adrienne maree brown: Sowing seeds of love in our “garden of ideas” (Ep440)

Written By kamea chayne
“The earth is giving us abundance. There’s no need to be at war with each other. We have enough of everything we need. So the grief of many of us is when you realize a lot of people reject that gift. [But] that doesn’t mean you stop offering it. ”
— adrienne maree brown

How do we navigate friendships in the context of social change and increasing political divides? What does it mean to ground ourselves in concepts that are much older than us — collectively nurturing our “garden of ideas”? And how do we move away from cancel culture to lovingly call one another in — to return and remember our shared values?

In this episode, Kaméa is joined in conversation by adrienne maree brown, whose most recent book, Loving Corrections, is now available from AK Press and wherever books are sold.

Join us in this nourishing discussion to learn how to move through these troubled times with deeper rootedness and impact — without letting possible senses of overwhelm translate into desensitization or disengagement.

We invite you to…

 

About our guest:

adrienne maree brown is growing a garden of healing ideas through her multi-genre writing, her collaborations and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E. Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of several published texts, cogenerator of a tarot deck and a developing musical ritual. adrienne's most recent book Loving Corrections is now available from AK Press and wherever books are sold. 

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episode transcript

Note: Our transcripts are lightly edited for clarity and may not have complete accuracy to speech. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored.

adrienne maree brown: I think I've been so blessed by the path that my life has taken. And the fact that I figured out that I was a facilitator feels like such a blessing all the time. I'm so grateful because it gives a different perspective on the work. I'm a movement worker and I've been a movement worker and even as that shifts into being more of a cultural worker, there's a way that I've always held an outsider perspective. I'm coming into the room to hold it as a complete entity. I'm coming into the room to hold it close and let everyone flow in and through. And so I can often feel things that are hard to speak.

Sometimes people come and bring me things that are hard for them to say, that they're struggling to say to each other. And now that I'm in this position where I sort of say, I've retired from facilitation, I don't get booked to do that work anymore, which is its little miracle. I never imagined that for myself. But now that I'm in this position, I take advantage of the freedom I have to say things that I might not have said when I was still wanting and needing to be hired by all these institutions and philanthropic organizations.

So in this book of Loving Corrections, there are a lot of things in here that emerged from that practice of facilitation, including creating spaces to talk to white people, to talk to folks who are in the practice of patriarchy or ableism. To say things as plainly and kindly as I can, with the intention that it's something that people can then use in a meeting or in a movement space to have a conversation around. This could look like saying, “Have you read this?” or “Let's talk about this? Can we have a fortified movement to have the conversations necessary for us to move together?”

I think about this all the time. It doesn't matter who's right or wrong if we're all gone if there's no one left. What matters is that we have to figure out a way for us to survive together. And it also doesn't matter if there's only one kind of person left who all agrees with each other. That's not reality. Our healthy reality on earth is divergence.

What does it look like to do divergence well in a healthy, loving, communal way? What does it look like to be bio-divergent and let that be the strength of the group, circle, organization, or alliance?

That's what I'm opening up to with this book.

Kamea Chayne: That's powerful. And I've never seen another book take this approach. I feel very shifted and inspired by this intention.

In a recent book launch event where you were conversing with Prentis Hemphill and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, you shared, “We can no longer get away with the laziness of critique without correction. We love to move through the world telling people how wrong they are and why we're getting rid of them. I'm not going to get rid of you. I live on the earth that you live on and I'm not giving up on myself and I'm not going to let you go. If you're causing havoc, my job is to get you together and figure out how to do that." This just feels like such a beautiful remembrance of our interconnectedness — and also a departure from cancel culture.

And to go a little deeper, I'm curious about how we make the distinction between “saviorism” and not giving up on people — and making it our work to support people to remember and return and re-root themselves. Because at least in the context of Western modes of therapy and relational healing, it feels like there’s this emphasis on letting go of control over other people and what they think and letting go of trying to change other people in the name of self-preservation and self-affirmation. So what are some of the nuances that you'd like to unravel here?

adrienne maree brown: I love this. I think one of the biggest things is relationships. The relationship is the difference, I think, between saviorism and just trying to change or fix people. 

Relationship is the ground from which you make the decision: Who am I going to focus on and how am I going to give them the most loving attention I can? How are they gonna know that it's rooted in love?

It has to come through a relationship. I've had people give me feedback, guidance, brilliant wisdom that I wasn't ready to hear because we weren't in a relationship. And I've had people give me all of those things when I was in a relationship and really open to it. The feedback I get from those who are closest to me is that I'm good at receiving feedback.

When I'm dealing with people I don't know, when I don't trust why they're relating to me, is there something that they're trying to get out of me? Is there something that they think is wrong with me? I am resistant to that. And I think a lot of people are resistant to that. What we see playing out now most of the time on social media, at least, is that people not only resist that, but they double down on the place where they're being asked to reconsider.

So I think the nuances are all in a relationship. I'm not saying that I'm gonna take every single person on, I don't think that that's realistic. I think that we're meant to be in staggered relationships. I think about this often because my mother comes from a white Southern family and there have been times when I have not been able to visit or be around that family because of the level of racism, harm and homophobia. It didn't feel like a safe place for me to be, but that didn't mean that she [my mom] shouldn't go there. That didn't mean that she should give up on working to build that connection and relationship with these people who are her family. So my not letting go of them happens through her, rather than happening directly. That's what feels safe for us, right?

I think about this often because I think a lot of times people hear it and they're like, “Oh, I've got to save these people.” No, I just have to stay in a relationship with their humanity. Sometimes that'll look like a fight. Sometimes it looks like being willing to hold the tension. And I had to learn that through a good friend because I've always been a people pleaser. I don't like tension. For a long time, I would try to do anything I could to avoid the tension of disagreement. I could facilitate it in others, but I didn't want it to happen around me. I had to learn to sit and hold the tension of being willing to talk about it, but not willing to pretend that the position I hold is not a legitimate one and have a conversation from that place. Let's hold that tension.

When you're in a space with someone who is racist, or abusing their power, you have to be willing to hold the tension and hold up the mirror, even if your hands are shaking.

And I think that's what we see happening in our country. Many people are like, “Okay, we're ready to gung ho, get excited about Kamala Harris as our president-elect and da da da.” And then there's a whole other set of people who are like, “There's a mirror that we are still holding up here because this genocide is still happening because we haven't received a satisfying answer to it. And our job, if we love ourselves and each other, is to hold it up, not drop it.”

Kamea Chayne: Thank you. It's clarifying that the difference here is relationships — being in a relationship with the person that we are trying to lovingly correct. 

adrienne maree brown: Yeah, I feel the biggest flaw I see in people's strategy right now is trying to hold people accountable when they have no relationship, right? Then I think it leads to suffering and a waste of energy.

Kamea Chayne: Yeah. I would love to stay with this a bit longer. I've seen just over the last year that many people have had friendships come to an end because of passionate arguments over Palestine, or other issues that they don't see eye to eye on.

And I know in my own life, I've also struggled with having heated arguments with friends on certain issues. And then also acknowledging that because I'm so passionate about whatever we're talking about, I also didn't necessarily express myself in the most patient, loving, and kind ways that people might be more receptive to. So that also made me question: If I can't even change the minds of my closest friends or family members who I know so well, then how can I ever be impactful in talking to strangers?

And at the same time, I know you referenced this idea that not everyone's going to “make it.” I’m interested in hearing you talk more about friendships in the context of social change, and how we know when it is time to let something go due to deep differences in our politics or belief systems. Is this just a matter of being more understanding that the seeds we sow aren't going to blossom right away and will take time? Or maybe our role is just to plant the seeds without necessarily expecting particular outcomes… Or else, how would you invite us to approach friendships and relationships differently?

adrienne maree brown: I love this. So, I think one of the things is to recognize that relationships do change over time and we're changing each other. Hopefully, in a healthy relationship, we're impacting each other and saving each other and showing up for each other, having each other's back. And that doesn't mean we're always agreeing on everything. 

I love the question you asked ‘How can I do this if I can't even get my family member on board?’

One of the things that I have found helpful is that I approach it as, I am an invitation to freedom, justice, to a different way of being in the world. Not everyone is ready to accept that invitation.

The invitation is an open-standing invitation. And then I have to protect myself. I have to protect my revolutionary spirit, my heart. I'm in a lot of grief these days. So the way I've been navigating it is, I make the invitation, I send people things that are like, here's actions you can take, here's an article I think you should read, here's a perspective, an action step that I think is a reasonable one. I send people stuff, I post things, and I make sure that people know as much as I know. And I recognize that it's invitational, that my yelling down a person, trying to make them feel shame doesn't necessarily open the portal.

Most people have to surrender something within themselves for that portal to open. And unfortunately, it's nonlinear. I wish there was a clear explanation. I wish it was as simple as, if people see this picture, if they hear these numbers, if they understand this power dynamic, if they read this book, they're going to land in the same place that I did because they're my friends and my loved ones.

And I think that that's one of the big pieces is to understand, that just because we love people doesn't mean that they think the way that we do or see the world the way that we do or that they're impacted in the same way when they do. I have a lot of people in my life who I know are deeply moved and hurt by similar things that hurt me, but their sense of agency over what to do about it is different from mine. 

For a lot of my life I have been asking, how do I get you to take those emotions you feel and move them into action?

I'm persistent in trying to figure out how to move that into action when I feel something. Can I get people to take some kind of small action with me? And the relationship is the way I find that works. If a stranger just says, “Do you care about this issue?” I might not care about it. But if a loved one says, “Would you be willing to give something to this? Would you be willing to make a phone call? Would you be willing to donate? This matters to me.” You make it personal for people. That's how you change people's perspective on things where they've been close-minded.

There's a book that I bring up a lot these days because I think it's relevant to what we're moving through right now. It's called Brave Community: Teaching for a Post-Racist Imagination. And it's a book about how to have conversations across great differences. And it talks about providing a similar grounding. What are people all looking at to have the conversation? And I found it so useful because I didn't know this within myself. But often I would be showing up with my case fully built and my mind wasn't open at all. I had already decided I was right. I wasn't curious about what the other person thought.

These are people that I love, so I think I know them, I understand what they think already. And so I was showing up that way. And I think often the person I was showing up to, convinced to change their mind, was showing up either the same way or they were showing up just wanting to protect the status quo. Can we just stay the way we are? Or can I change you? Can I make you come more my way?

I think that we have to be honest with each other when that's happening. This is no longer just a straight-up relational space. This has become a space of recruitment or organizing and possibly manipulation. I try to be very cautious about manipulation. It's maybe the thing I pay the most attention to.

I don't want people to make a move, even if it's the right move and it's the move that's most necessary. I don't want that to come from a forced place. I don't want it to come from a place of coercion or manipulation. My idea is that people get to make these decisions from an informed place but we live in a world where we don't have time for everyone to get informed. So when I say that piece of everyone might not “make it”, I talk about how we're making an invitation to justice every day.

That's what it is to be in movement, is to say there's a path for you. You could be free, your family could be free. You could have your rights and your family could have their rights. You could have body sovereignty. All these things are available to you, but you have to stand up for others as well. You have to join a community. That's how you get these things. And we make that invitation every day. Every single day, a lot of people say no.

Part of the grief that I carry every day is the fact that the earth is giving us abundance. There's no need to be at war with each other. We have enough of everything we need. So the grief of many of us is when you realize a lot of people reject that gift.

That doesn't mean you stop offering it. The Earth is our great teacher. The Earth doesn't say, “Fine, then no more summer.” Even if it goes through phases and changes, it continues to offer abundance.

We can do that. The sun is the same, it continues to offer its gift. We're the ones who have to figure out what to do with it. And that I think is what relationship gives us the room to do. It allows us to figure out what we do with the gift of each other. How do I become a gift to someone else's journey?

Kamea Chayne: I appreciate framing these as invitations and also as you just started sharing some values to stay rooted in.

The first portion of Loving Corrections is a series of essays and love notes for people who have veered off track and who you'd like to invite back into belonging and right relations, like righting gender, relinquishing the patriarchy, righting racism, a word for white people and so on. And when I think of the idea of correcting people, for me, personally, it brings up my imposter syndrome where I start to ask myself, who am I to know better? Who am I to correct someone and tell them that they're wrong and that my views are more right in ways that don't then replicate dynamics of domination and supremacy?

I know I feel very rooted in my values of collective healing and thriving. And in my bias, I see that as more grounded in the reality of our interdependence and our place in our shared webs of life. But my overthinking brain wonders, for example, what if some people strongly believe that borders and policing are what make a community safer, or the privatization of resources is more efficient, or maybe they're strong advocates against abortion because of their sense of morality? And so then they want to lovingly correct me for views that they think are impractical or wrong.

So then who gets the credibility and rootedness in our values and worldviews to do that correction? Maybe this kind of gets into the deeper questions of: What even are our values and what are they rooted in? But I welcome you to take this in whatever direction you feel called to.

adrienne maree brown: I think one of the biggest pieces for me is that if you're trying to figure it all out by yourself, then often you can lead yourself astray. We're not meant to figure these problems out as individuals. We're meant to figure them out in groups, in collectives, as communities. We're meant to figure out how to exist on Earth together. 

So I think one of the first things is when in doubt, find a community that you feel aligned with, that you can see yourself wanting to build a future with. And let your sense of politics be in relationship to theirs.

The flip side of it is you don't want to be involved in group thinking. So you want to look at places that base their values in reality, in science, in shared experience, and things that can be verified as experiences.

So I remember Mariame Kaba, the first time I heard her speak about abolition, she just made this brilliant case, which was: if you believe that prisons reduce crime, then why do we still have such high crime rates? Just help me understand it. And the way she said it, was a humble, curious framing. It was about trying to understand why things are the way they are if we have this system in place that supposedly sorts this problem out.

I like stuff where you start to push people to go down the path themselves. If you start to pay attention to just looking at the prison industrial complex, looking at rates of incarceration, looking at how many people go into prison and end up back in prison, that’s good data. That says something about this system is not working the way that you say it's supposed to work because crime has not stopped. People are still being killed. People are still being raped. People are still being robbed. What's happening? So I think that's one piece.

I also think this piece around the collective helps us to be more rigorous in our thought process. I am meant to think with others. And I learn so much when I do. It's always been one of my favorite things to realize that I'm having some brilliant new original thoughts and then I'll have a conversation with an elder or I'll have a conversation with someone in my community.

This is what happened to me with Grace Lee Boggs. I was off thinking I was having all this brilliant stuff. I was wondering why everyone was so obsessed with this woman. She's a Chinese American organizer who fell in love with James Boggs and the two of them became major figures in Detroit organizing. She joined the Black Power movement through her love and relationship with James. I was always questioning why everyone is so in love with her, why everyone quotes her every time I go into any room. What's going on with her?

And then someone was like, “Just read her autobiography, because a lot of the ideas that you're most excited about, she's been excited about for 50 years.” And it was so humbling and exciting to discover her work. I wanted to keep going down the path that she's been walking. I've been walking that path ever since. It feels partially like politicization.

Discovering [Grace Lee Boggs] feels like something else, like finding a soulmate for the ideas that I want to move through the world. I think we need to ground ourselves in concepts that are older than us.

Now, when I talk about the ideas that I'm forwarding, you'll often hear me call them a garden of ideas. I think of it as, this has been growing from the beginning of time. It'll be growing at the end of time. This is the big work of our species, figuring out how to be in a relationship with each other. And they're not ideas that I originated. Even though they felt original when they first came up in my body, they're not ideas that originated from me. They're ideas that humans have been trying to figure out always, and we know some things about them.

We know that when you're in group conflict, it helps to sit in a circle. That's been known for almost as long as humans have existed. And it still works. It's a viable technology that we can count on. I love things like that. I don't need to make up a circle. A circle exists. Other things are true of humans too. And it's trying to figure out, What are those truths that feel, if not universal, then at least ancient, so we can lean back into and find a way forward from that place. The truth of humans is we're a circle?

Kamea Chayne: I love that so much, the garden of ideas, because it still holds this space that in a garden, everything is constantly changing and evolving. So it's not static, but it is ultimately still rooted in a very deep way. And so there’s that relational element, there's the community element, there's the rootedness and also the openness to adaptation and change. Thank you for that offering. 

adrienne maree brown: Yes, and the pieces go together. Certain ideas grow well next to each other, and others don’t. So for instance, you can't have feminism up against capitalism, I don't think. I'm always trying to figure out, this idea doesn't grow well next to that idea because we're trying to have a space in which everyone has an equal opportunity regardless of gender, but we're living in a world in which no one is equal and everyone is constantly in competition for the bare minimum resources.

So then those who would be feminists end up turning against each other to try to get ahead in this society. Capitalism doesn't go well with having an ecologically just future. When you think, what is it I want more of? Do I want money or do I want the earth to exist for people to continue to live on? It's clear to me what my answer is.

So, if this idea is incompatible with my species, then I have to figure out some new ideas. And I think the gardening metaphor, for me at least, helps with that. This idea might thrive somewhere, but it doesn't work for humans. And that allows me to let it go. When I'm talking to a capitalist, which doesn't happen very often, and they’re trying to argue with me, I'm not saying that it's not an idea that could work somewhere. I'm just saying that here on Earth, based on all the experiences, and all the data we have, so far we have not been able to make this a viable strategy for humans. 

Kamea Chayne: And this goes back to the invitation to ask, what are our values grounded in? And it's tricky when there is a lot of media propaganda going on where some people's perceived truths might be rooted in lies and fabricated senses of reality. I think it's important these days, especially to be able to practice that discernment of: Where is our information coming from? What are our values grounded in?

adrienne maree brown: I love that. And I also think it brings into light, this sort of moral question of religion, of governance, of belief systems at large. That's one of the biggest things I try to pay attention to. A lot of people have really different beliefs and I can be fine with it. And I find it exciting. I find myself grown by it.

When I come across people whose ideas are directly against my right to exist, I have to be cautious. 

We have to be cautious and I think we're in one of those moments now. I think in the U.S. we don't realize how often we're in those moments, where we are surrounded by people who are trying to make the case that not all of us deserve to exist or deserve to have a viable experience of what quality of life is. They can couch it as part of their Christian belief system, Muslim belief system, Jewish belief system, or something else that God told them, that inequality is okay.

And someone else can say, “Well, God told me something else.” We get into a lot of danger there and so I always say, pay attention to not just what comes out of their mouths but what values they live by, how would their neighbors describe this person’s values. 

Kamea Chayne: With all of this, something that I'm still struggling to find my balance in is when and where it's just not worth engaging. And I feel like there's a general teaching that people can only change if they are open to change. Or otherwise, as we touched on earlier, maybe they've gone through experiences impactful enough to create the cracks and openings for new seeds to germinate within them. 

And there are also certain environments, like social media, as you mentioned earlier, that aren't as conducive to loving conversations. The comment section often feels very reactive and dehumanizing in many ways where people are just doubling down on whatever they're trying to say.

So with this in mind, given that we all have limited capacities, how might we take a pulse on any situation to see whether they are worth engaging in or how deeply we should invest? And when might it cost us too much to stay connected?

adrienne maree brown: Beautiful. I don't know what works for everyone, I'll say what works for me. I have to believe that the other person can change. I have to believe that the other person can hear me. I have to sense that they're open to listening. When those things are not in place, I change tactics. I have learned this methodology of principle struggle, and the idea is to believe that we're all trying to move towards unity.

I believe that it helps if we all have similar information to look at and respond to. I'm willing to be informed. I'm willing to read something. I'm willing to get engaged. But I also understand that every container is not the one for what I'm trying to bring. So I want to understand, is this the place? Sometimes it's meant walking away from an organization, an institution, or a job, because this is not a space that is interested in or willing to do the labor of the kind of changes that I would need, that I require to be here, to be alive. My work has felt very clear for a long time.

I'm a disruptor. I'm here to till the soil and turn it. I’m here to water things, to be interested in the weeds, to know whether something is medicine or not.

I understand my work. And so I'll say that that piece is there.

And then the online piece has gotten trickier and trickier. In my life, I feel like I've seen so much change with this. And I've been thinking about it a lot that when social media sites first came around, it was for friends. You were connecting to people that you knew in real life. And this was just a way for you to stay connected to each other based on offline relationships. And you were a person.

Now, almost everyone on social media is like, you're a platform, and you make statements as a platform. A lot of people are getting political education in that space. I got a political education as a person, by people who would gather me up and be like, “Hey sister, that's not how we talk about that.” Or, “That word is ableist,” or “Let me intervene in some other way because I care about you and I can see how much you love humanity. And I'm building off of what I see that's good in you, and what’s not good, the part that's trying, that's earnest in you. I want to build off of that. I want to believe you when you say you care about these things and here's what you do. If you care, here's what you do.”

So that kind of teaching, that kind of being held, now people aren't getting that. They're getting politicized a lot of times in these online spaces where you may or may not be talking to a human. You may be talking to a bot. You may be talking to someone who was paid to show up in that space and make it more angsty.

When you’re feeling compelled to engage with someone who's a stranger that you don't know, just click through and see a little bit about that person. See if they have a history of comments, see if they have politics expressed on their page. Sometimes, I'll be surprised because I'll click through and realize the person is a super staunch conservative. There's nothing that I'm going to say that's necessarily going to reach this person in this environment. I'm not sure what they're doing here. Because the spirit of someone who's coming onto a page and is opposed to my existence is not who I need to be in these conversations with. That's not where we start. Someone closer to that person would need to begin that conversation. It's not going to work with me. I've learned that the hard way.

I'm related to people who, at periods in history, have not wanted to see people who look like me exist. I understand the intimacy it takes to do those higher-level interventions when people are inside a cult, like white supremacy. So I think there's a lot about relationships that happen on multiple levels. And social media is not outside of that. I've been experimenting a lot with what can be said and done, and how much healing can happen in that space. And it's not as much as I would like, but it's not nothing. I think some people spend too much time there.

One of the things I'm often trying to do is figure out how to invite people out of that space and into a real-life conversation where you can reach across and when the conflict gets rough, you can grab each other's hands and be like, “Listen, I care about you. That's why we're having this conversation.” That part matters. When people are full of rage, you have to get down to the root of it.

Online spaces are where advertisers make money off of our discontent and our anger, because the more comments, the more views, the more money they're making. 

We have to be mindful that someone is benefiting from you having that rant or that argument. That's not the environment in which we transform lives.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you for this guidance in terms of not making social media everything and stuff online as everything, but understanding them as complementary and how we can use them and not be used by them. 

And I want to take a step back and move into looking at the bigger picture. I often think about this idea that hurt people hurt people. And I kind of see this resonating throughout your work as well in terms of how a lot of what we're seeing today is largely the result of unhealed trauma that is spiraling and causing more harm because we haven't really gotten to tend to the roots of a lot of these wounds.

I really resonate with this invitation in general into Loving Corrections because I think that also holds a lot of empathy that oftentimes, people on the side of doing the oppressing and the harming have their own set of deeper traumas to heal. And people on the side of extracting and exploiting human bodies and bodies of the earth have a sense of dissociation and a loss of their sense of interdependence to heal as well. 

I know this is a big question, and there are many answers and possibilities, but I get stuck thinking about how this system was essentially created to prop up and reward people who exploit and extract the most. And therefore, our currencies of money and power also reflect that. The world right now seems to be steered by people who are disproportionately the most ungrounded, disoriented, and disconnected in their values and worldviews.

So then there's a lot of tension when people who do feel most grounded and rooted in our belonging to the Earth and each other are trying to reroute this collective path. It doesn't seem as of right now like we're gonna be able to course correct by asking nicely or by playing within the rules of the game.

With this in mind, I'm curious what your current imaginations and theories of change might look like or be guided by, and how you see love playing into this vision.

adrienne maree brown: I love that you've asked this question. As soon as I finished writing Loving Corrections, I started writing a big book, Love, because I started to understand that love is my politics and worldview, and it's the thing that keeps flowing through everything else.

But I will say, one of the ways that I've been moving with love through this is because I'm like, “How can I love someone who doesn't want me to live?” And the only answer I've come up with was collectively.

If I look at the whole species, it makes me feel such grief that some people have gotten caught in the idea prisons that make their lives very narrow, very small, and very disconnected. I can't break every single person out of those idea prisons, but I'm doing my best.

I think about Harriet Tubman often, and how the work that she was doing at the time probably didn't feel satisfying enough. The idea that all the people that you've ever known and loved are enslaved and you can only bring one at a time or a small handful at a time up a very dangerous path and not everyone's gonna make it. And some people are going to say “no”, and some are going to turn back. But the job remains the same: To get as many people as you can across that line, to get them out of those conditions. And once they're out of those conditions, once they're free, you don't know what they're going to do. There's no guarantee that now you're free you're going to turn around and do the same thing.

I think that that's always one of the questions I have. Did Harriet Tubman make a little school? Was there a hope that she had that people would pick up the mission and that there would be more and more people who were doing what she was doing? I feel like that's part of our work right now to notice how these ideas have our species in lockdown. And it's a lockdown that is very unsustainable. 

 A lot of the scientists and folks that I look up to who look at how the world works believe these systems will tumble on their own eventually because they are so unsustainable, because they require a constant level of suffering that nobody will endure. And so eventually there's always a rising up, there's a resistance, there's a pushing back.

And no matter how you try to frame that resistance, people who have been oppressed recognize it for what it is. People who have been oppressed understand why we do actions to shut down weapon production factories, and why we try to grab our people when the police are trying to pull them away from us and make sure that they don't go in. We understand why we try to get ourselves free over and over again. Especially people who've tasted freedom, we don't go down easily. 

To me, our work is to stay connected to each other as much as we can, and to recognize that those ‘idea prisons’ live in each of us… I don't see myself as someone who has completely broken out of them. I'm trying.

I'm working very hard all the time to check them in myself. And I think I do a lot. I work very hard and diligently. And I still think I'm just scraping the surface of the transformation that's possible in my lifetime. And that feels exciting, even as it's daunting. I'm trying to break intergenerational patterns. I'm trying to break major systemic holds on my imagination for what's possible for my species. And I'm just getting started. I'm inviting other people with me and some will come, but not everyone will. But we got to get all of ourselves out of this. 

When I imagine looking forward, it's just a bunch of people figuring shit out together. To me, that's what it is to be human, to be on a planet that is not eternal either.

On the long horizon, there is a circumstance in which our planet gets completely swallowed up by the sun. We have to figure something out by then, and right now we're trying to figure something out. Can we keep the planet livable for humans until that point, or are we rushing that ending? Who are the people who are interested in figuring it out? That's who I want to kick it with. I want to kick it with the MacGyver’s and the Harriet Tubman's.

Kamea Chayne: It does feel like there's a lot that we have to metabolize with our bodies today with all of these different cycles that we're trying to disrupt. And I often think about the analogy of mycelium and fungi in terms of what they can teach us about relationships and community building.

Something that I've also been thinking about is how the climate catastrophes and genocides that we're seeing are the very visible mushrooms popping up and fruiting from the mycelial network of empire and global capitalism. So these aren't isolated events. They're just the more visible and visceral outcomes of their underlying networks of power and logic of exploitation, domination, and separation. There is a lot that we have to hold today with all of these different death caps of catastrophes popping up in different places at different times.

And I know it's not within any one person's capacity or capability to compost this monster of a global system. But I still struggle with feeling overwhelmed and never feel like I'm doing enough because I can't tend to all these different mushrooms fruiting at the same time. So I think back on your offering and how you remind us that "each of us is uniquely created to love different cross sections.”

As we start to wind down our main conversation, what guidance would you like to share in terms of finding our special sauce and unique role in movements — without letting the sense of overwhelm translate into desensitization or disengagement?

adrienne maree brown: I just have to say your questions are bringing me so much joy today. I'm just like, you get it. You read the text and you really paid attention. 

I think the thing that's been helping me is reading about ancestors, thinking about ancestors, and opening myself up to the wisdom of my ancestors, because when I just think about myself in this one timeline my ego jumps in very quickly to be like, you need to be doing more and nothing you do is ever gonna be enough. That you are solely responsible for saving all the people and stopping all the war. Get it together.

And then when I tune back into my ancestral wisdom, which all of us possess, it very quickly reminds me that we all lived a life, every single one of us. And we got as free as we got in that life, but we didn't get all the way. And we moved some big ideas, but we didn't move them all the way. But look at what we did and look at how it's impacted you. 

I just spent significant time in this conversation on Harriet Tubman, and I always spend significant time almost every time I go anywhere talking about one or more of these chosen ancestors in the lineage of my work who have helped me move forward. And the same will be true of the ancestors in the lineage of the next generation's work, and they will be the ancestors in the lineage of the next generation's work.

We're responsible for moving these ideas down through time holding our own and growing our own as we move them. So I want more and more people to care about the things that I care about. And sometimes that happens in ways that I want where we have these victories or these wins, but most of the time it happens in ways that are very difficult to metabolize. 

For instance, right now, what I keep hearing from people who've been working on Palestine for their entire lives is that this moment is the most people who've ever been speaking about it, the most people who understand coherently what's happening there. This is the most people who've ever taken a stance, their nations taking a stance on behalf of Palestine. But the cost is incomprehensible. I literally cannot process it inside my body.

I know that the change is happening, but I cannot hold it just in my own body. I have to be in community and I have to read my Mahmoud Darwish and I have to think that there've been people writing poems of love to this place all this time and they will continue writing them.

We're not even close to justice yet. We're just moving it along and it's humbling. I meditate a lot on how humbling it is to be a human who cares about this world. It's tender, but I think that's good news.

If I turn to my ancestors, they're like, “Don't forget crying and grieving. We also lived and died. We're grieving for the world that you never even got to experience because your whole world now is through a screen.”

I think one of the things we're meant to do is to be tender.

[Musical intermission]

Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books you've read or publications you follow?

adrienne maree brown: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin.

Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

adrienne maree brown: Be a moral center of the post-nation

Kamea Chayne: And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?

adrienne maree brown: I'd say people, Palestinians, Sudanese, Congolese, Haitians, folks who are surviving with and without the love and attention and safety and dignity and belonging that they deserve. But they're finding ways to plant gardens and desalinate water and survive.

Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a wrap here, but we'll have more references and resources from this episode linked in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, adrienne, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been a huge honor to speak with you and I'm so excited to just let this conversation seep into my body and feel the deeper shifts that I might experience over the coming weeks. For now, what final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as green dreamers?

adrienne maree brown: Just don't give up on love. Find some people that you love and find some land that you love and give yourself wholly to it.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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