Introducing the Treehouse
A monthly study group for seeding a creative practice that engages our political imagination
We know this place as the North Carolina Black River, they know it as Cykofa. A parallel universe suspended among the past and future — where cornrows are cryptography keys, data farms are data forests, the weaving loom is a computer, cotton is encoded with freedom dreams, and chain link fencing from demolished prisons is used as architectural membrane woven with plant life. They’ve always stored their data in the circles of time found inside the trunks of ancient bald cypress trees plugged into the swamp, but what happens when Seeda finds a rip in the dendrochronological memory, exposing select datasets from our world?
You are there and by there I mean here.
Inside that question. Inside a school without grades. Inside a school without punishment. Inside a school without police. Where “eachother” is one word, where the people become a red line and we add new languages of being to our collective dictionary.
“Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be, she said: ‘What if we joined our wildernesses together?’ Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.”
— Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019), pg. 491
I became so obsessed with the world I was building on the page that I began to accept nothing short of living inside of it. “We know this place as the North Carolina Black River, they know it as Cykofa…”, I chanted that paragraph like an incantation. I braided my hair into encrypted patterns and made ceramic vessels as Cykofian artifacts to drink from. I asked you to meet me at the river stained black by our memory and we created a school where we let our wildernesses touch.
The living rooms in Cykofa are wombs made of chain link fencing, above ground shelters cradled between two trees weaving the fencing with their interlocking branches, fractals suspending a hush harbor in midair. What rehearsals of home2 might play out inside this Treehouse? A monthly study group for establishing a creative practice that engages our political imagination. Inside the Seeda Retreat we go through the process of seeding and releasing a creative offer rooted in a desire for collective liberation. The purpose of the retreat is to gather, speculate and invent even more containers for practicing new ways of being. But where and how does the desire for collective liberation get seeded? Where, when, how does that seed originate and how do we water it with our political imagination through a cadence of practice? If the Seeda Retreat asks, what is our form? The Seeda Treehouse asks what are our ceremonies?
The word “essay,” in French, means “to try” or “to attempt”3. What Are Your Ceremonies? is a question I asked myself and all of us in an essay from May 15, 2022. I’ve attempted to live into that question every day. I still don’t have the answers but one thing I know for sure: people amplify the power of ceremony. Ceremony also requires commitment. Inside the Treehouse we practice a daily, weekly, monthly commitments to attempting. Attempting, inventing and rehearsing worlds where safety is relation. What does skill development look like here? Will you live inside this question with me? Inside this practice of attempting, where we have Worldbuilding Workshops on the second week of every month and a Daily Seed Study Groups on the fourth week of every month.
Register for this free Worldbuilding Workshop on Tuesday, July 16th to learn more, ask questions and determine if this practice space feels right on time for you. Enrollment opens Monday, July 15th.
“Organizing is an ongoing process that extends beyond protests and mass mobilization, that is rooted in building relationships, sharing knowledge, analysis, and skill, and strengthening communities. It requires us to build organizations that can serve as spaces for political education, skills building, mutual aid, as well as what emergent strategists refer to as communities of practice and network nodes. I firmly believe that organizing is necessary to build the world we want.”
— Andrea J. Ritchie, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies (2023), pg. 37
I wouldn’t mind living in someone else’s imagination if it wasn’t so damn small. The colonial imaginary we’re living in is suffocating, to put it mildly. No room to play, no room to dance, no room to move. I used to believe creative practice alone would free us, leading to a personal transformation that would necessitate collective transformation. I was wrong. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson teaches, “It became clear to me that how we live, how we organize, how we engage the world — the process — not only frames the outcome, it is the transformation”4. Form follows freedom. Simpson continues, “How molds then gives birth to the present. The how changes us. How is the theoretical intervention”. Creative practice without a political framework is just that. Worldbuilding is neutral; it can and does advance agendas of white supremacy, capitalism, zionism and the western imperial project at large. A creative practice that isn’t informed and accountable to any political framework might make us comfortable, but will not make us safe. A creative practice that isn’t informed and accountable to any political framework might make us happy, but will not make us free.
In Cykofa, there are no written words and data is stored in the memory of cloth. In Cykofa, there is no hardware, only the software of blankets, braids, bodies as nodes interfacing with an ecosystem of networked intelligence. In Cykofa, dance is the first language and movement is, both, how we organize and how we breathe.
May we join wildernesses5 inside the Treehouse?
I arrived here via the On Being podcast episode, “On the Insistence of Joy” with Krista Tippet and Ross Gay originally aired July 25, 2019.
What Toni Morrison said about home: “It’s a safe place, nobody is out to get you. Everybody doesn’t like you, some people might dislike you but no one is going to hurt you and everybody is going to help you whether they like you or not.” She says, “that’s the spiritual and physical safety of home”.
Ibid.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2017), pg. 19 via Andrea J. Ritchie, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies (2023), pg. 37-38
“And what if the wilderness — perhaps the densest wild in there — thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) — is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith’s term, the ‘intolerable.’ It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?
Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.
I’m saying: What if that is joy?”
— Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019), pg. 49-50
so excited for this development of the treehouse 🤎 hoping to join the next season as my summer has been overtaken already, but this is such a fantastic and juicy offering 🪺🪴