth of Your Desire

• PART 2: Discover Your Creative Dispatch

• PART 3: Discover Your Creative Offer

• PART 4: Resource A World Rooted in the Truth of Your Needs

🌳 Inside the Treehouse

We’re in the final week of the 🍁 Fall 2024 Seed A World Retreat which is dedicated to strategizing how we might invite the folks we dream of serving into offers we created with them in mind. In order to honor this stretch, tomorrow we’re engaging in a guided breath work meditation on how we ground inside our values. Inside this meditation we will remember our voice can shake. Our throat might tighten. Our stomach may drop. But we will not disregard or deny ourselves and our needs for the comfort of others. We understand we don’t have a right to comfort but we have a right to self advocacy. Inside this meditation we will ground ourselves inside our values to honor and protect our “yes” and release people pleasing tendencies that restrict our access to our “no”.

🎙️ For the Worldbuilder’s Podcast

In case you missed it, last week on the podcast For the Worldbuilders we released the 65th episode “Who Is Perfectionism For? Channeling Audacious Visions Into 3 Phases of Creative Business Development” via Spotify or Apple Podcast. Read more about the episode in the post below. 👇🏾

1. “Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” “God’s Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.” — Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81

2. “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” ― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

3. “What brings us back to remembrance is both individual and collective; both intentional and an act of surrender; both remembering desire and remembering how it works. Daring to recognize each other again and again in a context that seems bent on making strangers of us all.” — M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (2005), pg. 278

4. “Feel It in the Air” is a song by American rapper Beanie Sigel from his third studio album The B. Coming (2005). It is the third single from the album. The song was produced by Heavy D and features singer MJ Songstress. (Source: Wikipedia)

5. “Abolition is presence, which means abolition is life in rehearsal. Not a recitation of rules, much less relentless lament. Although the surface of contradictions, the dynamics of those contradictions in their dominant meeting, propose carceral displacement or spatial fix as necessary, natural and inevitable. So in order for the contradiction to ripen, we know the stage itself must tell a story.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Keynote