Enrolling Into New Worlds
Collective Divestment towards Collective Liberation
The first 10 worldbuilders to enroll will receive a free invitation to book a hour and a half long 1:1 Creative Advising session currently valued at $175. Inside this session you will receive 1:1 support tailored to developing the unique delivery, marketing and pricing possibilities of your specific creative offer. Enrollment into the 2024 Winter Cohort of the Seed A World Retreat is now open until January 29th! Learn how to develop, communicate and sell a creative offer by this spring. 🌱 Have questions before enrolling? I want to invite you to register for tomorrow’s workshop where we will locate your deep desire in your interdisciplinary practice as the orienting technology informing the direction of your creative offer.
What Seeda School Worldbuilders are saying about the retreat…
“Through the Seed A World Retreat, Ayana offers rich, juicy, tangible frameworks for attendees to tap into our deepest desires so that we may then be led by them in our endeavors to develop and share values-driven creative offers. Each retreat session was equal parts meditation, sermon, and playdate. It was an invaluable experience to imagine within a world where Black feminism was the bedrock, where attendees could start replacing self-rejection and scarcity with self trust and generosity, where showing up fully for our practices would sustain our livelihoods in the ways we dream of and deserve. I’m eternally grateful and excited for how what I learned in the Seed A World Retreat will propel me into a more expansive and abundant future.”
— Dkéama Alexis, Fall 2023 Cohort
somewhere in the unknown world
a yellow eyed woman
sits with her daughter
quilting
some other where
alchemists mumble over pots
their chemistry stirs
into science. their science
freezes into stone.
in the unknown world
the woman threading together her need
and her needle
nods toward the smiling girl
remember
this will keep us warm
how does this poem end?
do the daughters’ daughters quilt?
do the alchemists practice their tables?
do the worlds continue spinning
away from each other forever?
quilting – lucille cliftonThis morning I came across a post that read, “Just remember 5 years ago, you dreamed about where you are NOW”. I double tap as I walk past the police station and toward the coffee shop where I sit and write to you. Two crows land on my path and refuse to move, insisting I remember. So I put away my phone and breathe deep. The wind picks up, makes my hair dance onto my lip gloss, a cop car drives by and before my heart has a chance to race my great grandmother’s hand is on my shoulder. The smell of tobacco is in the air and I remember. We ride the two realities as a matter of fact now. When presented with no survivable options we create them. We call in what we need, grab our tools and let the memory of our hands sculpt alternatives into being.
To the black feminist root workers, healers, witches, spellcasters — every morning, every night — I hear your prayers. I feel the presence of your altar. The birds whose feathers you collect show up in my dreams almost every night now. I feel our fire — work too illegible for social media — our dreams entangled in the warp and weft of another grid whose fiber plants seed new and ancient fabrics of reality. Sometimes I still wonder how we ride the mouth of both worlds without them ripping us apart. Shoulder still smelling of tobacco from my great grandmother’s hand I hear her say, “become the yellow eyed woman and the alchemist sculpting stone into worlds where the daughters’ daughters are possible”.
I want us paid.
I want us deeply resourced. I want the abolitionists, activists, artists, poets, painters, healers, filmmakers, decolonial pedagogy practitioners, feminist facilitators paid up. Now. I don’t want their legacy plastered on posters in non-profits and hidden in footnotes after dying in financial precarity. I want the black feminist witches to want for nothing while they’re still breathing. I want us to have one more option outside of the precarity of applying to endless grants, selling our art work, enlisting in the university’s regime or holding down a full-time job that demands a split personality while requiring our sanity. Just one more option that has the power to produce thousands of other models, that’ll seed thousands more, making fractal facilitation a way of being.
It’s not lost on me that some of us feel unable to strike or divest because this system has us living in such a financially precarious state that it threatens our mental health daily. It’s not lost on me that the reason you haven’t broken your silence about Palestine is because it may compromise your job and your job is the only reason your household has healthcare. It’s not lost on me that our fear is rooted in real threats to our survival. We’ve seen what they do to yellow eyed women. It is not lost on me that we are living in a time of impossible choices and I just want to give us one more.
When presented with no survivable options we create them. We call in what we need, grab our tools and let the memory of our hands sculpt alternatives into being. We practice remembering. Through the practice we learn how to return to our desire, how to alchemize fear into love, how to root inside the values of our ancestors in order to develop creative offers that support our breath and provide frameworks for survivable options.
Learning how to price our offers, how to create frameworks for delivering our offers, learning list building strategies and developing sales funnels that feel aligned with the values we’ve returned to are some of the skills I’ve learned and teach inside the Seed A World Retreat. Skills that make survival as a yellow eyed alchemist feel possible in a world severing our relationship with spirit in order to maintain control. Spiritual reclamation is a journey the state can never reward us for. Again, if the prompt is, “How do we get the abolitionist alchemists paid?”. One response might be, “Let’s teach them how to create an offer the the fiber artists and healers can find refuge in, let’s teach them how to quilt the worlds they desire together, and while we’re at it, let’s teach them how to create containers for practicing inside those new worlds”.
What irresistible portals are the people you dream of serving waiting on? Offers as containers that might bring the two worlds spinning away from each other a little closer, if only for a moment, but just long enough for us to experiment with inventing new models of belonging, cooperative economics and mutual aid that build on the old ones. Generating money that will go to mutual aid request flyers and loved one’s Venmo accounts instead of the stock market and the distance between the two worlds spinning away from each other decreases little by little. Using our time, art, ideas, sweat, tears, spit trying to pay back a social debt that can never be repaid we dream up creative offers with the full hearted belief that this is just one strategy of millions to help us collectively divest and make more space for our liberatory quilting.
This retreat was visioned for you if…
You are wanting to seed, deepen or return to an interdisciplinary creative practice that has the potential to become your primary source of income in a year.
You are a multi-hyphenate creative with an ecosystem of skills and curiosities who craves a community supporting you in gardening the interdisciplinary ecosystem instead of encouraging you to flattening it.
You’re craving values aligned creative marketing and branding strategies for locating and communicating the narrative thread weaving your research, projects and offer together.
You thrive in decolonial learning environments centering the values of collective liberation and benefit from structured frameworks, templates, timelines and accountability.
You have an existing, income generating, creative practice but lately it has felt misaligned with your deep desire and values keeping you in loops of procrastination, disinterest and burn out.
You have an existing creative offer but have hesitated on scaling it to become your primary source of income, worried monetization will compromise its pleasure and integrity.
You are working a full-time job or stringing together gigs misaligned with your values, politics, income goals, pace of working, and/or the needs of your body.
Come join us in tomorrow’s workshop if this retreat sounds like it has been visioned for you and feels right on time. We’ll locate your deep desire in your interdisciplinary practice and explore how it can begin to fund your entire creative ecosystem without compromising your breath or a single one of your values.
What Seeda School Worldbuilders are saying about the retreat…
“I find it difficult to express in words just how impactful the Seeda School Retreat was for me as a clayworker, herbalist, teacher, and activist. Seeda School contextualized our work as multidisciplinary artists in the revolution and helped us all to abandon mentalities of scarcity that are upheld by colonialism and white supremacy. Ayana has put so much time, effort, and care into every piece of her retreat and it shows. Even as someone who already had a creative offer established, I gained so much wisdom from the content and discussions that I am confident will only improve the success of my offers, along with one of the most tender, caring, and uplifting communities that anyone could ask for. I am infinitely grateful for the work Ayana does in bolstering us artists and creating containers for the radical dreaming of better worlds. <3”
— Taylor Rae, Fall 2023 Cohort
Ready to enroll? Save your spot in the upcoming cohort today and get a free invitation to schedule a Creative Advising session after the retreat where you recieve 1:1 support with finalizing your offer price, framework and launch strategy. No questions asked refund available all the way until the first day of class.