When we work, play, dance, fight, design, collaborate to build next worlds that serve thriving and justice, we're building on and with, and in service to, the foundations and wisdom of generations of creators and change-makers. People and groups whose work and creations taught us, caused our bodies to sing out in recognition and longing for the worlds they built towards, enabled current and future work and creation. Enabled the gritty, practical experience of hope when we were in despair.
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Who emerges in your personal world-building lineage? Who lights you up?🌿
[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