pandemic — Blog — Index For The Next World

Dearest community,

Whether you are beyond weary, feeling well-resourced, or both/ and/ more, we're here with you this month. I feel my own grief and despair as a dusty animal curled in my ribs, alert to, and alarmed by, the out-of-season storms and coming fires where I am, the ongoing political situation full of racist oppression and suppression taking place in the US and beyond, and the continuing and devastating global pandemic.

I long for gentle rain, to embrace a friend, to feel a tangible scope and space of hope, to gather in a place with others and plant seeds. And I long deeply, sharply, for drastic systemic change, for a future for people and planet.

It's at moments like this when I can find myself asking, what is the point of world-building? Why work and play to build skills, stories, systems in ourselves and our communities that embody the world we need? Are we even going to make it to the point, as a planet, where these things will have the chance to germinate and grow on a large scale? Is there even going to be a future? Should all of our effort go solely towards resisting the current systems?

And then I remember two things, things I learned from people who have been doing the simultaneous work of repairing, resisting, and re-imagining / replacing, for generations.

First, I remember that the time is now. We need these skills, stories, and systems now, not just at some far-off future point. We need them in our homes, our relationships, our communities of resistance and repair. We need them because they can foster access, resilience, pleasure, and co-care, and those aren't luxuries, they are urgent necessities for people now.

We're not waiting around until the next world seems globally possible to start figuring out how we'd like to live in that world - how we behave and design now affects who makes it through, alive and resilient, through the present moment and into a future. I am reminded of the arrogance of my own despair- that I don't actually know what futures will come, apocalyptic or otherwise. This moment is what's here. How are we co-creating with this moment itself to live the next world now, in this world, in the worlds that we touch every day?

This is our sacred and necessary work: to care for each other and the land, now.

And the second thing I remember is that seeds can be stored. In the right conditions, some can be stored for generations. In others, seeds need to be grown out each year to keep the genome, the genetic design magic of that lineage of seed, continuing on.

So too do stories and skills require refuge. We carry these seeds in our pockets, we pass them on to one another to plant, grow again, save more seeds. We are maintaining lineages and diversities of stories, skills, ways of living on the earth that run counter to the systems that dominate. We keep them alive through the generations, inside of, or in the margins of, systems that would like to destroy them. We must, we must keep these lineages alive, these practices in practice, and then pass them on. If you want a particular crop's genome to remain through the generations, you don't hoard the seeds: you share them out. We are the story tenders, the skills teachers. This is how we maintain the viability of the future we long for.

This is our sacred and necessary work: to carry thriving-world stories and skills safely through the generations, to pass them around and on.

Simultaneously, we collaborate and co-create with this moment, and share and carry seeds for the next. Thank you for being in this sacred work together.

With love and gratitude,
Rachel Economy
Owner / Lead Editor-Facilitator, I4NW

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?