Enrollment Into Seeda School Closes Today!
Where We Cultivate the 3 Core Themes Inside Creative Permission
Dear Worldbuilder,
After Thursday’s Worldbuilding Workshop on “Resourcing A World Rooted in the Truth of Your Needs” we kicked off a 3-part email series on a concept I call our “creative allowance”.
On the last day of open enrollment I want to break this concept down in case you weren’t able to join us.
Together we worked with the following prompt: My abundant number (expansive monthly income goal) would make me feel well resourced enough to take the following creative risk: [OFFER, BOOK, PROJECT, DECISION, MOVE, ETC.]
For example: My abundant number would make me feel well resourced enough to write a genre-bending book on desire and build a schoolhouse in the forest for black feminist worldbuilders.
What might your response to this prompt sound like? What creative allowance do you desire? Inside this prompt, revealing the creative allowance we’re after, is the keyword “feel”.
In my 10 years of creative practice I have found the “want underneath the want” usually boils down to these 3 themes:
Safety
Self-Trust
Belonging
What can this look like?
Safety
Let’s start with safety.
Have you ever felt like a creative offer, book, project, decision, move, RISK was summoning you despite yourself?
Could the final state of a work be so arbitrary, wherein what gets sent into the world has nothing to do with excellence or achievement or internal triumph—but rather, love? Your bewildered love of and for others, for the vocation itself, that allows you, not so much to complete something, but simply hand it off the moment you are called forth? When you are summoned, despite yourself?
Over the past several months I’ve had to make time and space for the genre-bending book on desire that wants to emerge out my creative practice, at times against my will.
I know I’m not alone…
You can see the creative project clear as day, you can hear the creative call on your spirit as clear as a church bell and still block out the image in your mind and muffle the ecstatic sounds ringing in your inner world. Almost as if it's trying to create a rupture to the outer world, almost as if it's trying to break free.
“It’s not the right season”
“There are already too many demands on my time”
“Thrusting the weight of my attention behind such a creative risk would be irresponsible”
“I don’t have the creative spacious in my schedule that this project deserves”
Are all reasons I would submit in an effort to bargain with my creative spirit. Even if these claims rang true, the calls kept getting louder and the visions clearer.
Now I know what I was truly after was creative permission, “creative allowance”. Not a budget, not a literary agent, not a degree, not some “healed” version of myself. Truth is, all of that was already woven into the journey and still stalled.
How might we allow ourselves to be summoned by the work — summoned by spirit — not despite ourselves, but in collaboration with ourselves?
How do we cultivate the felt sense of safety in our creative practices to answer the call and actualize the vision?
An allowance that only we can hand out.
This is what we reflected on in Thursday’s workshop and what we dive deeper into inside the Seed A World Retreat, where we remember we will not be punished for our desire. We remember our pleasure is not a safety hazard. We remember there isn’t some looming consequence that we can't survive on the other side of answering our creative callings.
Finally the ecstatic sound breaks free and ruptures out into the world in the shape of a book, a play, a trans-media landscape, an offer.
As soon as we allow it.
Self Trust
Now we can move on to cultivating a felt sense of trust in our creative skills and the financial viability of our creative desires.
Keeping with the concept of “creative allowance”, self-trust allows us to take the next most accessible action, pulling our desires into the present.
This concept is related to our shared resource, money. Yes. Inside Seeda School we’re clear that worlds need resources.
But this concept is also related to the creative permission we allow or withhold from ourselves and eachother. The creative offers, projects and portals we’re receiving guidance on how to open yet sometimes it can still feel all too daunting.
I’ve been there.
Maybe you can relate? The feeling of being haunted by your own creative brilliance. The feeling of being taunted by your own potential. Simultaneously tormented by the thought of “missing your window” while frozen at the sight of the boulder you’re presumed to know how to push up the hill.
This is what colonization does. This is what academia does. This is what capitalism does. Attempts to sever us from our spirit so completely that we think we’re alone, our power becomes alien to us and following ancestral wisdom seems “illogical” or “unreasonable”.
In 2019, I had a vision for a worldbuilding campus called Seeda Sanctuary with anti-disciplinary studios and cabins for artist residents, landscape architecture by black feminists and Cykofian artifacts filling the interiors. We would host retreats that were equal parts healing and creative. We would harvest produce from the forest garden and share meals in an open air cafeteria alongside birds, bees and butterflies. But how, how, how?
I was living in Brooklyn, away from the forest, while working 10 hour days teaching coding. “Who…me?”, “Who am I to…?”, “How, how, how?” was on repeat in my mind until 2020 when “who…me?” turned into “why not us?”, “who am I to…?” turned into “my ancestors prepared the way to…” and “how, how, how” was broken down into incremental steps I allowed myself to follow.
Seeda Syllabus turned into Seeda Press and Seeda Press turned into Seeda School and Seeda School will turn into Seeda Sanctuary. Why? Because now I know the boulder at the bottom of the hill is never ours to push alone.
What’s your project?
Maybe the dream brick and mortar book store starts out as a book club and the restaurant named after your grandmother starts out as you teaching cooking classes the way she taught you.
Will you trust yourself to take the first, most accessible step?
What creative offer has every single one of your life experiences prepared you to deliver?
In a system where “logic” and “reason” have always been technologies severing us from our creative spirit, we trust ourselves to escape loops of inaction rooted in fear and take incremental action rooted in love.
Belonging
The last core theme/feeling we cultivate inside our creative allowance aka “the creative permission slips we give ourselves in our practice” is: belonging.
This is the part where we allow ourselves to stop assuming we are an imposter inside our own desires.
Questions regarding safety, trust and belonging can inevitably bubble to the surface inside any creative vision or calling that isn’t in alignment with white supremacy culture.
The key isn’t to disregard these questions or to suppress our fears. Instead of hiding from the cop in our heads and hearts, instead of avoiding the culture of colonization that infiltrates our inner world, we address it and return to sender.
Next time you silently think to yourself some version of “who am I to…?”, “I don’t have the qualifications to…”, “I lack experience in…”
Catch it and name who you are, who you belong to.
For me this might sound like:
“My name is Ayana Zaire Cotton, with the legacy of Swahili, the Congo and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in my name. I’m the daughter of Darieta and Gibran. The older sister of Malik. The granddaughter of Cat. The great-granddaughter of flower gardener and death doula Big Ma. The great-granddaughter of hair salon owner and Hoodoo practitioner Honey. The great-great-granddaughter of my Native American ancestor Amisola. The granddaughter of saxophone player Abdul Karmin.”
Now it’s your turn.
Ancestor in training — name the people, the plants, the places, the pets that taught you everything you need to know.
Name who you are outside of white supremacy.
Return to the technology of belonging already embedded in your name, in your intuition, in the web of relation that made you possible.
We do this to remind ourselves belonging isn’t something we earn or acquire, interspecies belonging is a fact we’re born into.
This fact of belonging doesn’t require a degree, a resume or a certification.
But it does require practice.
How do we practice outside of the culture of white supremacy and inside the creative permission of belonging?
A belonging that is both interspecies and spiritual, ancestral and political. A felt sense of belonging that is both about us and beyond us.
This is exactly what we learn how to practice and root inside of within the Treehouse which now hosts the Seed A World Retreat.
Join us this fall in remembering belonging is always, already available in our inhale and exhale, inside creative community and inside the creative permission we allow.
The Invitation
Enrollment into the Seed A World Retreat closes today!
The Seed A World Retreat was designed to disrupt patterns of distrust and feelings related to lack of safety and belonging that can extend into our relationship with our ancestral wisdom and creative spirit. How might taking weekly, decisive action in our creative practices cultivate a self-trust that allows us to reclaim our power, serve others and generate income in our offers? Let’s find out together…
Join us over the next 9-weeks as we discover your creative offer emerging from your zone of deep desire, build the step-by-step framework informing your dream participant’s journey inside your offer and finally create the launch strategy for inviting your community to engage in the offer you designed with them in mind. You’ll also learn how to price and position your offers for both impact and sustainability.
I can’t wait to worldbuild with you this fall, with full creative permission and an abundance creative allowance!
So be it, see to it, breathe through it,
Ayana