otherWisdom Circle

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.