For The Worldbuilders Ep. 027

Invitations from Inside Collective Grief and Study

Image description: A portrait of me with long braids parted down the middle, wearing a black rubberized canvas dress I made with detachable sleeves. I’m holding myself as one sleeve covers my right eye and I look away from the camera. Photo: Chukwudumebi Ezefili

Hi there,

It’s me again. I’m experimenting with a new email cadence where the newsletter goes out every Monday and an invitation to listen to the latest podcast episode goes out on Thursdays. We’ll see how this goes.

It’s Week 2 inside the Seed A World Retreat and it’s the second week of the active and on-going genocide in Gaza. The New Inquiry article titled The Second Week published by the Palestinian Youth Movement on October 24th lists the death toll, names and ages. Seeing the ages calcifies the rage. Inside Tuesday’s retreat workshop and inside the podcast I talk about how I’ve fortified my nervous system to metabolize wave of grief after grief after grief. Then I wake up this morning to the news in Maine.

Whenever the collective grief and rage threatens to wipe me out (and sometimes it does), I root in the memory that our capacity to love and imagine new worlds is as relentless as the violence. So we gather and we pray and we protest and we rage and we read and we remember the world we’re dreaming of is embedded in the world we have.

With desire,

Ayana