In this gathering, we return to a set of powerful questions shared by Fatuma Emmad—questions that lingered after our last circle and deserve more time. Together, we’ll explore what draws us into practices of nourishment, land-tending, and ecological care. Are we growing food to survive? To reconnect? To repair? To rewild? And how do we know we’re not replicating the very systems we long to transform?
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.
This goodGrief circle is an opportunity to sit with what our death-and-grief-averse culture often hides from sight. To complement our discussions in the otherWisdom Circles around the mythical land of Away, we will hold space for open conversation in the style of a virtual Death Cafe. Taking the time to explore a topic that the dominant culture has deemed taboo might just shift our perceptions of death and decay in ways that can inform how we lean into otherWays of living, loving, and grieving amidst a finite world.
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.
Cameron Terry, an urban farmer in Roanoke, Virginia, will share with us his experience in food sovereignty and the local food organizing space. Cam not only runs Lick Run Farm, but is a founding member of the Southwest Virginia Agrarian Commons, which works towards community held land for regenerative food production and farmer equity. He also organizes farmers markets, farm events, and a farm summer camp for kids in the city.
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.
Food activist and organizer Sam Bliss runs Food Not Cops in Burlington, Vermont. Join us as he discusses the ways we can acquire and relate to food when it’s not purchased, and how he shares and gifts food within his community, whether it’s homegrown, hunted, wild-harvested.
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?