What’s The Difference Between a Craving and a Desire?
Permission to Play is Always Ours
“No matter how I held myself, what contortions I forced my body into. The glow was irrepressible.”1 I read this dream as an allegory for an intense feminine and feminist desire that resists concealment, bursts beyond interiority, and permeates the space and people around it.
— La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (2021), “A Portrait of the Artist As A Mad Black Woman”, pg. 123
Dear Worldbuilder,
Today I went down my graduate school rabbit hole again.
And the usual end of day refusal returned.
This time, not because of the trauma of undergrad. This time, because I detected the craving.
What’s the difference between a craving and a desire?
A craving is here today and gone tomorrow. The craving of graduate school will be gone tomorrow. The desire for an expanded sense of creative permission will not. Desire is here to stay. A reliable, persistent, annoying, erotic, eternal flame. A heat that won’t leave you alone even on the nights it feels like it might be easier to shiver to death.
Heat says no.
Desire says no.
Love says no.
What happens on the other side of remembering creative permission is all we’re after?
We crave the degrees, the awards, the fellowships, the certificates, the Forbes list, the artist studio, whatever our gold star is that says,
“Okay, you can go play now”
“You’re approved”
“You’re qualified”
“It’s safe to go outside”
Forgetting permission to play is already, always ours. The Black Outdoors2 calls us home and we arrive to it’s wilderness with our songs, our poems, our paintings, our collard greens, our software, our films, our dance, our syllabi of desire.
What happens on the other side of remembering we are the adults now and we determine when recess is?
And what if we decided it was everyday? In between the lips of luxury that is a quiet morning or the warm pocket of pleasure in between the legs of your inhale and exhale.
Desire was always the first and only qualification needed to do the work we came here to do.
Cravings come and go.
Desire is here to stay.
How will you design your creative ecosystem with desire at the center? Desire as the core power source, the erotic eternal flame. The irrepressible glow, bursting beyond your interior world; keeping our hearts and imaginations warm amidst the chill of colonial order.
In the Worldbuilding Workshop this past Tuesday, we located the eternal flame of desire powering our entire creative ecosystem. That was just Part 1 of our Worldbuilding Workshop series. Registration is free for Part 2 and you’ll also receive the recording of Part 1 where we learned how to seed a world rooted in the truth of our desire.
If you’re ready to join us in the Treehouse enrollment is now open and closes October 21st. Learn more, download the fall syllabus and enroll here.
With irrepressible glow,
Ayana
🍁 P.S. Feel free to share the flyer below for Part 2 of the Worldbuilding Workshop Series with a friend, lover, co-worker, cousin, hair braider or neighbor who might be interested in learning how to financially resource an interdisciplinary practice with you this fall and beyond inside The Treehouse. 👇🏾
Ntozake Shange, Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), p. 27
“Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study”. Series Editors: J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak. Overview: Black Outdoors is dedicated to the study of alternative ecologies and socialities beyond logics of property, sovereignty, and propertied self-possession. It points to forms of social life exceeding the racial, sexual, gendered, economic, and neurological protocols of self- and civic administration and of the normatively human. Indeed, Black Outdoors attends to figurations of the outdoors as “black,” where blackness exceeds regulation.