Your Life, A World
How Do We Go Elsewhere While Staying Right Here?
Dear love, my love will sing 'til we reach the star
Two hеarts beating as one, we'll sеarch the heavens far
Our lives been full of hope and a great, burning fire
We'll reach our dream, darling, 'cause that's our desire
— Sharon Revoal, Reaching For Our Star (1980)
As I write this the genocide in Palestine is ongoing, the violence, displacement and famine in Sudan continues to ripple through our collective flesh, a new cop city is being seeded in forests on stolen land as if it is a fact of nature and the mining in the Congo is splitting me in two like a middle name. I understand how my last name came to be Cotton, because, Transatlantic Slave Trade. I understand how my first name came to be Ayana, because, pretty. But why my parents chose Zaire1 as a middle name seems to invoke something else. Something at the margins and right in the center. I write from this place, forever universal, forever personal, whose name could only be described as “middle”. An in-between space. How do we survive it without swinging too far to the pretty or too far to the slave trade? Too far into imagination or too far into despair?
There is this stable middle ground from where I know we can dream but how?
Palestinian writer Adania Shibli said, “reality was not generous enough, whereas literature appears to be more generous”2. And the truth of that echoed through my body like a church bell calling me to service, but what to do with it? What to do with it? I understand the invitation to imagine your life as a world is far too much to ask of us during this extended scorpio season of genocide and rupture and hurricane and torture and burning everything burning, but I will ask anyway. What do we do with it? This burning reality and our imagination of otherwise?
Our most urgent question in this time of great rupture and transformation seems to be: How do we go elsewhere while staying right here?
The bell compels me to ask again, how do we go elsewhere while staying right here?
I don’t know, but I know we must. Just like I don’t know how I’m going to write this book, but I know I must. This is how the worldbuilder starts. The goal must be this audacious, the vision must humble you. Worldbuilder’s don’t dream in projects, they dream in time zones, alternate realities, atmospheres of otherwise, parallel universes, maroon3 moons. These ulterior sites aren’t built to escape, they are built to make the present bearable. A world that can hold our life. Our breath, a declared variable, a const we must let4. There is a difference between escaping and letting. I need us to know the difference.
Okay let me try again. What if you imagined your life as a plot of land you owned, not a plot of land you are content on owing until death? What happens when you use this plot to dig, and dig, and dig for the truth in the terrain of your life? What if you dig for the truth long and wide enough to create space? Now there’s a living room and even a study which felt impossible to achieve at first. There’s a place for your books and your clothes and your wigs and your archive your people and it turns out, there’s even room for your body too. Through your work you dig and dig and dig and all of a sudden there’s all this open space and suddenly and wow we live at 2024 Present Place and suddenly and wow it ain’t so bad.
Let’s build a home on this stable ground suspended between every past and every future.
We take life slowly by, taking it. Reaching for this life, this star we ride the dust to elsewhere and forever, tomorrow and today. All in one single moment we remember we can finally live here, in this present one. Where the entire span of a lifetime is in one breath and here we can have as many as we want. Back to back, just like that. Visiting the past to tell the future, “You’re okay in this very moment. And this moment is all you have because, beloved, this moment is all you need”. Another lifecycle swells up from the tide of the diaphragm, the maroon moon pulls you closer with every breath. Vulnerability isn’t a liability here, it is a fact simultaneously acknowledged and honored, for once. Time slows, for once.
We remember we take life slowly, by taking it back in our hands. Dancing with it on the floor of the living room, a disco of divinity, at Present Place we become agents of love. Oozing audacious agency and erotic power. We made it back to our bodies and suddenly and wow it ain’t so bad. A creative homecoming. How do we do this? By treating our life as a world we can author and shape and share and build. Remember that impossible request I made of you in the beginning of our time together? That invitation shows up in your mailbox at Present Place everyday you wake up because it refuses to give up on you, your breath, your erotic life.
What will it take to RSVP, yes?
🌱 Seeda School News
🎙️ For the Worldbuilders podcast returns this week with our first episode titled “All Stories Rooted in Independence Are Lies”. I want to invite you to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube if you haven’t already. This way you’ll never miss an episode!
🕸️ This week is research week inside the Treehouse where we intentionally engage with the piles of links, PDFs or books we’ve amassed over the month. Engage with the dispatches of our peers and review the work we’ve released, shared or created over the course of the month. We take this week to honor our creative effort with intention and take note of any threads or themes we can weave into next month’s dispatches. Check out our Fall 2024 Are.na channel to engage with what we’ve been reading, listening to and dispatching.
🌳 Every month in the Treehouse we host a monthly workshop with marketing spells and strategies for weekly dispatches in the form of newsletters, podcasts, videos, multi-media worldbuilding content etc. Next week, December’s workshop is all about how we name and declare our values in our creative practice to attract co-conspirators, collaborators and opportunities in alignment with our desires and the worlds we’re building in our life and creative businesses. Current Treehouse members are invited to join us December 3rd at 12PM EST. Want to learn more about the Treehouse? Join our wait list to be notified about a free upcoming Worldbuilding Workshop!
“Zaire, officially the Republic of Zaire, was the name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1971 to 18 May 1997. Located in Central Africa, it was, by area, the third-largest country in Africa after Sudan and Algeria, and the 11th-largest country in the world from 1965 to 1997. With a population of over 23 million, Zaire was the most populous Francophone country in Africa. Zaire played a central role during the Cold War.” (Source: Wikipedia)
“Growing up in Palestine, the clarity of narration—a clear beginning, middle, and end—is not accessible,” Shibli notes. Instead, Palestinian storytelling is marked by hesitation and what she describes as “a stutter in narration.” This uncertainty, she explains, reflects the difficulty of pinpointing a starting point in a story steeped in decades, even centuries, of conflict and loss.
“Maroon refers to an African or Afro-American person who freed themself from enslavement in the Americas and lived in hidden towns outside of the plantations. Enslaved people used several forms of resistance to fight their imprisonment, everything from work slowdowns and tool damage to full-fledged revolt and flight. Some self-liberated people established permanent or semi-permanent towns for themselves in hidden places not far from the plantations, a process known as marronage (sometimes also spelled maronnage or maroonage).” — K. Kris Hirst, “Maroons and Marronage: Escaping Enslavement”, published on February 03, 2019 by ThoughtCo.
JavaScript Variable Types: 1) The var statement declares function-scoped or globally-scoped variables, optionally initializing each to a value. (Source: MDN) 2) The let declaration declares re-assignable, block-scoped local variables, optionally initializing each to a value. (Source: MDN) 3) The const declaration declares block-scoped local variables. The value of a constant can't be changed through reassignment using the assignment operator, but if a constant is an object, its properties can be added, updated, or removed. (Source: MDN)
Thank you for this much needed work- held in my heart today- food for the future that is now!
Thank you for this. Your images move and settle like warm water I can rest within. I felt what you've written especially the piece re your names. Salaams