Ancestors’ Dreams: Weaving a Future Story | A Soils Lab with Alexis | Practice Map
Hello Creative One! Welcome to Seed & Spark: Journal of the Fertility Abundance Garden. This is a Soils Lab Practice Map. Learn more about An Introduction to Soils and the Soils Lab practice below. To attend a Soils Lab you must be a creator in the Creators Circle. To learn more about the Garden or to join as a creator, please visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center. So much life, labor, and love goes into creating and sustaining the Garden and everything we share. The Garden is sustained by the kindness and generosity of creators and supporters. If any part of our magical world touches your heart and nourishes your being as a creator, please do pour into our Giving Well or join a Sustainability Circle today. If you are already contributing to our bounty, THANK YOU FOR THE LOVE!
Ancestors' Dreams: Weaving a Future Story
Soils Lab with Alexis | Practice Map
monday | 7 March 2022 | 6pm Est
What if we are stewards of a generational arc that started 7 generations before us and extends to the 7 generations after us? What could it mean to keep the story of our ancestors as we weave a story of a hopeful, thriving futures for our descendants? What elements of the story of a future world in which our descendants and the earth are thriving are alive in us right now, asking to be told?
In this Soils Lab experiment, we will practice telling the stories that are alive in bodies and asking to be told in the moment. We will create characters and a future world for them to play within and explore the lessons our future stories may have for how we build, how we grow, how we love today.
I have oriented my life and work towards creating the world we deserve to live in -- to dreaming that world, to planting the seeds for it, to worldbuilding. I am part of a network of folks who are in the practice of stewardship of long arc stories that span about 140 years, 7 generations back, 7 generations ahead. In this practice we endeavor to know, understand and embody the story of our ancestors, their wisdom and dreams and connect them to a hopeful future story for the next 7 generations to come. The goal is to weave together a compelling narrative of the future we are conjuring and creating by the choices we make each day within ourselves, our families and our communities, believing that if we can see the future clearly enough, we can become who we must become in order to bring that world into being.
I'm fascinated by Octavia Butler’s prediction of 2024 in the United States as depicted in Parable of the Sower. That future is now. And I am curious about whether others will join in what I have come to see as my duty to future generations—to travel to the future and write a better story—with transformed and equitable systems and better relationships between humans, the earth, and all who share it with us.
For the last few years, my workplace, Resonance Network, has been inviting folks into experiments in taking up this sacred responsibility. I want to practice with mamas I am deeply connected to through The Garden, specifically because we are magical creators and I care deeply about the future you all envision and the shape and texture and nuance that will come from our unique perspectives.
I am curious about whether The Garden would want to practice more than once and begin to weave and archive a collective future story together.
what to bring:
Please have art supplies nearby. Can include anything folks enjoy working with.
this soils lab includes these elements:
Workshop in development/experimental practice
Vision mapping/dreaming
Story sharing/dialogue circle
The above quote is an excerpt from Norma Wong’s preparation for a Seven Generations practice with a group. Alexis also recommends the following explorations to warm up your storytelling majesties. The first two links are examples of what she wants to include in the workshop, a depiction of the main character of the story:
Resonance and the power of storytelling for the future
This is a blog post I wrote about the practice, which includes a summary of the first story I told when trying this out. It's a story in which I propel my goddaughter 20 years into the future.
Her name is Bisila
And this is a story I've shared in the garden. It's just the bones of a story really that I want to develop into something else.
On worldbuilding: Q&A with Zen teacher and movement strategist, Norma Wong
meet Creator Alexis
Alexis
Alexis is a queer Black feminist DC girl whose heart pumps to the beat of “the Pocket” that holds down DC go-go music and culture.
about our soils lab
Soils Lab is a central component of Mother Mother’s evolving creative practice methodology, An Introduction to Soils: Preparing the Heart, Mind and Body for Deeply Generative Creations.
Soils Labs are where we explore practices that nourish our soil of creation, the substance from which we create everything we do. Soils Labs journey into diverse creative realms like writing, storytelling, visual art, sacred rituals, healing practices, movement, birth and fertility studies, and so much more. Every creator shares from the wealth of her brilliance, and we all grow from there.
attending soils lab
Soils Labs are collaborative-time (live), virtual gatherings. To honor and protect the intimacy of our sharing, Soils Labs are not recorded. We are a Come As You Are congregation and you are welcome to attend as much or as little of the lab as you like. You must be a creator in the Garden who has confirmed conscious participation to receive the access link for the labs. Please visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center to join the Garden and begin attending Soils Labs. If you have recently or previously joined the Garden, visit the Sanctuary to confirm or reconfirm your conscious participation.
ABOUT SOFT-TIME
The Garden thrives in soft-time expansions. While the Soils Lab is a collaborative-time gathering, we consciously create multiple points of engagement for all creators to participate in the majesty of our explorations and experiments, whether or not you attend the lab. In addition to the practice maps, our Soils Labs are archived in multiple places inside the Creators Portal and the Creators Shared Diary. We also extend conversations and discovery opportunities in the Creators Channel and Fertile Majesties groups. Mattering soft-time practice spaces is a vital way that we disrupt mandates of capitalism, and continue to decentralize fixed-time and cumpulsory-time standards as universally legitimate and relevant. In making space for the diversity of our life rhythms and labors, we take great care to develop generative, nourishing methodologies that honor the fluid nature of our lives as creators.
ITALICIZED WORDS DEFINED AND EXPANDED ON IN THE GLOSSARY
where do you share your stories?
Ask a question + share your story with us. The Fertility Abundance Garden is a congregation for creators, a sanctuary for mothers, a dreamscape for sacred storytellers. To learn more and to join the Garden, visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center.
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