otherWisdom Circle

Different containers are appropriate for storing, carrying, and collecting different contents. As the contents change, the container might need to change as well. You can store yarn in a loosely woven basket, but you cannot carry water. You can ferment kefir in a glass container, but it requires attention and active care, so that you burp the container before it shatters. Some containers are temporary, and others hold forever. Some carry seeds, others carry ancestors. In this discussion, we will discuss the oft-overlooked importance of the vessels we carry and those that carry us.

Throughout this cycle, we will be exploring the concept of Away. We have become blind to the metabolic processes that sustain us, such that what we consume and what we excrete simply comes from and goes to the mythical land of Away - outside of our attention or awareness. Not only does this hidden world allow us to be oblivious to all kinds of irresponsible, unsustainable atrocities, but it leaves us feeling isolated, uninformed, and disconnected from our beautiful, entangled relationships with the wider world. In this first call we will deep dive into all that we discard in our exploration of Waste.
There is so much abundance in waste, if only we have eyes enough to see. Waste, by one definition, is the disposal of something that still has value. With some extra time and energy to sort through and process what others discard, we can actually keep the useful and nutritious bits in circulation and to properly lay what we cannot use to rest, or give it to someone that can.

Everything we consume carries stories, has origins. Our food, energy, metals, and comforts are pulled from somewhere — and over the past several centuries, those somewheres have multiplied and often stretched well beyond the range that our bodies travel. Everything we consume connects us to other bodies, beings, places and ecosystems, but those connections are often imbalanced, incomplete, and uni-directional. They take more value than they return. They leave more harm than they tend. In this session, we will look closely at extraction: how bodies, lands, and histories are mined for profit, and how we are entangled in these flows.

What comes to mind when you hear the word compost? The bucket of stinky food scraps near your sink. Single-use plates and utensils that go in a green bin. A big pile, you know, you need to turn. Time, temperature, and transformation. Rich garden soil.

Composting is the process of taking bodies and materials (waste), inviting a new kind of life into them (microbes), and turning them into something that can be used again (digestion). This applies to reclaiming what the dominant culture discards as “waste,” yes, though we can easily extend the lessons of composting beyond the physical.

Together, we will consider composting as both a biotic practice (closing nutrient loops, building soil, healing metabolic rift) and a cultural practice (working with memory, story, and trauma to fertilize more viable futures). Beauty in the breakdown.

Exploring Initiatory Territories through Conversation, writing, and Collage with Tom Hirons & Niels Devisscher

In the middle world we now inhabit, surrounded by the monstrous in politics, ecology, and the psyche, how do we face these forces within and around us, without turning away?
And perhaps most importantly: can we still find something sacred within these monsters?

In this hands-on workshop by poet and storyteller Tom Hirons, and communications designer and collage artist Niels Devisscher, you will be guided into Supernatural and Monstrous territories using two different but complementary media.

Phantoms, spirits, apparitions, poltergeists, wisps of white vapor, floating sheets with eye holes cut out. Spooky as they may be in popular fiction, there’s certainly more to ghosts than blockbuster films. Whether interpreted metaphorically, felt bodily, or dismissed as mythical while hurrying past a creepy graveyard, ghosts are well understood as ancestors, legacies, and former or lingering presences on the land. They can be meaningful ways of relating to and understanding the past. Who are our ancestors’ ghosts? Who are the ghosts who inhabit the land on which we live?

The vilification of witches and witchcraft was a crucial, and very intentional, part of the process of capitalist enclosure. It is one of many examples of genocide against women, pronatalism, demonization of traditional knowledges, disruption of non-male solidarities, and the beginnings of the invisibilization of women's labor. Despite these attacks, people persecuted by patriarchy and sacrificed to capital practiced resistance and solidarity that still persist strongly today. So too do the spaces for holding unconventional and traditional wisdoms of those villified as witches. In this discussion, we will explore what it means to be a witch, why they have been made so feared, and how we might reconnect with witchcraft. Acclaimed feminist historian and author Max Dashu will join us to lead this discussion.

We each have multiple sides to our existence — different ways we’ve reflected throughout our lives, and the fractals of our existence in this current moment. When we launched otherWise, we came up with 16 archetypes of people who might find value in our community, or 16 different attempts to articulate some of the many forms people find they’ve come to inhabit in modernity.

These archetypes are like mirrors held at different angles, showing different parts of us from different perspectives, how we show up in different contexts. We all contain multiple archetypes, some described here, and maybe others we’ve yet to put to words. In this session, we’ll go through the archetypes that we feel make up the fractal accumulation of our existence.