During our conversation On Sacred Seed and Soil, Abena Offeh-Gyim (@livingtheancestralway) points out the absurdity that certain companies claim to own seeds as if they could own life itself. 1 Seeds are living things. They are our ancestors. They have been here before many of us were here. And they have also been here with our grandparents. 2 The seeds are past. They are present. They hold stories. They know the soil. They know where they belong. They know where they can thrive. They know their ecosystem. 3 In indigenous seed systems, there is a sharing and an exchanging of seeds. It is so crucial to biodiversity, but also crucial to human connection and to community connection. 4 Seeds are free. Nature gave them to us. It’s very dangerous for a company, corporation or country to invest research then claim the intellectual property rights and usage of seeds. It's a threat to life. It's a war against life. 5 If we were to take a cultural inventory of all the people [throughout time] that have participated in protecting, preserving, and saving seeds and compare that [value] to a company or corporation claiming intellectual property… then to ask the folks that have been protecting the seed to now pay for it is absurd. 6 Photo of Abena Offeh-Gyima and Calabash by @ekow.dawson #Linkinbio 🎵 by @buffalorosemusic @eliza.edens and #marianmclaughlin #AbenaOffehGyimah #AncestralFood #AfricanFood #SeedSaving #SeedLibraries #Farming #LivingTheAncestralWay #ForTheWild

Despair not 🐜🌞🕳️🌱 1 Ants circling around nourishment by Becca James via @3rdritual 2 I think of you waking up before me in your temporary body on your small, ailing planet. The courage it takes to do it again and again. @yeahliya 3 Pour away despair and rinse the cup. “the apple and the egg”, 1979. @press_sf 4 Laying naked in the sun is church @activationcodes 5 I will be the gladdest thing under the sun, I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one. “the apple and the egg”, 1979. @press_sf 6 Oh Matchless Earth, we underrate the desire to dwell in Thee. @ritualstudies 7 Pareidolia, occurring here in nature, is a psychological phenomenon whereby we see familiarity in a random object or stimulus @unownedspaces 8 A weighted blanket is not enough. I need to merge with the soil and co-regulate my body with the earth’s mycelial network. @wordsarevibrations wordsarevibrations via @luna__dietrich 9 The seeds are past. They are present. They hold stories. They know the soil. They know where they belong. They know where they can thrive. They know the ecosystem. @livingtheancestralway @forthewild 10 @massive.archive

Notes from our conversation with ABENA OFFEH-GYIMAH (@livingtheancestralway) on Sacred Seed and Soil /338 1 Farmers are literally archivists of the land. 2 Farmers have knowledge of the earth, the soil, and know when to plant. They know when it’s supposed to rain, when certain birds fly away, when certain worms are coming from the earth. This is experiential knowledge that you cannot purchase. 3 Festivals and prayers before and after the harvest season are a crucial part of preserving that food. 4 “African native food should not be categorized as famine foods simply because they can grow and thrive in drought conditions. They're growing naturally in their ecosystems and their use extends beyond the environmental conditions they grow in. Our indigenous foods are not famine foods. They are our histories, our culture and our traditions. Our native foods carry us and the future possibilities of a sustainable food system.” – “Africa's Indigenous Foods are Not Famine Foods” by Abena Offeh-Gyimah 5 Photo of Abena Offeh-Gyima and Calabash by @ekow.dawson #Linkinbio 🎵 by @buffalorosemusic @eliza.edens and #marianmclaughlin #AbenaOffehGyimah #AncestralFood #AfricanFood #SeedSaving #SeedLibraries #Farming #LivingTheAncestralWay #ForTheWild

Engaging crucially with food as a cultural, spiritual, and generational experience, this week’s guest Abena Offeh-Gyimah (@livingtheancestralway) highlights the connections between ancestral foods, and the soil, seeds, and people who play a part in sustaining ancestral foodways. Focusing on the ancestral foods of Africa, and specifically her home-country of Ghana, Abena shares stories of connection, trust, and community fostered by food. Abena calls listeners to pay attention to the technical and spiritual aspects of seeds that connect them to past, present, and future landscapes. Through this deep connection, Abena points out the absurdity that certain companies claim to own seeds as if they could own life itself. Seeds carry with them the miracle of life and abundance, how might we shape our food and agricultural systems to honor this sacred reality? Abena Offeh-Gyimah is the co-founder of @beelacenter for Indigenous Foods in Ghana, a project that seeks to preserve indigenous African seeds, foods, and practices. Prior to this role, Abena worked as the Project Lead for the Jane Finch Community Research Partnership, with extensive experience in community engagement, ethical research, program development, partnerships & collaboration, and with previous organizations like North York Community House, Black Creek Community Farm, Jane Finch Center, and with Building Roots Toronto. Abena brings years of experience in conducting ethical community engaged research practice, work in local food systems, seed sovereignty, and collaboration in food sovereignty movements. Abena is a writer, a poet, a researcher, a naturalist, and a conservationist. For an extended version of this episode please join us on Patreon at patreon.com/forthewild. 🎵 by @buffalorosemusic @eliza.edens and #marianmclaughlin 1 Photo of Abena Offeh-Gyima and Calabash by @ekow.dawson Slide IDs continued in comments…

Notes from The Edges in the Middle, IV: Bayo Akmolafe and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: 1 The longer that struggle, protests, demonstration,and movement exists, it raises questions about the stability of the society. –Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 2 We run the risk of [mirroring] the forces that we are fighting against. In the US, the Right wing is canceling books and banning books. There is an impulse from parts of the Left, when you step out of line, when you have a political thought or say something that people disagree with, there is an intense reaction aimed at disciplining you into not saying it. –Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 3 The ground beneath our feet is going. We’re finding more and more that our struggle is eaten up. –Bayo Akomolafe 4 The Edges in the Middle, IV: Bayo Akomolafe & Keeaga-Yamahtta Taylor #Linkinbio Episode 🎵 by @sitkasunmusic generously provided by @longroadsociety #OtheringAndBelongingInstitute #DemocracyAndBelongingForum #TheEdgesInTheMiddle #UCBerkeley #BayoAkomolafe #KeeangaYamahttaTaylor #BlackLivesMatterButToWhom #ForTheWild

my hands are wands of earth (a prayer, a mantra, a becoming) 1 @yesolpictures 2 In my wildest dreams my body is consumed by nature. (Original image cropped) @lostinwildspace 3 @_nelly_london via @odeandiefreude 4 So from a scientific standpoint, a person’s being does not stop at the skin, but extends out into the surrounding space. On a level of personal experience, we know it to be true, as we have all felt the presence of others. Now it has been proven and explained scientifically. @saralynntuitive 5 my hands are wands of earth @parareligiousmoss 6 I think of the human race as someone who has became separated from their mother’s hand in a department store… for fifteen thousands years. — Terrence McKenna @delphi.vc 7 @eternal222222 8 If we are going to survive, we are going to need to tie our roots to other roots. — @cosmogyny 9 @eternal222222 10 May we use the word becoming becoming becoming as our central mantra and accept everything it brings in its path. Asé —Bayo Akomolafe @for.the.wild

Recognizing that concepts like justice and liberation are not static, Báyò Akómoláfé and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor meditate on the meaning of Black liberation and freedom, wondering what possibilities lie beyond inclusion. As we trace how we are imbricated with specific social systems, we may simultaneously also come to find the cracks within the systems, the places to push, and the spaces to commune and question together. Holding space for the complexity of struggle and refusal, this conversation offers guided insight into dialogues of change and the potential for paradigm shift. 1 What does it mean to be free? What would it mean to not have [freedom] as an objective at the center of a political struggle? 2 It's not wholly clear to me what it means or how it is ingested in our contemporary society. Is it the ability to vote? [Is it] to be free from harassment, discrimination? –which to me, doesn't sound very free at all. –Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 3 We are not individuals that have the property of freedom–we are indebted to ecologies. When we speak of people, I hear processes and fungi and architecture and texture and algorithms that are streaming through the air. There's a lot of porosity between the environment and people. –Bayo Akomolafe, credited to Gilbert Simondon 4 Without the outward signs of being shackled, we are still tethered to systems and ways of being and ways of seeing. How are we part and parcel of algorithms, systems, and ways of thinking that are sticky to get out of? –Bayo Akomolafe 5 We're at a point in our shared histories, colonized and colonizer, where the ship is in trouble. And now we have to ask new questions. –Bayo Akomolafe 6 There are people who are fine with leaving the hall of the slave ship and just being on deck. And then there are other people who want to not just leave the slave ship, but set it on fire. –Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor #Linkinbio 🎵 by @sitkasunmusic generously provided by @longroadsociety #OtheringAndBelongingInstitute #DemocracyAndBelongingForum #TheEdgesInTheMiddle #UCBerkeley #BayoAkomolafe #KeeangaYamahttaTaylor #BlackLivesMatterButToWhom #ForTheWild

Continuing the conversation series, “The Edges in the Middle,” presented in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s @otheringandbelonging Institute, For The Wild is delighted to share Báyò Akómoláfé in conversation with scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Speaking on the theme "What if justice gets in the way?,” Báyò and Keeanga engage in a lively conversation that considers how our quest for justice shapes us and is simultaneously shaped by systems of power and control. Together, they ask: how can we move justice out of the existing political paradigm and move beyond a normative sense of justice and reform? “The Edges in the Middle” is a series of conversations between Báyò Akómoláfé and thought companions like john a. powell, V, Naomi Klein, and more. These limited episodes have been adapted from Báyò’s work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute. In this role, Báyò has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's @dandbforum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across difference to strengthen democracy and advance belonging in both regions and around the world. Báyò's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. 🎵 by @sitkasunmusic via @longroadsociety Listen link in bio 1 Illustration from “Mbari Publications” 1963 2 Does justice get in the way? Is justice limiting? 3 To say justice gets in the way or to suggest that it might get in the way is to trouble the relationalities. –Bayo Akomolafe 4 It is to cast our gaze beyond our fight for inclusion and to bring in a historicity that stretches beyond the moments of capture and captivity. It is to ask questions about what we are doing, and what is being done to us in our quest for justice. –Bayo Akomolafe 5 If we only conceive of justice in the existing political paradigm, in the narrow and confined ways of an American context and how American ruling class conceives of it, then justice is incredibly limited. –Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

UPDATE 🗣️ Last call! Bayo Akomolafe’s Slow Study ends Sunday night. Available at sliding scale. Link in Bio. Quotes from the course, We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks!… 1 You have been shaped by these contracts at this time, and they have narrowed your possibilities, but that’s not the end of your story. It’s not the end of our human story. What will unbind you back into that stardust human experience? –adrienne maree brown 2 We need to be aware of identity as a place that has given us a sense of belonging and safety and understanding of ourselves, but we need to not let identity get in the way of that larger project, of getting in right relationship with the planet, becoming compatible with the planet, which moves beyond identity, which moves at the level of species. –Bayo Akomolafe 3 Gods is the cracks, right? Not that God emerges from the cracks, but that God is the crack. God is the opening. God is the refusal for anything to congeal into totality, or unity. God is the ongoingness of the universe. God is the ongoingness of things. God is the decolonial. God is opening. God is Black, not in the sense of having black skin but in the sense of refusing capture. God is the Black Atlantic. God is the bones beneath the public. God is that which haunts territoriality. –Bayo Akomolafe

UPDATE 🗣️ Closing Sunday Night —SLOW STUDY: Bayo Akomolafe's We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks! Thank you community!! We have been honored to host this course and grateful for all who have brought this carnivalesque experience of postactivism into practice. Today is the final opportunity to access this iteration of the course. As we look forward to Bayo’s upcoming We Will Dance With Mountains (Fall 2023) and subsequent Slow Study, we are winding down sales of the current Slow Course. Sliding-scale sales will end tonight on June 9th, 2023 (11pm PST). If you haven’t had the chance to experience the course yet, now is the time. Find the link in our bio. When you purchase the course you will receive evergreen digital access to the lectures, transcripts, and digital course book in the form of a download. ___ About the Slow Study: This course is a series of lectures and practice prompts from our 2021 global course– We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks!– edited into a learning journey for you to explore from your home at your own pace. We Will Dance With Mountains is a carnivalesque course in postactivism (a formulation of Bayo), a matter of fissures, fault lines, cracks, openings, seismic shifts, endings, and fugitive marronage. The course (often described as an expedition or a wild adventure by previous participants) is about recuperating our connections with a ‘world’ that can no longer be seen as dormant, mute and passive. It is about coming to new senses, and co-generating new practices of place-making in partnership with the more-than-human world. In short, the course is about becoming with-nesses. About what we do when hope gets in the way, when forward movement no longer leads to interesting places, when justice obstructs transformation, and when victory keeps us tethered in carceral dynamics. Through curated sessions, shared explorations, emergent rituals, lectures, and side events, Into the Cracks! longs to push toward the unthought, the yet-to-be-tried, and the surprising, by exploring new nuances and complexities in the postactivism field summoned by Bayo Akomolafe.

Guest @samanthazipporah reminds us that our bodies and their cycles are a part of nature, not separate from it. Honoring the seasons of life, of the earth, and of our bodily cycles, Samantha highlights the importance of both fallow and fertile times, with particular attention to how this manifests for those with wombs. These intimate connections between body and earth inspire Samantha to dive deep into the power within cycles of menstruation and ovulation. Edit: We’re grateful this topic is prompting deeper conversation. While we welcome respectful debate and critique in our comments, we reserve the right to block comments or close threads when conversation becomes disrespectful to our community of contributors and listeners. 1 Our bodies are not a metaphor for the earth, they are the earth. 2 The metaphor between the four seasons and four weeks is helpful for educating about menstrual and fertility cycles. 3 Synthetic hormonal contraceptive methods essentially trap us in late fall in terms of the [seasonal] analogy of the menstrual cycle—four weeks being four seasons. 4 Synthetic hormonal contraceptives are creating stasis—trapping us in the premenstrual week [in a way] that mirrors monocropping. 5 The way that soil depletion and desertification happens as a result of monocropping—the same thing happens to our bodies and metabolism in a way that tragically mirrors [industrial] agriculture on the planet right now. 6 Samantha Zipporah on The Womb Continuum #Linkinbio Episode 🎵 by @jeffreee, @samanthazipporah, and @yesolpictures

How might we tend to our bodies if we saw them as an ecosystem? In this week’s episode, guest @samanthazipporah reminds us that our bodies and their cycles are a part of nature, not separate from it. Samantha also calls us to consider the type of culture we are cultivating surrounding body sovereignty. How can we strive towards an end to rape culture that comes from an understanding of consent that occurs in connection with others and centers power with others rather than power over others? The dominant overculture encourages an intense dissociation from our bodies, but when we tune in and are present to what is occurring within our bodies and our relationships, what might we learn? Samantha Zipporah is a midwife, author and educator in service to healing & liberation. Sam’s path rises from an ancient lineage of midwives, witches, and wise women with expertise spanning the continuum of birth, sex, and death. She is devoted to breaking the spells of oppression in reproductive and sexual health by connecting people with the innate pleasure, power, and wisdom of the body. Her praxis weaves scientific and soulful inquiry that integrate modern medicine and data with ancestral practices and epistemologies. Sam's most recent publications and offerings center the radical reclamation of contraception and abortion. Her online membership, The Fruit of Knowledge Learning Community, features access to her heart & mind via books, courses, QandAs, curated resources and more. 🎵 by @jeffreee @samanthazipporah @yesolpictures Edit: We’re grateful this topic is prompting deeper conversation. While we welcome respectful debate and critique in our comments, we reserve the right to block comments or close threads when conversation becomes disrespectful to our community of contributors and listeners. Image— Opened pomegranates collaged into a Baroque painting of a snake, flora, and fungi by Otto Marseus van Schrieck, 17th Cen. Slide ID in comments