The Worldbuilder’s Way
An Algorithm for Actualization
“...We cannot defer the work of dreaming and practicing new worlds to some imaginary, more visionary people; we need to exercise the discipline of making that work part of our everyday conversations and actions even as we fight the violence of this one.”
— Andrea J. Ritchie, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies (2023), pg. 51
I’m listening to Ever New1 by Glenn Copeland and watching a child dance across the ecosystem of my veins. Somehow from somewhere, somethingidontknow, like shame crawls through for not considering this work. But isn’t this breath and isn’t breath work here? Doesn’t death stream through every screen and isn’t breath work here? What would you call it? Survival inside a country whose biggest export is fear? Isn’t breath work, here? I ask and ask and ask again: How do we do it together? How do we take turns? How do we balance the weight across the network? Embodying load balancing2 databases, what’s encrypted in our backs they turned into tree trunks sweating black water? The smog of necropolitics is thick but we’re thicker. Audre Lorde wrote into the glitch and snickered: black feminist breathwork is an energy source. These are the uses of the erotic when it turns into power3. Breathwork. I called my ancestors and they called back, “fear kept you safe, now it’s keeping you small”. Inside full moon dreams they ask, “will you hand it over?”...“my child, will you practice release?” Turns out learning to create was the easy part, the skill is learning to let go.
She plots, she plans4. This is for the women, trans and gender expansive folks who feel their power boiling right underneath the interface of their flesh. This is for those who know they must be intentional about their rage because they can breathe fire with their words, more powerful than sticks and stones, their grammar can break bones. This is for those who can bend time with their attention and build worlds around the molten core of their desire. Shaping layers of liquid, mantle, crust and black gold fertile with composted empires — holding seeds for a future that hasn’t happened yet but must5.
She can see without images6.
She listens while she looks.
This is for the worldbuilders with great grandmothers named Big Ma who tended to flower gardens they never cut and talked to their dead as if they were sitting in that empty chair over there. This is for the worldbuilders with great grandmothers named Honey who had beauty salons in basements and medicine rooms next door filled with candles and walls covered in newspaper, for humming, for praying, for screaming, for howling, for singing, for dancing7.
What if this is The Worldbuilder’s Way?
Where making something out of nothing but the material of memory is the creative practice. Spinning visions, once held only by spirit and the page, into realities where breath feels possible. The Worldbuilder’s Way is to acknowledge: to be apolitical is political8, especially considering the power we wield. It is negligent. Worldbuilding is a neutral verb. The world we’re currently breathing in is encoded with the algorithms of white supremacy, racial capitalism, carceral choregraphies and patriarchal values that make the biological betrayal of colonization possible. What algorithms will we encode into the air of our worlds? Algorithms of black feminism, abolition, indigenous wisdom, perhaps? What might breathwork feel like here?
I find myself returning to the instructions, functions9, protocols and recipes embedded in black feminism, abolition and indigenous wisdom to initiate and in(form) my political imagination most often. In walking The Worldbuilder’s Way you will find every political framework is embedded with a spell. Just as capitalism is a faith based practice, abolition holds the promise of a future we might not be able to see but can smell. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, abolition is an algorithm encoded in the millions of quotidian subprograms we’re already running10.
Hair salons as day cares
Grandma’s sweet potato bread recipe as currency11
Aunties churning pots of sou-sou12
Gilmore teaches us abolition is presence, Alexis Pauline Gumbs teaches us presence is practice. We wouldn’t mind living in the imagination of others if it wasn’t so small, so hard to breathe…if they had imagined a world that centers life, that treats breath as sacred and the body as something to be(hold), not suffocate.
Black feminist practice is breath work memory work self work collective work
Embarking on this work — welcoming grief, transformation and accountability with a political framework that isn’t terrified by the wildness of the beyond-species-other is The Worldbuilder’s Way, but what is our compass for navigating this practice? What’s our algorithm for actualization?
I am breathing all my fire, all my power, all I know into the vessels of these weekly offerings. Hoping you catch it and shape it into a globe, actualizing a world, a practice with desire at its core. Hoping you catch it13 and shape it into a life, practicing the cadence of release, giving thanks to generations forward and back14.
Inside the breath work, a compass came through where true north is always ancestry, unlearning is a process of initiation, and surrendering to the ecstasy of release is how we use the erotic as power.
This is The Worldbuilder’s Way15.
Register for the free Worldbuilding Workshop to learn more about your Element X and The Treehouse, a creative accountability circle for planting daily seeds and releasing weekly offerings where we not only locate our desire, but develop the skill of practicing inside of it.
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”
— Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power (1978)
“Sci-fi obsessed, living in near isolation, musician Glenn Copeland wrote and self-released Keyboard Fantasies in rural Ontario in 1986. Recorded on an Atari-powered home-studio, the cassette featured seven tracks of a curious folk-electronica hybrid, a sound realised far before its time. Three decades on, from the warmth of his neoprene-insulated garage studio, Glenn Copeland (formerly Beverly Glenn-Copeland) began to receive emails from young men across the world, thanking him for the music they’d recently discovered.”
“In computing, load balancing is the process of distributing a set of tasks over a set of resources (computing units), with the aim of making their overall processing more efficient. Load balancing can optimize response time and avoid unevenly overloading some compute nodes while other compute nodes are left idle.” (Source: Wikipedia)
Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power (1978)
“The loophole of retreat…
a dark hole
an attic space
she plots, she plans
she dreams of possibility from within impossible strictures of enclosure and confinement
her escape is immanent, as her imagination is boundless
her enclosure is an incubator for a practice of refusal and a roadmap to freedom.”
— Tina M. Campt, “The Loophole of Retreat—An Invitation”, December 2019, published by e-flux Journal
“The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t happened yet but must. It is an attachment to a belief in what should be true, which impels us to realize that aspiration. It’s the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be. It’s a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now.” — Tina Campt, “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity”, Listening to Images (2017), p. 17.
“You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures.” — Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture (December 7, 1993)
“The world is dying
In so many ugly ways
And humans with it.
And yet, against all odds
I realize
There will always be a Beverly Buchanan
Arising from a virtual “nowhere”
To cobble together the broken pieces
-Left over from the beauty
That is destroyed-
And paint them red
For dancing.”
— Alice Walker, Beverly Buchanan, Artist, 1940-2015 (August 4, 2015)
Ayana Zaire Cotton, Being Apolitical Is Political Beloved 🇵🇸: Invitations from inside collective grief and study (October 23, 2023)
“In computer programming, a function, procedure, method, or routine (also known as a subprogram) is a callable unit of software logic that has a well-defined interface and behavior and can be invoked multiple times.” (Source: Wikipedia)
“Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Gilmore and Lambert, 2019)
I can’t stop thinking about the story Kay Brown of
told us inside the Seed A World Retreat, when they received a sacred tattoo service in exchange for their grandmother’s sweet potato bread recipe.A susu or sou-sou or osusu or asue (also known as a merry-go-round, Partner, or Pawdna in Jamaica; sol in Haiti, san in Dominican Republic, and Njangi in Cameroon) is a form of rotating savings and credit association, a type of informal savings club arrangement between a small group of people who take turns by throwing hand as the partners call it. The name is used in Africa (especially West Africa) and the Caribbean. Each person contributes periodically the same amount to a common fund; the total contributions are disbursed to a single member of the group. Each time, the recipient changes so that eventually all members are recipients. (Source: Wikipedia)
“WALKING. SINGING. BUILDING. LAUGHING. LEARNING. LOVING. TEACHING. BEING. Hey. Brother/Brotha. Sister/Sista. Here is my hand. Catch the fire…and live. live. livelivelive. livelivelive. live. live.” — Sonia Sanchez, “Catch the Fire”
“I think it is so important for us to try to extricate ourselves from the idea that the measure of value is one human life, and that if it is not achieved in our lifetimes, it is not important. If people who were enslaved held those ideas, they would not have struggled so much. They were struggling for us. They were struggling for the possibility of a new world. If we imagine the ways in which people 100 years from now, 200 years from now, will be thankful to us for doing the work that we are doing today, then that means that we will have played a part in the production of that future and that we will be spiritually present in that future. That, to me, means that our goal, our primary goals, are to create new arenas for struggle, to guarantee that it continues from one generation to the next.” — Angela Davis
The Worldbuilder’s Way: A Black Feminist Guide to Actualizing Desire is the tentative title of the book I’m incubating inspired by this testimonial from Chinyere, the black feminist practitioner of
: “Words cannot express enough how grateful I am for the blessing that is both Ayana and Seeda School. Enrolling in the retreat was an immediate yes for me — where the weekly meditations and facilitations from Ayana felt like sacred invitations to return — return to community, return to self, return to Spirit, return to our gardens. Like The Artist's Way, but through a decolonial Black feminist lens, I continue to find Seeda School and its Retreat as an evergreen gift and artistic nourishment that, as a result, enriches the tending of my spiritual and literary practice — The Conflicted Womanist.” — Chinyere Erondu, Fall 2023