For The Worldbuilders

• 075. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered LinkedIn When Affirmations Weren’t Enuf

  You don’t need more affirmations. But perhaps, like many of us, you are desiring tools, skills and strategies for navigating the seasons where your faith starts to feel foolish and the results you wished for are taking longer than the ego can bear. In this episode we explore navigating suspicion around our creative commitments and the temptation to give up inside the messy middle. We remember the potency of our creative power activates when we’re lost, not when we know the way. How do we remain steadfast inside our commitments while facing the grief, fear and uncertainty of our time? How do we trade the misleading allure of instant gratification with the sturdy sense of alignment that arises when we choose the practice of closing the gap between our values and our actions everyday, as Mariame Kaba invites us to do? How do we release all our “shoulds” and stay in the game long enough to learn what comes next? These are the questions we explore inside today’s episode.ResourcesRegister for the Free 2-Part Worldbuilding Workshop Series and Download the Spring 2025 Syllabus: https://www.seedaschool.com/programSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠Citations“for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf” is a 1976 work by Ntozake Shange. It consists of a series of poetic monologues to be accompanied by dance movements and music, a form which Shange coined the word choreopoem to describe. It tells the stories of seven women who have suffered oppression in a racist and sexist society.“What Does It Take to Sustain the Lives of Black Feminists While We Are Alive?: Defining Affirmation Banking & Overcoming the Expected Humility of Accepting It” by Kay Brown of Assemblage: Baby’s BreathFaculty Spotlight: Graphic Designer and Musician Wesley Taylor, Emphasizes Design Justice, Community Building“It Is Working—You Just Can’t See It Yet” (Substack) and “225: Stop Quitting Too Soon” (Podcast) by Myleik TeeleVictoria Monét on taking the streets instead of the highway and one of my favorite songs of hers, Hollywood feat. Earth, Wind and FireCover Art: Betelhem Makonnen, "conjugated keyboard" (2020) Materials: Keyboard, tumbled rocks, Dimensions: 12.6" x 14.8" x 1 “

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• 074. Your Favorite Black Feminist Is An Entrepreneur

  Our favorite black feminist was most likely an entrepreneur because for many of our ancestors black feminist entrepreneurship was simply a synonym for “the practice of surviving with our dignity in tact”. Many of us have heard the stories if we listened closely, the auntie, uncles and cousins who spun up hair salons, barbershops, daycares, restaurants and classrooms inside living rooms, kitchens, gardens and basements. Businesses that experimented with mutual aid and refused to replicate the carceral choreographies they might have witness or experienced in their neighborhoods or at their jobs. These stories are not new, disability and complex trauma sometimes renders us unable or unwilling to hold "traditional jobs". Entrepreneurship and creative lives of refusal aren't always born out of courage, sometimes they're born out of necessity and needs capitalism just can't hold. What creative strategies can black feminism teach us about surviving systems designed to fail us?ResourcesRegister for the Free 2-Part Worldbuilding Workshop Series and Download the Spring 2025 Syllabus: https://www.seedaschool.com/programSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsFreedom Farm CooperativeWhy Harriet Tubman Is a ‘Powerful’ Choice for American Currency'Nurse, Spy, Cook:' How Harriet Tubman Found Freedom Through FoodSojourner Truth, "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance”Sankofa SymbolBlack Utopias: Speculative Life & the Music of Other Worlds by Jayna BrownCover Art: Lauren Halsey, Untitled (Parliament) (detail), 2021. Digital collage. Source: MFA Boston

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• 073. 3 Ways to Engage with the Rigor of Ease in Creative Practice

  Rigor doesn’t equal hard work and ease doesn’t equal work that is easy. Asking for help, refusing to resent our capacity, honoring the needs of our body and moving at the speed of creative flow is rigorous work that might require practice if our learned impulse is to habitually bring ourselves to the edge of our capacity in order to feel worthy of the ease of our creative expression. Our art flows out of us like our breath, sometimes the hardest work is to let and protect it.ResourcesRegister for the Free 2-Part Worldbuilding Workshop Series: https://www.seedaschool.com/programSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠Citations“you’re not a perfectionist, you’re internalizing capitalism” meme by Ariana Brown (@arianathepoet)Cover Art: Book Scan from Your Satisfaction Is Our Future (2017) by Ayana Zaire Cotton

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• 072. The Fear of Being Witnessed Stemming From A Fear of Witnessing Ourselves

  My intention inside this episode is to reflect, alongside you, on my own journey toward softening inside the sacred practice of bearing witness — both to myself and to each other’s becoming. Witnessing myself was painful at first. I was confronted with all the ways I had invented masks sacrificing my comfort while prioritizing the comfort of others, who oftentimes were loved ones. Parents, friends, partners, co-workers, peers, teachers, family members, roommates, the list goes on. When confronting all the layers I had assembled out of survival, I realized I was unrecognizable to myself. I cycled through periods of shame, rage, grief, and ultimately grounded inside compassion. When I stopped running from my authentic self, I was able to face her and in that stillness become a compassionate witness. No longer afraid of my own darkness, longings and desires — terrified that they were threats to my survival — another way forward opened. Inside this compassionate witnessing I realized all my fears held keys to something beyond survival, something like belonging. Through this witness work I began to create safety inside myself. Through this witness work I began to collaborate with loved ones, instead of hide from them, and created safety in my home. Then it spilled over to our neighbors, our streets, our schools. But it started with bearing witness inside the sacred act of coming home to myself again and again. My intention inside this episode is to remind us, worldbuilding happens on various scales of intimacy.ResourcesDownload the Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself: ⁠https://www.seedaschool.com/questionnaire⁠Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsDear Mazie, exhibition curated by Amber EsseivaDear Mazie, program “IT’S ALL OUT OF MY ARMS: An Activated Honoring”“Dropping the Mask”, Hidden Brain episodeBrendane A. Tynes’s Instagram post on mirror and witness workKaren M. Rose’s Instagram post on Venus retrograde, mirror work and ancestral venerationCover Art: Written (2021) by Lorna Simpson. Materials: Collage on paper Dimensions: 15 15/16 x 11 1/16 in (40.5 x 28.1 cm)

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• 071. My Nervous System Likes Receiving Money for Work that Isn’t Punishing

  My intention inside this episode is to invite us to put some respect on our nervous system. We have done the journaling, we’ve cultivated all our embodiment practices on our walks and by the water. We’ve done the divination, breath and mirror work to bring us to this moment where our nervous system is prepared to hold us at our next level of practice. There are new invitations, new calls, new assignments we desire to expand into, but moving in fear might be sneakily disguising itself as “honoring our nervous system”. Our craving for predictable outcomes and comfort can encourage us to play small inside the vision for our creative practices and lives. Inside this episode I invite us to consider the ways we can honor our nervous system by welcoming the transformative discomfort of desire.ResourcesDownload the Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself: ⁠https://www.seedaschool.com/questionnaire⁠Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsMyleik Teele’s Podcast — 219: Do The Work: Stop Researching, Start Moving“June Jordan Solves the Energy Crisis: Love is Lifeforce” (March 23, 2016) by Alexis Pauline Gumbs published by The Feminist WireCover Art: Nick Cave (b. 1959, Fulton, MO; lives and works in Chicago, IL), Soundsuit Series

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