RADICAL WELL TENDING IN A TIME OF DROUGHT
Living Folkways of Care
Radical Well Tending in a Time of Drought is an immersive anarchist summer school for tending the well of our collective inheritance - vibrant care, clear water, ancestral remembrance, and the living knowledge of our interconnection.
The struggles of land are reflected in our bodies and communities. As the west of turtle island bakes in record-breaking heat, and we enter historic droughts, we are seeing burnout, illnesses, despair, and struggles to just materially survive in the system that both exploits the groundwater and our bodies. This complex and difficult landscape is the terrain and conditions we now inhabit. How do we respond to this? How do we seek not individual salvation and temporary fixes to feel ok enough to make it through the day, but develop a deep, long-lasting, and resilient web of care?
Our bodies remember what it is to be in deep relationship with each other. The cultural norms most of us have been born into are strange - capitalism, alienation, systems of domination, and individualism are historically recent and culturally specific. We have been raised to think individualism is normal, self-interest and greed as natural, separation from other species as just how life is.
We refuse that. Here we explore the tendrils and threads of remembering a different way of being, an embodied ethic of care, a felt sense of connection, and a deep sense of aliveness in a complex web of life.
What are the conditions that make care and solidarity inevitable? How do we create them?
How do we redistribute power and resources, and live into cultures of collective care and responsibility?
What experiences cultivate the courage to do something radically different to what exists right now?
Radical Well Tending in a Time of Drought is a response to these questions, an emergent and living classroom, and an invitation to tend the well of radical care. We find care in our ability to support each other, in land rematriation and wealth redistribution, in burning precincts, in pipeline blockades, bush kitchens, truly listening to each other, and in crip text threads of resonant support. Care is how we embody a world free of coercion & oppression, and full of freedom and liberation.
In this class we encounter stories and knowledges passed on for generations, stories that are the offerings of our ancestors to us in a time of loss and remembrance. Deep time stories of the land, living time stories of changelings and nettles, near time stories of uprisings and blockades, and future stories of emergence into relating in ways we are just getting glimpses of - this class brings all of this together, because we feel in our bodies the way all this is present now, living with us, caring with us, loving us.
Relationship is beautiful and nourishing, and even in the richest networks is also challenging. What makes it both sustainable and emergent? How do we address massive need in our communities when everyone seems stretched and capacity is low? What is possible that we haven’t even thought of yet, and how do we get there? Together we will build and unearth webs that are not static and fixed but are alive and adaptable, developing skills and practices that can be used in our day to day lives. Everything we do matters.
Rejecting 10 point plans and 5 year goals, releasing the need to come up with “solutions” we deepen into the conversation with the living world in all its complexities and co-creatively act from there. Here we go beyond the paradigm of activism, and radical projects as separate to our everyday life - here we embody liberation in everything we do. This is a practice of presence that includes deep time, and a radically whole conception of place and relationship. Here, we teach presence as something in motion, something responsive and alive. Something vital to radical change.
Through examining radical histories, folklore and folktales, listening to the land, and practices of liberatory relating, we will affirm and remember something that is woven into our very nervous systems - that we know how to do something very different to the individualism we have been raised in. We know how to play and experiment with new/old forms of relating together as we dismantle that which tries to sever us from this knowing. We will be interrogating power and how it is maintained as we explore community care, relationship building, ritual, resistance and showing up fully to the beautiful and challenging work of being together in ways that are beautiful and dangerous to the status quo.
In this class of radical well tending, we will focus on relationship, reciprocity and care webs as groundwater that we depend on. Over 14 weeks we will alternate between Sun weeks and Moon weeks covering a different theme every two weeks. In Sun weeks, we share knowledge and skills with stories, history, ritual and practices, and in Moon weeks we dive into deeper discussion, roleplaying, reflecting, and experimenting with the knowledge we’re building together. We will trace the threads of care and mutual aid that have been a part of human history forever, a history that is in deep relationship with the more than human world too. The alienation we are experiencing now is recently created, and can be undone.
Class Themes
Radical Well Tending in a Time of Drought / Being with what is true
Undoing Enclosure, Opening Dams
Encountering the Hemlocks / Observing power and sowing reciprocity
Our shared inheritance / Undoing the spell of capitalism and creating collective abundance
Stepping on Stray Sod / Moving with shifting ground
Hearing the Banshee Together / Sharing risk
The River Sings Solidarity / Togetherness is a web
Join Radical Well Tending
Classes are by zoom and will include auto generated captions, but will not be recorded. They will be held weekly in two cohorts, and will be a combination of lecture, discussion and small group breakouts. You will be prompted to let us know which cohort you would like to join once you sign up.
TWO COHORTS
Wednesday 5pm PST
Thursday 10am PST
14 weeks starting 28/29 July
Payment can be made either in full or in three monthly payments ($200 per month). With a full class, a portion of the funds will go to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Raven Trust. Some sliding scale and trade spots are available, no/low-cost spaces available and prioritised for Black and Indigenous students. Please do pay full price if you can. For trade or sliding scale please email us at beckanathan@gmail.com
Please note that while having two teachers lessens the chance of interruptions to the class schedule, due to chronic illness flare ups there is still a possibility individual classes will be rescheduled. Refunds are not offered for rescheduled classes.
Pay in full $600
Pay monthly - 3 payments of $200
CLASS FULL
About Sophie
Hi everyone, I’m Sophie and I practice anarchist and animist life ways, always seeking to come into deeper connection with the human and more than human world. I live on unceded tongva territory, in the watershed of Payme Paxaayt (The L.A river) and am from the banks of the river stour, in Canterbury, England. I am fascinated by the rich histories of rebellion we have inherited, the spirit of aliveness that has never been crushed, and endlessly inspired by the many many creative, courageous and loving ways people have lived and do live. I have devoted my life to exploring how we create cultures of care and liberation, and am currently mostly focused on non hierarchical teaching and facilitation, and embodying liberation and care in my relationships, including my human friends and family, my cats, the skunks that forage in my backyard, the underground streams of LA, the ponderosa pines of mt pinos, and everyone else I come into contact with. I believe we get free through loving relationship, and courageous action, and seek to live into that all the time.
About Becka
I am a believer in the aliveness of the world, the knowledge of the people, and the wisdom of the earth. I am a birth worker and educator, and I am committed to approaching my work with a spirit of community, non-coercion, and reciprocity. I have always lived near the sea. Currently I live near the sea, marshes and a bog on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm & Səl̓ílwətaʔ land, and was raised on an isthmus between two harbours and many volcanoes in Aotearoa. My ancestors were settlers, predominantly from Ireland, Scotland and Wales, in what is colonially known as Australia and New Zealand. This joint pain of disconnection from place, and benefitting from the ongoing displacement and colonisation of Indigenous people in all the lands I am connected to drives me to be constantly abolishing and uprooting whiteness in myself and systems around me, through self interrogation, collective responsibility, and relationship building including with more than human kin and the earth. I believe that we know innately how to be in right relationship with each other, and that we are held when we waver by finding maps and blueprints in the stories of our ancestors and the long, strong threads of radical resistance.