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Kin-making and
culture building at
the end of the world
We're shifting our lens from trauma to liberation - devoted to what liberates life energy, what sparks creativity, what lights imagination, and what renews and nourishes our connection and belonging in an inherently interconnected world.
Imagine if...
We had a sense of ourselves as interconnected to a world alive...
(What might we pay attention to?)
We untethered from historical & culturally harmful structures that have shaped experience...
(How might relationship to ourselves look?)
We could hear the guidance of ancestors and more-than-human kin...
(How might that change how we relate to others?)
to reclaim our place inside an interconnected web of life.
A global pandemic took, and the events of 2020, involving the murders of our Black siblings, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmad Arbery (among too many others that were not public knowledge), a fear-saturated racism saw violence and tension towards our Asian American/Asian siblings increase, and the historical atrocities done to indigenous peoples were laid bare..it left many in the Reckoning. The reckoning includes the layers of disconnection from an experienced interdependence with the world around us, and others (human and non) in the age of the anthropocene.
Our collective discomfort, and the calls from hearts everywhere to awaken to the legacies of harm caused by racialization and white body (and human) supremacy, have contributed to this threshold time.
In the midst of all of this, we’re living our lives, in these bodies, as caretakers, parents, siblings, neighbors, friends and global citizens, facing complex realities whose historical filaments tell the stories of where we are now, having the experience we’re having, and how these experiences have been shaped by this cultural moment.
We are part of an interconnected world, which means our personal healing is entangled with communal and culture-level healing. Our bodies, and how we experience the world through our bodies, is central to the alchemical composting we perform when we engage in processes and experiences of personal and communal transformation.
We already belong. We just need to re/member.
Journey through an exploration of Rooted’s Ethos…
The soil in which we're planted and grow…
The Borderlands represent that murky, liminal space that opens up in the disruption and disorientation of confronting trauma response patterns and orientations we’ve embodied in a culture of coloniality/White Body Supremacy.
It’s the mysterious and messy place that makes way for other possibilities of being in the world and in relationship. It challenges us as it uproots us in ways that can generate discomfort. Many of us have internalized narratives of shame and defectiveness, some rooted in personal histories, ancestral memories, and in the legacy and history of racialization.
We can't be challenged in our capacity to meet the complexities we face without a foundation of personal and communal support and an expanded capacity to be with what comes as we encounter these borderlands; the liminal spaces between the world we’ve known and the not-yet world to come.
The kind of revolutionary change at the heart of what many of us we personally and communally long for, requires a confrontation with what we think we know; what has become embodied and is created and recreated through our bodies.
How can we suspend the stories that play out in our minds and hearts and bones - stories that maintain harmful orientations and habituations? How do we create opportunities to disrupt what has become conditioned and habitual?
We acknowledge our bodies, these bodies, as a crucial site of transformation and reworlding.
We acknowledge that the bodies that we bring to these spaces are shaped by forces seen and unseen, and that it’s in the practices we play with and explore that we learn to cultivate the discernment to allow our bodies - personally and communally - to become our compass. We believe there is an innate inner ethic that we orient towards when the conditions are right.
“Each interaction matters since the possibility for what the world may become calls out in the pause that precedes each breath before the moment comes into being and the world is remade again, because the becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter.”
- Karen Barad
What does it mean to explore connection and belonging across the borders of what separates us in new configurations and across lines of division in acts of collaborative survival? - (Anna Tsing)
The feminist philosopher and scholar Donna Haraway writes that “‘making kin’ across divides of species, nation, gender and other borders is perhaps the most urgent task today. Through friendship or kinship we undo and renew ourselves in potentially radical and dangerous ways. In this sense, freedom is rooted in friendship” (Joyful Militancy). This is the Commons to Come (Mary Watkins). How might we imagine undoing the firmament on which colonial paradigms stand and healing lines of division through friendship and kin-making practices?
“Staying with the trouble, yearning toward resurgence, requires inheriting hard histories, for everybody, but not equally and not in the same ways.”
Dine Weaving: Cosmological Performance, Mathematical Rhythm, Navajo-Churro Sheep, Hózhó
Culture does not exist ‘out there’; it is in and through our bodies that it’s created and recreated, and often taken-for-granted as simply being the waters we swim in. It’s in the murky and mysterious edges of the borderland spaces that we harness our creativity and imagination to re-world together - that is, to create new culture.
The etymology of the word “culture” is ‘growing, cultivation’; meaning it’s in the experiences we have personally and communally - that we then repeat - that become the cultivation of future worlds.
Rooted takes an decolonial approach and seeks to de-center dominant narratives to make space for ‘many worlds’. This isn’t about recreating a pristine and romanticized past but navigating the terrain of the new in ways that support and sustain us.
Moving Beyond Stuckness and Separateness:
Exploring the Nutrients that Foster Belonging to Life
How can you deepen your own exploration?
bell hooks said, “rarely, if ever, does healing happen in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
The Global Village Gathering Space is an online membership / assemblage of curious bodies meant as an anchoring place for us to ‘tie our roots to other roots’ (Sophie Strand) in acts of ‘collaborative survival’ (Anna Tsing) through friendship, joyful exploration, edge work, and play.
We would love to have you join us there.
Ways to engage right now:
Tending the Roots Podcast
