Alexis Pauline Gumbs, "this is what it sounds like (an ecological approach)"
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7.
cultivate breathable air

8.
shape trees for your gods [31]
circles for your ancestors [32]
fire from our stories [33]

9.
yemaya has a mirror [34]
time travel salt roads [35]
older than narcissus [36]
and more true [37]

oshun has a trajectory [38]

they improvise in harmony
unmistakable direction

water
the earth
with your face [39]

Footnotes

31. An Ecological Approach: A Treatise
In a time when the planet is preparing to stop tolerating our collectively destructive relationship to life resources and the future, the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind is a specific example of how to orchestrate an intimate, profound, and living feminist praxis full of impact. What the project itself exemplifies is an ecological approach based on the following principles:

• we have what we need (each other)
• everything is useful, everyone is priceless
• we are part of a larger environment that we can relate to symbiotically or destructively
• our ecology includes spiritual, physical, practical, social, emotional, technological, and intellectual resources

We offer An Ecological Approach as a necessary alternative to an economic approach to the planet that reifies capitalism as a resource model and disrespects the vitality of other resources, especially spiritual and emotional resources and the wisdom of oppressed people. This approach is very much informed by an approach called "organic pragmatism" developed and practiced by SpiritHouse, a Durham-based social justice arts organization. [Back to text]

32. An ecological approach is beautiful. It matters whether we face each other in a circle or stand shoulder to shoulder in a line. Spiritual leader, scholar, and transnational feminist activist Jacqui Alexander teaches the spirit and responds to an aesthetic; 3-year-old spiritual teacher and gender queer baby Jibs (an Eternal Summer participant), practices this truth by ritually granting each person in our circle a hug and a kiss at transitional moments in our gatherings. We understand the way we organize ourselves as a creative process, with shapes, visuals, and rhythmic and sonic resonances. In other words any structure is an expression of an aesthetic that may or may not serve our vision, invite our ancestors, or allow energy to flow. An ecological approach means being artists with our lives, our relationships, and our organizing such that energy and inspiration move through us. What this looks like, feels like, sounds like, will be different in particular areas of our shared environment and will evolve. [Back to text]

33. An ecological approach is accountable. Because we know that we need each other, and that everything is useful, and everyone is priceless, an ecological approach must be accountable to communities and individuals in specific ways.
Account (a story): In order to be accountable it is key to create safe, sacred, informal, and regular spaces for the people we are accountable to to share their stories or give an account of their experiences, visions, and insights. People may give accounts through food preparation, song, text messages, body language, showing up, or not showing up. Related to the above, the forms of participation that we create and listen for must be as multiple as we are.
Account (a reckoning of resources): Accountability also means knowing that the people own the project. In an educational project it means remembering that all knowledge belongs to the people. In an activist project it means remembering that the power for transformation lives inside the people. In a practical sense it means the project is owned, supported, co-created by, and transparent in the community it nurtures and grows within. This is very different from giving an account (aka a grant report) to an outside funding source. The life source of a transformative community project is obviously that same transformative community, ancestors included. A funding source that sees itself as separate can disrupt our relationship to our life source. However, when the viability of a project depends on the people activating resources, literally feeding each other, looking for ways to mobilize or siphon resources from their jobs, supporting the project with money that is in no way disposable, the project has to be accountable. We will not sustain a project that we do not see as nourishing in our everyday lives.

Accountability activates us. [Back to text]

34. An ecological approach is reflective. [Back to text]

35. Which means studying the herstories in which we are grounded, and by which we are inspired. [Back to text]

36. And also means cultivating a loving practice of self-criticism that remembers that our relationship to the planet is in need of transformation. As poets Alixa and Naima of Climbing Poetree remind us: "raindrop let go, become the ocean." We are mostly water; so is the planet. [Back to text]

37. The world will only transform to the extent that we ourselves transform. This applies individually to each of us and also to what we create collectively. Our organizations, projects, and initiatives are only transformative if they transform. [Back to text]

38. So we honor our vision of a radically different world when we let go of ego and organizational ownership and embrace our purpose in relationship to something much greater than ourselves. [Back to text]

39. Transformation means letting go of who we thought we were, facing painful experiences and practices that harm others. This will almost definitely involve tears. [Back to text]

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