Desgin Thinking for Morning Routine - The Video!
We're excited to share some of the resilience skills we teach in free, easy-to-put-to-use ways that you can immediately apply to daily life right now. We're here to support you in imagining and building the worlds you need where you are- the kitchen, the container garden, the morning, each is a little world. Watch this video for a quick-n-dirty design process to support you in creating a morning routine that meets your needs, is pleasurable, and that you can actually implement!
![[Image of white text on a marigold-yellow background. Text reads, in large letters, "imagine," and below that in smaller letters, "an index for the next world"]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c09d212e69cf49f9a312ba/1593638600194-6M6D53S67CZ3MC8KI7Y6/Creative+Wrapper+for+Instagram.jpg)
[Image of white text on a marigold-yellow background. Text reads, in large letters, "imagine," and below that in smaller letters, "an index for the next world"]
Imagination Is A Radical Muscle - Defunding Police, Re-Imagining Public Safety, Uprooting White Supremacy
To build thriving and just systems, those systems first have to be imagined, in contrast to the current system. Imagination is a radical and essential muscle.
We've been quiet online for the last few weeks, and we may be again for a bit, wanting to listen to and highlight Black creators, activists, and change-makers' messaging and leadership.
More clearly than ever, we hear, and stand-sit-lie with, calls for defunding the police, re-imagining public safety, and uprooting white supremacy. With these visions of abolition shared by generations of Black movement leaders and activists and artists and people. Visions created by people who have not had the option to accept and survive this system as it is, who have had to imagine something different. Who are offering visions and strategies for systems that are not only survivable, but are actually oriented towards care and thriving for all.
The core intent of the Index for the Next World publication is to house and highlight a diverse set of immersive visions of a world that thrives. The core intent of the I4NW member village is to offer skills for implementing re-imagined systems. Now more than ever, we are deeply and fiercely committed to this work, in service, solidarity, and collaboration with the larger I4NW community of creators and change-makers. Our inaugural publication and our member village will go live to the public in ~2 weeks, and we're so excited to share more with you leading up to and during the launch.
And, we're also a company run by a white cis woman. And so we're in discernment and conversation about what shifts we want and need to make in our online presence and content (and length of posts!), especially on social media, long-term to be in integrity with the work of highlighting and centering BIPOC voices, and de-centering whiteness.
Thank you for all that you imagine and create, re-imaginer community past and present. We're so grateful to be imagining with you.
- Rachel
[Image of white text on a coral-colored background. Text reads “practice” in large letters ,and then below it in smaller letters, “an index for the next world.”
Live the Next World Now
Live the next world now
One of our core driving values here at I4NW is "live the next world now." But rather than focusing on any attempts to perfectionistically "get it right," we center the questions:
How can we, imperfectly and messily and incompletely and playfully, with dedication, in little bits and fragments and temporary moments, co-create and live the world(s) we need right now?
How can we live these next world(s) in our interactions and interconnections with each other, ourselves, land?
What are we going to do instead of business-as-usual?
How are we already doing that "instead," those next worlds, individually, and collectively?
Who is tending and carrying on, seed-banking and protecting against onslaught and erasure, our knowledge and practices and systems of thriving and justice, of the next world now?
How can we listen respectfully to, center, and reciprocate / compensate these teachers (human and beyond) and their wisdoms? .
AND SO IN THIS MOMENT OF GLOBAL PANDEMIC, UNCERTAINTY, AND CONTINUED HARM TO THOSE ALREADY MOST MARGINALIZED... .
Instead of adding one more "should" to our list, we seek to return to the question, "How are we already living it?" Across the globe, across our communities and so many others, amidst the chaos and the harm, the ways in which we're already creating and building the worlds we need are coming through loud and clear. As chronically ill and disabled people, we know that we can't wait to create the worlds we need to survive. As queer people, we know that in order to exist and thrive in the world we have to imagine a world in which we exist and thrive. And on and on, through our specific community lenses and lineages.
This is what we aim to do and house here at Index for the Next World: skills and stories of "what we do instead," of how we "live the next world now" and in the future.
Video call game nights. Coordinated grocery runs. Sharing and trading skills virtually. Mapping resources and needs and sharing them. Checking in on each other. Mutual aid spreadsheets. Humor text threads. Read-alouds across time zones. Practitioners offering accessible rates and trades online. These are just a few seemingly small spaces where living the world we need, doing the "what are we going to do instead," are showing up already for us. It doesn’t erase the harm. It does give us something tangible to hold onto, to live into in little moments and pockets, to grow half-hopes in, to tend and keep alive, to keep our imaginations rippling with possibility in the face of the narrowing we face.
What is one way that a next, pleasurable, just, thriving world, showed up in your life this week? What’s a way it didn’t, that you’re longing for, drawing us towards?
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Copyright 2019 Rachel Economy