Join the Working Group for a New Spirit: Fall Edition

October 19 - December 7
Mondays, 8-9:30p EST

The WGNS is a series of gatherings for clarity and direction in this our messy moment of distance and collapse. We come together so that we can learn from each other. 

This spring we learned together around a selection of texts, from bell hooks to Lamentations, Fanny Howe to Essex Hemphill.

For the fall edition, we'll be considering INVENTORY.

We'll spend time with new texts and the offerings of three guest artists:
Katherine Agyemaa Agard 
Eyad Houssami
Rebeca Medina 

All are welcome.
Come to every meeting, come to one or two. 
There will be continuity and there will be surprise.

To join, send an email to tomorrowwillbethe22ndcentury@gmail.com.
You'll get the zoom links as well as weekly updates and reflections on the meetings. No obligation to come.
Feel free to write with questions, too. 

What do we do in the Working Group? 

We check in, we use the chat bar.
We read aloud together.
We ask questions, offer answers.
We do freewrites, sometimes.
We do guided meditations.
We have show-and-tells. 
We share writing with each other.
We tell stories.
We analyze, we intuit, we challenge, we support.
We smile with friends, we get to know strangers.

What are we going to be talking about? 

Over the course of eight weeks, we'll consider INVENTORY.

In permaculture, inventory is the first thing you do when you're considering how to design a system. You make a list of what you have, in the hopes that you'll notice new connections. Possibilities open up when you look at the familiar differently. 

The English word "inventory" shares a root with "invent." Both come from invenire: to find, discover. To responsibly account for what is, what has been, what our history has included, can also be a process of discovery and creation. 

What, around us, have we neglected?
What, at our side, do we no longer see?
How can we use the familiar to open up new possibilities for our violent, broken, ailing world?

Also:
Can we learn to take inventory without surrendering to the logic of "having"? Of ownership, control, colonization? 
Can we find new resilience in the things that seem most fragile? Can we find new uses for the things that weigh us down?
Can you and I account for a shared reality? Can we account for what we don't share? 

There's a Nishnaabeg word I learned from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: biiskabiyang. "...the process of returning to ourselves, a reengagement with the things we have left behind, a reemergence, an unfolding from the inside out." 

According to the Nishnaabeg, this is where we find ourselves in history. Biiskabiyang is this generation's task. To look back and see what has fallen by the wayside, pick it up, invite it to transform self and world. 

Maybe what we do in the Working Group will have something to do with that...