Mia Birdsong: Deepening our interdependence with community (ep367)
“Freedom and friendship have the same etymological root, which means beloved... [Historically, freedom] was about your people and that collectively, you were able to get the things that you needed for everyone to survive — food, shelter, water — and that children, disabled people, babies, and elders were cared for. This was how you were free — in the collective.”
In this episode, we welcome Mia Birdsong, a pathfinder, author, and facilitator who steadily engages the leadership and wisdom of people experiencing injustice to chart new visions of American life. She has a gift for making visible and leveraging the brilliance of everyday people so that our collective gifts reach larger spheres of influence, cultural and political change, and create wellbeing for all of us.
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include remembering a wiser and more radical meaning of “freedom”, re-envisioning what it means to feel safe and secure in a community, the generosity of receiving in relationships, and more.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app, or read on for the episode transcript.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Luna Bec.
Episode-inspired artwork by Isadora Machado
Episode references:
How We Show Up, a book by Mia Birdsong
Next River: An Institute For Practicing the Future, an upcoming project by Mia Birdsong
How the Word Is Passed, a book by Clint Smith
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a book by David Graeber
Beloved, a book by Toni Morrison
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Mia Birdsong: There is something so seductive about the idea of the American dream. It paints this “beautiful” picture of success and happiness and tells us that to access that thing, all you have to do is to work hard. It is basically a 1950s advertisement for life. We all want to be happy. We all want to feel like our lives are “successful.” We're told from a very young age when you grow up in America, here is how you get this thing and this is what it looks like. What is wrong with that is that? Well, every piece of it is a lie.
[The American dream] creates a hierarchy for what our families—which are so deeply personal and critical—should look like.
It’s an insular, nuclear family, it’s white culture, it’s heteronormative—[a family] that does not depend on the state for anything. In many ways, it is a replication of a monarchy. So it is a man whose wife and children and home are all basically property. We have these incremental shifts that we've made in the last 150 years, the mom is allowed to work or there can be two moms or they can be Black, but they still have to align to a culture that is still very white, still very heteronormative, still very insular, and they have to be “self-sufficient”.
It also ignores, of course, all of the barriers that have been built to prevent people from actually getting to this place. So even if it was a good place, most of us can't get there anyway. Part of the damage that it's done is it has had so many of us and I, myself included, point our paths towards something that upon further reflection, not only can we not achieve, but we don't actually want. We spend all of this time and energy, and beat ourselves up for not getting there. And we're like, “Why is it not working, why are we not getting to the things that we're told [we could]?” All we had to do is "work hard to get there.”
Our failure is individualized when in fact, America has built actual barriers to prevent people from achieving the thing (that again, upon further reflection, many of us discover we don't even want). It's in service of maintaining patriarchy, maintaining the idea that individuals are responsible for any of the harm they experience, maintaining white supremacy, and maintaining capitalism.
What is true for us, as people, is that we are fundamentally community-oriented social animals.
We are not like our cousins, the snake or the lizard who are [like], “Our parents lay eggs and we hatch from the egg and then we can go and get our own food and find our own shelter and do what we gotta do until we die.” We are born helpless. We need care. For quite a long time. Until we're able to participate in the collective process of making sure that our community has food, shelter, and care. The idea that we are going to, as people, grow up and then be “self-sufficient”, it just is... part of what capitalism does.
It creates a barrier between the things that we need and the people who actually make those things available to us. Most of us are not part of communities where we're collectively building homes or growing food or providing education or taking care of each other. Usually, we are buying those things, [and even then] there is still a whole system of people who are there to make sure that those things are available to us. An individual person can't actually be self-sufficient. Nobody is going out and hunting and gathering their own food, building their own shelter, taking care of their own broken leg, doing their own surgery, or teaching themselves.
Kamea Chayne: Even that isn't self-sufficient because things come from the land, and that's a community, too.
Mia Birdsong: That's where I was going to go next, that we as people have this idea that to be self-sufficient is to basically extract all of these things from the rest of the natural world and make it our own.
When in fact, we are, of course, not only in relationship with other humans, we are in place-ship with everything. This idea that we're going to grow up and get married and have children and have a job where we're going to earn enough money to purchase all of the things—not just all the things that we, of course, need, but actually a whole bunch of crap we don't need. That's going to make us “happy” and “successful”. That's the American dream.
One of the many hard but necessary gifts of COVID has been to reveal so much more to many more people the lie that that is.
Kamea Chayne: It certainly feels like we've been sold so many visions and told so many things about what we need in order to thrive. But more and more people, thankfully, are waking up and seeing through these lies and relearning to feel and listen to our deeper yearnings for what it is that we truly need in order to feel cared for, nourished, and safe in a real sense of the word, and rooted.
From How We Show Up, you ask some really foundational questions. “What does it really mean to be in deep, close community? What form does it take? Who is included and why?”
Especially during a time when I believe, at least, big tech and social media platforms have superficialized and diluted the deeper meaning of community, I think these are really important questions to sit with, so that we may be able to fulfill our yearnings with something that feels a lot more nourishing and authentic and real. But I would be curious to hear how your thought process and ideas of community have evolved as you've leaned deeper into these questions, and what you envision today as the type of community that we need for our mental, emotional, spiritual, health and collective resilience.
Mia Birdsong: [When] you started you were talking about this returning to something. Part of what brings me comfort in thinking about what is our path forward is recognizing that...
Everything that we need and want has existed or does exist in some form. We actually do not have to invent anything new. We may have to adapt it for the context that we're in, but there is so much to lean into and allow to surface if we tap into our ancestral knowledge.
If we tap it, and I mean all of us—because all of us, if we go back far enough, are from places that practiced deep community and had relationships with the rest of the natural world that were not extractive and destructive in the way that they are now—tapping into that ancestral knowledge, digging underneath the fear and anxiety and disconnection and the sense of scarcity that our current world has infected us with, [we will] see what we really long for, and understand that that longing is birthright.
I think about things like belonging. I think about [the fact that] we want to be part of a connected network of people and [part of a] place that allows us to be ourselves, and that allows us to contribute and allows us to be, to receive, to be known, to be deeply seen, and allows us to know and see others. [That] allows for our nourishment, allows for our growth, allows us to feel, allows those feelings to be witnessed, allows us to grieve, and to do those things in ways that are not put forward into the restrictions that capitalism and other systems make space for.
But when I think about what it means to be free, I think about the social movements that I'm part of and our North Star of liberation. I think about how freedom is another American dream adjacent thing. America tells us that freedom is deeply individualistic. It's my freedom. It is about achieving "independence.” It's about accumulating enough resources so that you do not have to ask anyone for anything. It is about this idea that you can do whatever you want and you're not accountable to anyone and you're not responsible to anyone.
[Being free within the American dream involves] being a person that is utterly and completely disconnected from anyone or anything. When I think about what liberation actually is... I can't actually have the things that I need and want without other people, without community, and neither can they.
No one can have the things they need and want without each other. Liberation is actually a collective process. In fact, when I was doing research for my book, there were a handful of facts, pieces of information, and wisdom that I came across that blew my mind and solidified this for me.
One is that freedom and friendship have the same etymological root, which means beloved. When I thought about that, I was like, “Oh, these words were birthed together.” Freedom and friendship were words that were birthed together. So that was one piece and then the other—this is in a Western context. I'm actually doing more research on this right now for a project that I'm doing on the future of freedom. So, I don't have all of this information yet, but...
I'm assuming this is a Western context, that before the 1500s, the way that people understood what freedom meant was that you had your people and collectively, you were able to get the things that you needed for everyone to survive. You had food, you had shelter, you had water. Children, disabled people, babies, and elders were cared for. This was how you were free — in the collective. How slavery was understood was that to be a slave was not just that someone else could tell you what to do. You were a slave because you were disconnected from your people, taken away from your people.
When I think about that understanding of freedom in the context of Black people's experience in America, I think about us being kidnapped from the continent of Africa and held hostage on plantations. I think about that separation. I think about the constant threat—that was not tangential but was integral to what American slavery was—of being sold away from your loved ones or your loved ones being sold away from you. I think about the post-reconstruction terrorism in the South by white people through lynchings and the threat of lynching and the refugee crisis that that caused for Black people, who fled north and west. I think about the prison industrial complex and the way that it has locked up and put so many Black people in cages far away from their families.
I think about this American project to make Black people not free by separating us from each other. I also think about our unending resistance to that American project of separation. So I think about Black people who ran away from slavery to find loved ones who had been sold away from them. I think about post-emancipation. There's actually this amazing, heartbreaking, and beautiful archive that you can access online, of a bunch of the ads that Black folks placed in newspapers trying to find their mothers, their brothers, their friends, their husbands, and wives who they hadn't seen for ten, twenty, or thirty years. They're all very short, but they're just beautiful and heartbreaking.
I think about parts of the country where usually women have organized buses to transport people from the cities where they live out into usually rural places where their loved ones are in prison so that they can go visit them. I think about the organized effort that has happened to try to end the monopoly on phone calls to prison that allowed phone companies to charge amounts of money that people could not afford in order to just make phone calls to people that they loved. Then I think about the long-standing practice of Black people just making a family with whoever, with the other people who are around them.
Chosen family is such a fundamental part of the Black experience in America.
So much so that I feel like most of the Black adults that I know find out when they're grown that Uncle Bobby is not actually their father's brother but is their father's best friend from high school. Seeing freedom through that lens.
This idea that freedom is about your people changes not only how I understand the Black experience in America but changes how I see the dominant understanding, the dominant story about what freedom is, versus what it really is. Because the dominant story about what freedom is about disconnection and separation. So much of [that is] of patriarchy and white supremacy, of the ways that they put forward an idea of what a good life is—which is just an utterly self-hating, dehumanizing, punishing [way] to live a life.
Kamea Chayne: It's beautiful and it's powerful, this recognition and reminder that power comes from being connected, having community, and practicing culture together. It all invites us to go back to our foundational human needs, which I think most people know in our hearts — that we are social creatures and we need community. We need interdependence on others. Personal thriving is very much tethered to our collective thriving.
I think about our culture of disconnection and superficiality and how people often talk about how our world is becoming increasingly divisive. I almost wonder if this divisiveness comes, not entirely at least, from people just having differences in our values and opinions and worldviews, because people are diverse in our upbringing, experiences, cultures, values, and so forth. So, while I don't doubt that the narratives we've been fed, especially by corporate or partisan media, are driving larger wedges between people, I also would question whether our capacity to hold empathy, to seek, to understand over a judge, to engage in the complexity of the human experience, rather than to simplify people and shun them for very reductionistic things, has been eroded for all sorts of reasons as well, maybe due to the systems we've been a part of.
But what would you add to the question here, when we think about our capacities for empathy and its role in the deeper community?
Mia Birdsong: What that makes me think of is how one of the coping mechanisms we have as people when we experience crisis or trauma or harm is to numb ourselves. We just shut down because the thing that we're experiencing is too much for us to feel, which is super useful. If you think about human evolution and if there is a need to function such as run away or do something that is going to save your life, [then] feeling or processing those feelings… you don't have time for it at the moment.
But we live in a culture where we are so often experiencing harm and trauma and abuse and attack. I mean, we're still in a pandemic. The experience of the pandemic has been an experience of trauma for everyone. What that trauma looks like is absolutely different depending on all kinds of things. But no one has not experienced trauma. That we're expected to carry on right [now] in the face of that trauma means that we are numbing. [And] the pandemic is [just] one example.
The culture of violence and extraction and degradation of ourselves, of the rest of the natural world, along with our access to information about all those things happening, is a constant trauma.
Our response is numbing. When we are numbing, we're obviously not feeling our own feelings. But it's also impossible for us to experience and feel empathy. You and I are talking. [It’s the] beginning of June, and we are again still in a pandemic in the United States. We've also just had this public attention on multiple acts of terrorism and gun violence. That's just one example of what's going on. I am feeling and have felt this overwhelm of my system and it does not feel like there is room to pause and feel things, to pause and grieve, [even as] someone who makes an attempt to do those things and tries to find room to do those things.
We don't have a culture of being taught that those feelings are okay. We are rewarded and celebrated when we push through. When we put our feelings aside and keep going, get our work done, take care of other people, or whatever it is that is what we're expected to do to function. Our culture is like, “You're awesome if you can keep doing those things despite all this other stuff happening.” So, we don't have a lot of permission to feel our own feelings, never mind actually empathizing with other folks.
I found that after the murder of children in Texas that it was important for me to tap into my grief and empathy. I had to dig a little bit deeper to get there. That meant getting closer to the specifics of people's trauma and I felt like it was an important process for me to be able to tap into my own grief and my empathy. But I also was just aware of how voyeuristic it felt to have to feel like I need to find the really powerful but also gratuitous storytelling about people's experiences in order to find my own feelings. Part of that feels like a legitimate process of making real and human people through their stories and their experience. But it is unsettling to me that sometimes just knowing about a thing isn't enough for us to tap into our grief and to tap into our empathy.
Kamea Chayne: With all of these things happening, on top of the climate crisis and all existing forms of injustices, I don't think our bodies have grown to be able to process all of these large-scale and societal traumas on our own, either. So our capacities to feel, grieve, and hold empathy have been systemically robbed from us. Then we're told that we're weak when we can't handle these things alone, which just furthers this vicious cycle for our collective well-being and public health. There's a lot to undo there and to push back against in terms of how we might actually reclaim our capacities for empathy and for healing, and also to rebuild the communities we need for our individual and collective healing.
Earlier, I touched on how I think big tech and social media platforms have co-opted a lot of our relational needs, using the terms “community,” “friend,” “connection,” or “engagement” in ways that are much more surface level than I think what we more deeply yearn for. There's that aspect, this concern that a lot of us have been disillusioned into filling our voids with things that don't go nearly far enough to really nourish what we need for our social well-being. Then, even darker is when our human yearnings to belong get hijacked by those with malicious intent, with exclusionary and discriminatory views of who belongs and who is less than and deserves less then.
I think there's a need to expand our capacities for empathy even more here, if we have space for that, because sometimes when people have certain voids or senses of insecurity and fear and are unsure what those feelings actually mean or where to direct their frustration, we become more vulnerable to these discriminatory stories about who we are and what we should be a part of to feel connected to something larger than ourselves that might help us to feel safe and grounded.
How have you thought through our innate human needs for belonging, but through the different forms that they show up for people, and whether the end result of how one defines community then impacts our larger communal well-being?
Mia Birdsong: I read or heard about a study that was done on people who are part of the anti-abortion movement. One of the things they found is that the people who are most committed to that movement and most involved and put in the most work and showed up at clinics to harass people going to get healthcare—it was not because they held the ideology the most tightly. It was about how they found community [there]. The people who showed up, [they showed up] because they [felt] a sense of belonging.
Let's talk about gun violence for a minute. When I think about what we need to do, so often, our reaction is to be like, “Well, how do we solve this problem right now? What is the immediate solution?” There is a subway shooting in New York and the mayor is like, “Oh, we need more cops,” which is just a non-solution. That is an unsafe option. That is not going to do anything. It is going to make some people feel safer and it's going to make some people feel like something is being done. But it is a negative solution.
Then we have gun laws—an “actual” solution, something that will take a little bit of time, but seems like a feasible thing to try to create. Regulations around guns, that seems like a good idea—that we should have background checks, that people should have licenses, things like that. But what that does is that reduce the body count. That doesn't actually stop the violence. The thing that stops violence and is much harder for us to sit with as a solution is because it's something that is long-term, it's something that we would not be here to actually see. It's a solution that has us deeply examining masculinity and what it means to be a man. It's a solution that has us asking, how do we create space for people to feel belonging, not by who they hate and who they're keeping out, but by where they actually are seen and held and loved and cared for? That is culture change. That kind of change takes decades.
One of the things I think about when I do work for which I won’t see the results of, or for which I'm not going to see the [desired outcome] actually happen is [this]: people who did work to make a change that I benefit from, who [themselves] did not get to see it. I think about enslaved Black people in the 1700s, who were abolitionists and who only knew for generations before them, their ancestors were enslaved, and for generations after them, their descendants were enslaved. They were not like, “Oh, let's pass some laws to make slavery less shitty for everybody.” But they were like, “No, the thing that we need is to end this institution, this institution that is upholding the entire economy of America.”
They were clear enough [about the fact] that this thing needed to end, and not that it needed to be reformed or that we needed to tinker around the edges, but [that] we actually need[ed] to do the work to end this thing. It took decades, decades, and decades.
I want to be able to sit in the long arc, of thinking about how do we actually address violence? How do we actually address so much of the oppression and extraction that we see and experience?
And I think that cultures of belonging, creating cultures where we actually feel like we belong is a huge part of that. That requires not just that you and I have a conversation and get to know each other. But that it requires ending capitalism. We can't have a system that needs us to perpetually accumulate things and acquire things and spend our time producing. If we are going to be in community with each other and as you pointed out earlier, with the rest of the world, with land, with trees, with crows, we can't have the life that we are meant to have and that we deserve tomorrow, in that context. Creating laws is not going to do that. We have to actually change fundamentally the culture that we exist in. I'm so here for that work.
I think that there is this really powerful place for us to sit in. That while we are creating this liberated, joyful, connected future, that the way we get there is by practicing it now. So there are all kinds of work that I'm here to do, but one of the most important things for me is to be in a community where I feel like I belong and where the people who are in my community feel like they belong and are free people together.
That doesn't mean that I'm not going to have to have a job and make money and buy things. It doesn't even mean that I'm not going to buy things I don't need. It doesn't mean I'm going to never use Instagram again or not buy plastic things. It doesn't mean that I'm going to become a minimalist, but it means that believing that that future is possible for us and that the way that we get there is not by creating a spreadsheet or a strategic plan, but it's embodying that as much as we can with each other right now.
Kamea Chayne: Earlier we were questioning and re-grounding what freedom means. I think here we're really being called into question what it really means to feel safe and what would it mean to see safety as primarily coming from community itself rather than something that is outside and on top of, an institution that is outside and on top of.
Just as an analogy for our listeners who may be coming to this show with more of the ecological lens, investing in the carceral system, in my mind, is akin to amping up on the use of pesticides and herbicides in agriculture, which most people understand to be a not very health-enhancing approach which just takes on this symptoms-focused solution of targeting, isolating, and locking up or killing rather than actually tending to the underlying conditions that created those symptoms.
Transformative justice, just to put a name to what I believe you're speaking to, feels like it's more about addressing those underlying conditions and creating the conditions that ultimately can help us feel safe and secure and rooted in our communities. Is that accurate or what else would you add to this?
Mia Birdsong: Yes. And I love this analogy, too, because I feel like it's also not that by tending to the land, we get rid of aphids, for example. It's that aphids are still going to happen, but we can create conditions where aphids are going to happen, but they don't eat all the kale. The ladybugs—this is what I do in my garden—show up and they eat the aphids, and some of my kale is gone, but not all of it.
When I think about humans and I think about harm, it's not that we're going to get rid of harm.
It's that the way that we're going to address harm, part of it is about trying to prevent it. So trying to raise people right, to raise children and to make sure that they get the love and the care that they need and that they're the people who are raising them also have the love and care that they need so that we're reducing it on one end, but it’s not as if harm is never going to happen. It means asking, how do we address the harm?
Mariame Kaba talks about how no one is the best thing that they have done or the worst thing they've ever done. We exist, and all of us are capable of harm and all of us absolutely perpetrate harm and all of us experience harm. If we understand that, then when we have to tend to someone who has experienced harm, we also recognize that we need to tend to the person who has perpetrated harm, because people cause harm because they're missing something, because something is wrong, because something needs to be healed.
It is absolutely necessary to focus on people who are healing, on people who experience harm. We also have to recognize that if we don't want harm to continue, locking somebody up is not the answer, but healing whatever needs healing in them is how that happens.
That is my understanding of the transformative power of transformative justice. The transformation doesn't leave the possibility open for the person to perpetrate the same harm again.
Part of [transformative justice] is not intellectualizing or extracting it to situations of intense violence, but thinking about “Well, how am I moving through the world?”
Where am I being impatient or short, or where are the places where I get activated and I act outside of my integrity? How can I recognize that? What's my responsibility to be doing my work, to be healing myself? What is the help that I need? What is the support that I need? Part of being in relationship is about being with people who will support your accountability. Mia Mingus, who is a disability justice activist and a transformative justice practitioner, talks about how if the relationships in your life are not where you are intentionally actually having conversations about accountability, then you are living an unaccountable life. Then you are perpetuating being in relationship with people in ways that lack accountability.
When I heard her say that, I was just like, “Oh,” because I don't think I had conversations with the people I'm really close to about how we need help with our accountability. It shifted so much of the way that I'm in relationships, with my closest friends in particular. We had to actually have conversations about the police, had to have conversations about the places where we mess up and where we are our worst selves, and where we make mistakes the most often. I feel like I'm still doing that. And that is deeply humbling.
But man, it is also a relief when you start telling people about the ways in which you're a terrible person. It's like, “Oh, my God, I can get this off my chest.” And guess what? They still love you. And they tell you about the ways that they mess up. That is part of what I mean about being seen. It's not just that we want recognition for how I’m awesome and how I'm dope and how I do good things. I also want to be seen. I want my wounds to be seen.
One of the things I often say to people is that my children get the worst of me. These babies push all of my buttons, they bring up all of my unresolved stuff around my childhood. That is the place where so much of my motivation for me getting my shit together and doing my work and healing my old wounds has been. Because I was like, “I will be a better parent because of this. I will be healing intergenerational stuff and not passing it on to them.” To be clear, I'm not a bad parent. I do some amazing parenting. I'm not saying that I'm a terrible person, but I'm just saying the stuff that is unhealed in me reveals itself most deeply with my parenting. That is hard stuff to admit, but being able to talk about that and share that with people who love me, that in and of itself ends up being part of what allows me to heal from it. I wish all of us [have] the courage to be vulnerable in that way.
At the end of July last year, I got diagnosed with colon cancer. The twenty minutes after the surgeon told me that I had cancer, I had a call with a friend of mine. We were doing a work project together. I went into survival mode. I was like, “Oh, this is just going to mess up the timeline and the project we're working on.”
She's amazing and made me pause and she had feelings about what I had just told her, so she just pulled me out of my numbness, out of my survival mode, and gave both of us room to begin to feel what I was talking about. Part of what that first interaction reminded me was about what I had learned from all these people I interviewed in my book and from my experience of the pandemic up until that point—about asking for help. So I told everybody that I knew. I told all of my people.
Our approach to illness in America is often about privacy, both because we don't want to be perceived as weak, and because we think of medical information as being private.
There is this very unspoken assumption that the person that you're going to share your medical information with if you get sick or you have a disability or you have a chronic illness, is your parents when you're growing up, and then you're going get married, it's going to be your spouse. The insular nuclear family impacts how we think about the medical care we get, because it stays inside of the insular nuclear family.
I was not doing that. I told all of my circles and I still am awed by how available folks were and how thoughtful and how committed. I had a care squad which included my friend Aisha and three other Black women who organized themselves to communicate with all my people. They created spreadsheets. They created fundraisers. Food was the low bar for what my family was going to experience—they created a joy fund for me so people could contribute money and I was meant to spend it on things that brought me joy. So, I bought all these art supplies. And when I had surgery, I was in the basement of the hospital, and there were people outside the hospital singing for me, and I could not hear them, but I knew that they were there, and I felt their presence.
Part of what I could see is not just obviously what a tremendous help and support it was for me—I have no doubt that my experience of going through surgery and chemo was so much less shitty than it would have been, because I had these people. But I was also so aware of the gift that I was giving them. For folks to be able to show up for me, [it] was a gift that they got. I think we forget that. We forget that even though we experienced it ourselves.
We know how good it feels to be able to show up and care for somebody we love.
Not because we're earning points with our God. But because it makes us feel a part of their lives. It makes us feel a part of something, especially when we know that they feel vulnerable or unsafe or are in pain or suffering in some way. We get to be part of that and help the pain resolve and help them feel less alone and help them feel cared for. That feels good for us. I so want us to remember that.
To be clear: right now, I'm cancer free. I'm not dying right now. I will have to I have to get scans and blood work for the next five years. But my plan is to not die of colon cancer, just so y'all know.
Kamea Chayne: I hope you've been getting all the support and every form of healing that you need. Also, it’s so timely that you had finished this book about community and interdependence and knew not to be afraid to lean into, as you name it, the generosity of receiving, knowing your loved ones want to show up for you. Being open to receiving is very much a part of relationship building.
This all for me speaks to the power and hope in community and knowing and witnessing one another deeply showing up for each other, caring for each other, and making sure no one falls through the cracks. Not to blame the loss of community on individuals, because there are systemic barriers there. But there are definitely things that we can do intentionally to be more present for each other and to work on expanding our capacities for empathy and just being present to care for each other.
Finally, in terms of a vision forward, you share: “I’m not interested in having to step out of my daily life to have it or in creating a separate place in isolation from the rest of the world—that leaves too many people behind. We have to make it where we live.” We are in a loneliness epidemic which unfortunately was worsened due to the pandemic, with deaths of despair increasing drastically in the past year, so I think these are really serious and important questions to ask.
Given all of the challenges of the current extractive system and individualistic culture, how would you recommend people rebuild community right where we are, so that even as we work towards a societal overhaul, we may be able to reclaim what we need for our social wellbeing right now, and also so that we can expand our collective capacities to come together to bring forth those larger systemic changes that we yearn for?
Mia Birdsong:
Many of us are walking around having the same experience and we're not talking about it.
The place that I generally tell people to start is with the people they're already in relationship with and to just begin to have that conversation. The other thing I will say is that there’s the reaching out part, right? Then there's a reaching inward part.
There is an excavation of, again, these layers of things that tell us that a good life looks one particular way, that I feel we need to discard, to figure out what it is we actually want and need and long for, and then to listen to that as we make our way forward to each other. So many of us are wanting and needing and longing for the same thing.
The other piece I will say is that while we spent, and for many of us continue to spend, the last few years being separate from other humans, the rest of the natural world is here for us. One of the things that I did during the pandemic is start a coven, as one does. One of the things we did was choose land and people. By people, I just mean living things that we would do our work together in honor of. We're all here in the Bay Area, so we chose the Bay Area and we chose eucalyptus and redwoods as our people.
Redwoods because they're indigenous to here and eucalyptus because we're all Black women and they were our ancestors stolen from their homeland and brought here for a particular purpose and then criminalized when they no longer serve that purpose or some white man brought the wrong type of eucalyptus. It was supposed to be a hardwood eucalyptus. He brought softwood. They're now everywhere in the Bay Area. For us, it feels very much like Black people being stolen from Africa and brought here to work. So, we have a relationship with both of these trees. I think of them as my elders. There is nothing like putting my head in the lap of a redwood and listening and feeling into the connection there to make me feel grounded and less alone, especially right now, less lost and helpless.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you. We are now going into our closing questions. What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Mia Birdsong: I mentioned I'm working on this project about our fundamental understanding of freedom. So almost everything I'm reading connects with that. I just finished Clint Smith's How the Word Is Passed. He is a historian and a poet. The book is this transporting, visceral, beautiful, and heartbreaking book about the stories we tell about America, chattel slavery, and the consequences of that.
And I want to name two other books. I just started reading at the beginning of David Graber and David Gross’s book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which challenges our conventional, white and European understanding of human history, and it is blowing my mind. And I'm also rereading Toni Morrison's Beloved.
Kamea Chayne: What is a mantra, motto, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Mia Birdsong: I would have to go to our ancestor, Octavia Butler. All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.
I have lots of practices, but one of them that's been really grounding and humbling is that I have been feeding these crows that live in my neighborhood. They go to this ash tree in my yard and they call for me. Then I run outside and bring them peanuts.
Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration at the moment?
Mia Birdsong: One of the things I love about the word “inspire” is it means to breathe life into. I would just go back to the people that are in my life. I have all these extraordinary people who are organizers and activists and healers and farmers, and they're just out here engaging in life and with each other. I think part of the reason that they're inspiring is that it’s a collective of people, it's not an individual person, and our generativeness, our grief, our curiosity, our commitment to this work inspires me.
Part of that community is the rest of the natural world. These crows that are in my neighborhood, the bees that I keep, the garden I tend to, the ocean, the eucalyptus and redwood elders, and that life can take so many forms, just continue to fill me with awe. That inspires me as well.
Kamea Chayne: Mia, it's been an incredible honor to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us today. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Mia Birdsong: One of my mentors, Akaya Windwood… I was talking to her during a moment of transition, and I just was in that place of not knowing where it was I was going. She was like, “Yes, that's the best place”, because she said that when you don't know, every possibility is open. She told me to stay as long as I could in that place of not knowing. I feel like we are all sitting in a place of not knowing in so many ways right now. It's uncomfortable as hell. I get the instinct to just move forward because we are uncomfortable. But we need to listen and just sit in this place of not knowing until the answers become clear.
