Today’s Tools Build Tomorrow’s Dreams

Refusing perfectionism, planting seeds instead

Image Description: Standing in the archway of a crumbling brick wall slowly being reclaimed by the forest while wearing an unbleached cotton jumpsuit I made inspired by the legacy of black feminist labor. The jumpsuit features deatchable sleeves hanging at the arm holes and I am gazing into the distance leaning against the destablized bricks. Photo: Chukwudumebi Ezefili

“Black feminists and novelists have opened up uncomfortable questions about a deep praxis that can and does undo the world.” 

— Sharon Patricia Holland, an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life (2023), “Chapter 1 — Vocabularies: Possibility”, pg. 10

Mesh Networks of Study

You open the glass doors and walk into an ecosystem the smell of intergenerational belonging, neighbors, books and quiet aliveness. You haven’t been in a space so incessantly public in years, a different kind of card is required here and it isn’t debit. You scan the wide open terrain of collective study and you find the group you’re meeting with. You initially connected online and this is your first time meeting them away from keyboard — it takes a minute for your brain to adjust to your debunked height assumptions, you’re noticing how the tenderness of their hands dancing in the air take you by surprise, you are warmed by the light in their eyes that Zoom fails to capture, thank goodness. It makes this moment that much sweeter. 

You’re convening on the occasion of a self-organized study group using an open source curriculum on black feminist creative praxis to collectively imagine how we might make the revolution irresistible through our cultural work and you’re not alone. It’s Tuesday evening and you’re inside one of the thousands of study groups happening through the decentralized network of collective study campuses called public libraries. You’re at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C. at 901 G St, but there are other study groups convening across the country in the public libraries of Flint, Michigan, Jackson, Mississippi, New Orleans, Louisiana, Oakland, California, Birmingham, Alabama, Houston, Texas, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Detroit, Michigan, Atlanta, Georgia, Lahaina, Maui and many more.

You make a classroom in mid air using the form of the open circle, a table whose gravity pulled the group in its direction. You softly catch up, reintroduce yourselves and hold space for the folks who weren’t able to make this evening’s study group due to caregiving commitments, grief and/or a friend’s birthday party. You check-in on them and ask how their needs might be supported in the group chat you all formed then you navigate to the curriculum’s online repository. This week is all about how black feminist performance is a praxis of quotidian worldbuilding in the everyday. The curriculum reminds us Ruth Wilson Gilmore said “abolition is life in rehearsal” and the group decides to use this quote as a prompt for gathering books and other media materials to engage in an open studio session together. Using the prompts inside the curriculum and the materials gathered from the ecosystem of the library, you get to studying¹.

One study group participant begins sketching poems, another person brought their watercolors and begins transmuting with memory and hue, another brought their crochet hooks and tends to the fiber of time, one is taking this time to braid their son’s hair and another is using this window to synthesize new community agreements that arose from a workshop they facilitated last weekend. After an hour of quiet research and critical composting, you come back to the open classroom you formed around the table. You all share what came up after working with the material of the curriculum and the public library. A couple of you stay back to make pull requests for suggested updates to the open source curriculum’s repository based on the reflections inside today’s study group. Another pair of you branch off to pick up groceries for one of the folks who responded to the offering of care inside the group chat. You all promise to do it again next week. 

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

A vision of an autonomous, decentralized school that didn’t own property because the campus was a mycelial network of thousands of public libraries and the curriculum was a decolonial framework and repository alive with weekly updates via a series of branches, pull requests and merges.

This is a vision I’ve carried around in my body ever since I learned about open source programming back in 2017. A vision of an autonomous, decentralized school that didn’t own property because the campus was a mycelial network of thousands of public libraries and the curriculum was a decolonial framework and repository alive with weekly updates via a series of branches, pull requests² and merges. The curriculum would help hold practicing black feminist, interdisciplinary artists, healers and educators in their work of making revolution irresistible through worldbuilding. This vision felt so large, wild and emergent that I filed it in the back of my creative consciousness for years — making an occasional appearance when a conversation presented an obvious invitation to share. In hindsight, it was the scale of the vision that served as one of the reasons I was able to put off starting Seeda School for so long. I told myself I need to get a big girl job first. I need to learn how to teach first. I need to do more research on black feminist pedagogies first. I need to move to a particular city first. I need to go back to school first. I need to have more contacts first. I need a certain amount of years of experience first. Operating from inside a belief system of lack, I subconsciously told myself again and again, “I need a certain level of external validation in order to become worthy of the decadent pleasure and powerful eroticism of this calling first”.

My spirit validated the vision. What more did I need? I found myself postponing the joy of the call year after year. Not yet understanding, inside the call is where all the necessary provisions already lived. So often we rob ourselves of experiencing the lessons we’ll need tomorrow by not starting with what we have today. At this very moment, do I know how to help facilitate an open source curriculum and collectively steward frameworks for a decentralized network of thousands of black feminist study groups simultaneously happening every week in public libraries across the forests, deserts, coastlines, wetlands and urban ecosystems of the United States? Not yet. Do I have the tools³ to plant what might feel like the initial seeds, right now? Absolutely. And so do you. What’s that fractal, juicy, erotic, irresistible vision that returns to you in your dreams, in expansive conversations with strangers, during morning walks when you allow your mind to drift into liberated landscapes? In 2022 I finally opened the doors of Seeda School whose name is short for “seed data”, with the intention that the curriculum would always be informed by the seed data of black feminism and the collective imagination inside our collective study. 

The Journey is The Dream

A year later a Seeda School learner recommended me to help co-imagine, co-build and co-facilitate an open source curriculum on the topic of the decentralized web⁴ and I was hired as a creative consultant on the project last week. An opportunity that might not have presented itself had I not opened Seeda School this time last year, with the tools I had. When I recognized the connection, I smiled to myself and said a prayer of gratitude to my ancestors for ordering my steps in ways that exceeded my expectations every time. I said a prayer thanking my creative community who wrap my work and heart with deep tenderness and possibility. Prentis Hemphill reminds us, “Perfectionism is a commitment to habitual self-doubt”. In what ways is self doubt causing you to block the harvest your seeds might provide? We need your nourishment. Please don’t wait to live the questions because you’re waiting to have all the answers. I promise, that day will never come. Instead of committing to perfectionism, what we might commit to is planting seeds. Planting seeds with the creative skills, resources and tools we have on hand. The Seeda Syllabus was the initial seed I planted, then came the Seeda School newsletter which reminded me that writing is another seed, the catalyst, the food for the work and practical rehearsing we must do whose energy “cannot translate into anything but revolutionary movement”⁵. But as Fargo Nissim Tbakhi reminds us in “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” writing alone is not enough — it can and must inspire decisive action. The dreams of tomorrow require the tools we have today. The blank syllabus turns into a writing practice which turns into a school which turns into one node out of thousands inside a decentralized infrastructure of collective study made possible through our web of imagination and wefted strands of care. On the paths of our faith walks we trust we will pick up the necessary tools for stewardship at every scale of our freedom dreams, all while planting seeds that can and does undo the world.

Come plant seeds with us this winter! Kick off the new year by joining the Seed A World Retreat Winter 2024 Cohort. Open enrollment into the retreat begins on January 15th and ends on January 26th with the first day of class starting on January 30th. You’ll want to mark your calendar for this one! In the meantime, I want to invite you to download and review the most recent version (v2) of the Seed A World Syllabus for more information on the retreat.

With desire,

Ayana

1. “Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. he notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity.” — Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, pg. 110

2. “Pull requests let you tell others about changes you've pushed to a branch in a repository on GitHub. Once a pull request is opened, you can discuss and review the potential changes with collaborators and add follow-up commits before your changes are merged into the base branch.” Source: GitHub

3. “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.” — Audre Lorde. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110-114. 2007. Print.

4. “The decentralized web is a research program which proposes to reorganize the Internet using peer-to-peer or federated infrastructure rather than centralized data hosting services.” Source: Wikipedia

5. “In this way, what the long middle of revolution requires, what Palestine requires, is an approach to writing whose primary purpose is to gather others up with us, to generate within them an energy which their bodies cannot translate into anything but revolutionary movement. This is what Boal modeled for us in his theatrical experiments, which were dedicated to empowering audiences to act, to participate in a creative struggle to envision and embody alternatives. For Boal, theater was not revolution, but it was a rehearsal for the revolution, meant to gather communities together in that rehearsal. Creative work readies us for material work, by offering a space to try out strategies, think through contradictions, remind us of our own agency.” — Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” published by Protean Mag on December 8, 2023