Join Us in Dispatching Off Social Media
It’s the Worldbuilder’s Way
Inside Seeda School we practice cultivating an embodied sense of safety, trust and belonging. We trust ourselves to deliver the work that is ours to do, not only because we’re (re)membering our whole body is an intuitive interface for our ecosystem before the e-waste project of liquid screens, but also because we’re gathering clarity and pouring water onto the organizing framework that is our values system. Inside the classroom of the Treehouse we learn how to use this system of values as the framework for our creative offer but also our practice of living.
You know the thing we do where we collectively remember we’re all live wires hosting immense stores of data critical to our survival and we can trust ourselves and eachother not to trip. Where we remember relational safety makes it possible to stand tall and finally allow ourselves to belong inside the fullest expression of our desire, our sovereign selves.
In this return to our wholeness is a return to spirit where we’re no longer afraid of the other — afraid of our own reflection. In fact, we grab them up in our outstretched hands, our twin, our dream collaborator, our inner child, we stop running from them in fear and instead get close enough to hold our desire with a love that will never run out.
My deepest desire has always been to find you, which is to say, to reunite with my sovereign self. Not the self that’s afraid of the dark, I already met her, but the one that dances in it. Dances in that space absent of light where our skin, the first liquid interface, glows with metallic memory, a reflective truth, a mirror made mantra and we’re able to make out the length of our longing inside this middle of nowhere.
This is where discipline softens into devotion. I will look for you inside the database of desire, the ash of ancestors, the body of home, the bend of time, the forest of education, the system of our values, the chorus of community, the language of love, the compost of culture, the blackness of the river, the longing of dignified labor, the site of spirit.
These locations make The Worldbuilder’s Way Compass helping us navigate our journey toward the erotic as power where spiritual severance is sutured and (re)memberance becomes newly possible.
As we collectively investigate our relationship to social media, may we also begin to speculate and dream up what form our creativity might take on alternative platforms. So we may find ourselves and eachother once more, dancing in the dark, no longer needing to have all the answers before we make a move.
Inside this movement our Creative Dispatch might take the form of a:
Newsletter: Short story, poem, recipes, spells, advice column, astrology readings, prayer, art exhibition reflection, interview with friends or elder, personal/political essay, love letter, critical pop culture review
Podcast: Solo episodes on navigating desire, interview series with friends, dj set from living room, song, oral history podcast with neighbors or elders, guided meditation, soundscape of ancestral lands, voice memo collage
Video: short film, video collage, experimental vlog, short gardening tutorial, video of work in progress, rescued archival footage, mini-courses, video game streaming with political commentary, video art
Live Stream: Ask me anything (AMA), interactive monologue, sacred coworking container, live tutorial with Q&A, live dance lessons, live guided meditation, live teach-in with guests, studio visit, live interviews
Wild Card: Playlists, collages, an unnamed form of multimedia, self portraits, code snippets, painting, drawing, images of maquettes, image from microscope, image from telescope, a weekly quilt, ceramic, or jewelry experiment
Again, the list is as endless as our love. May you share your choreography for dancing in the dark so we may learn a move or two? What form might your creative expression take off social media?
Let’s find out together inside the Treehouse, a space supporting you with breathing through the return to a public creative practice and releasing an income generating creative offer in alignment with your values. The air is thick with grief, but we remind eachother to move every week because release just feels good. Bringing the ridges of the wound together again, closing the separation colonization invented, our desire is to suture the severance. To find eachother as we locate ourselves. To practice (re)membering, the work we offer to the collective and the work we must offer to ourselves is allowed to be one and the same.
This is the Worldbuilder’s Way.
I hope you’ll join us. Enrollment closes today.
What Worldbuilders Are Saying About Seeda School:
“Being led through the Seed A World Retreat by Ayana offered me the sea I know I can rely on to float me above all that attempts to drown me. Each of the nine action steps helped to buoy my practice & deep sense of embodiment utilizing the full power of Audre Lorde's uses of the erotic.
Ayana's excavating groundwork reminds us that the ability to float already resides in the power of our expansive breath. If we can dream it, then it is safe to trust that it is already done for not just ourselves but folks dreaming of the work we are producing.
The world you desire to build already exists within you & the worldbuilding framework helped me realize that our work can support so many others if we break through the fertile ground where we stand alone. In fact, through the worldbuilding framework, Ayana facilitates that we are never truly alone because the Sankofa sensibility circularly connects us to our past, present, & future.
If you're ready to invite folks to wade into the sea of your worldbuilding & transformative offer then sign up! Trust that when it rains it pours & your abundant desires will grow & be witnessed by the outstretched limbs of folks in the Seeda School community with you.”
— Kay Brown,
“Ayana has created a thriving Black feminist counterpublic that combines the speculative imaginary with the power of presence and action to manifest worlds that exist outside of and beyond oppressive systems, reminding us that we don’t have to cut off any parts of ourselves in the work.
As a participant in both the Seed a World Retreat and the Treehouse over the past year, I have found that accepting Ayana’s invitation into communal worldbuilding has completely transformed the way I think about both engaging with and funding my creative practice. Their gentle invocation around returning consistently to our work to build a nurturing cadence of outreach via the weekly dispatch, with its focus on curiosity and research, as well as their guidance on developing an income-generating offer has shown me the value of cultivating a creative ecosystem where all parts feed into and nourish each other.
I came for the emphasis on grounding our art in interdisciplinary wildness and opacity. I stay for the soft weave of community that grounds us all together in what Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls “an interdependent ceremony.” Ayana and my fellow worldbuilders are holding each other through this time of escalating genocide and rising fascism worldwide and together we are creating full universes of possibility to, in Christina Sharpe’s words, “imagine otherwise.””
— Elliott Silverstein,
“Seeda School is the most nourishing, electric, brilliant, inspired, held space I have been lucky enough to be a part of. I entered the retreat from the depths of a creative winter, and Ayana built the container for a true and revelatory spring. She has architected the balance of structure, rigorous tools, juicy inspiration, accountability, and relational support that will help you (finally) recognize and birth the thing that has been calling you. And more than that, Seeda is the invitation to manifest the luscious version of a life you didn’t know you were allowed to have.”
— Olivia Vagelos,