adrienne maree brown on Emergent Strategy and being in right relationship with change

Lisa: So Adrienne, thank you so much for coming on the Leadermorphosis Podcast. I’m really excited to have this conversation with you.

Adrienne: Thanks for having me, Lisa.

Lisa: So I’ve been thinking about how to start this conversation, and on my walk over here, I was listening to an episode of the Emergent Strategy podcast, and I remembered that you always mentioned this question of, how can we be in right relationship with change? And I thought maybe that was a good opening question. Like, I wonder if I put that question to you now, what’s current for you with regards to that question?

Adrienne: I love this question. I love thinking about it in my own life. And I think what I’m learning about being in right relationship with change right now is it works better if I feel my feelings in real time and express them in real time. Over this last week, I’ve gotten a lot of like, kind of big tectonic plate shifting news, both in ways that made me, like, very excited, and in ways that made me a little trepidatious, and ways that made me like, Am I ready for a next stage of growth? Like, what? Where am I? And it just helps so much to like, feel it all be like, Oh, before I try to logic my way through this, how do I actually feel? Let the feeling flush through my body, let myself feel it.

And I think the other thing I’m learning is to just have a softer hold on plans, like when I make plans with people, when we are oriented towards things like, life is requiring a different level of presence right now. And I think this has been true for a while, but it feels like something that’s shifted a lot in my adult life. Is the pace of massive things we need to respond to means that, like in a given day, like there’s going to be something that makes me want to grieve hard most days, and I can tune into it, and I could be present with the reality of it, if I’m soft with my plans, if I’m just like, Okay, I thought this was going to happen. But, you know, in the week they were in, this young man named Ralph Yarl was shot by a man who he went up to this man’s door to he was looking for his brothers, and he had the wrong address, and so this kid was shot, and he survived, but receiving the news, you know, it’s like, you go through this process, or it’s like, oh my God, not this again. Oh my god, this has really happened. Oh my God, is he going to be okay? Oh my god. What comes up in me about the state of things in the US right now, the state of things with guns right now, the state of things with racism right now, and how there’s no way to be safe amongst people who want to take your life. And there’s a miraculous thing happening, which is this person actually has survived this and getting excited about how the communities that I’m a part of are the ones that respond and say you can’t get away with this anymore, and push really hard for some consequence. So all of that is happening in a week, or none of it was planned to happen in a week, right? And inside of my system, the response to it was a poem this time, you know, but sometimes the response is a song. Sometimes response is just, I need to go sit with my altar, but I’m trying to get to a place where I can still feel the changes that are happening, so I can feel what my what’s called from me in response to it. Yeah, and I actually can’t feel what I need to feel, if I’m trying to just stick to what I had planned for the time or the week or the day or the moment, you know.

And I’m trying to get better at telling people, you know, hey, give me. I just need to take 30 minutes and go sit over here and be with this poem. Or, you know, I just need some alone time, like just asking for the kind of creating containers around myself so that the change can happen within me, as well as change how I’m relating to the world. So, yeah, soft with plans, and then I also, I’m trying to just be more and more curious all the time, you know, like, I’m just like, I really don’t know how we all get through this. I have a lot of clues, you know, I feel like a little, yeah, kind of a detective scientist of life. So.

Lisa: Thank you for sharing that. I think something that really resonates for me in your work and in your writing is for me a reminder to to think about change and to think about the kind of reimagining that so many of us want of how we are together. You know, how we organize, how we live together and so on, is to not only approach it in a intellectual way, right? And there’s, there’s something so refreshing and nourishing about the way you talk about that, that it’s, it’s much more holistic. It’s about embodiment. It’s about feeling and sort of starting with self. Also, I know you, you write and talk a lot about fractals, that we are fractals. And you know how I am and how I am with this other person is a fractal and and it also scales up. So it seems fitting that that’s your answer today.

Adrienne: It’s true. I mean, that that has has I feel like I finally fully landed that that I’m like, Oh, I really have a fractal understanding of the world. And when I approach things from that, I can handle what’s happening in the world. I can find a place to be inside of all of it. When I’m not thinking in a fractal way, I get so overwhelmed that I find myself still to the point of stagnation. You know that I’m just like, there’s nothing I can do about this. The problems are so big, and we have to resolve them. We all have to get on the same page, and we have to do this. And that’s not how human history generally works. Right is we as a species very rarely get on a same page and move together, especially not in the right direction. So we tend to group think in the wrong direction. We tend to group think towards oppression and towards fascism.

So if we want to move in the right direction, there’s this other thing, and I’m writing about it now more like really deepening my study of mycelium, and really trying to deepen my study of like, what does it actually mean to move underground, and what does it actually mean to move relationally? What does it mean to let the impact of your life be the impact of what you can touch and who you know, and how vast the impact could be if everyone took that on in a more significant way? I think there’s so much energy that we lose because we are directing it towards a general public, you know, commentary, or a general like commenting and fighting amongst strangers on the internet, and they were doing this sort of generalized work, rather than turning to the relationships in our own lives and the people that we can talk to and touch and reach and elect and and being in the conversation there of just like, now, you know, I think it’s one of the ways where conflict avoided at the collective scale, right? Is that it’s like, I’ll do it over here, but if it comes to having an in person conversation or an interpersonal moment where I’m like, your politics cause harm to me, or the boundary you just crossed, or the practice you have with regards to the earth, or, you know, I was just around a friend who doesn’t use plastics and is really, really, really mindful about it, and it was so inspiring to me, because I’m like, Yeah, I think of myself as that kind of person, but as I’m moving through the world, sometimes I’m tracking it very rigorously, and sometimes it falls away, you know, so we, like arrived somewhere together, and they offered us plastic water bottles. And my friend was like, No, thank you. I have a reusable water bottle. Where can I refill it? Like we actually don’t want. Any of this in the space. And, you know, looks like, Where, where are we sourcing our toilet paper from? Because there’s plastics in it, there’s and it was just so helpful to be like, if every community had someone in it who was like, This is what I think about, and someone else who’s like, I think about the water use, you know, for me, I think a lot about the water and electricity use in a space. You know, I’m like, why are all the lights on? Why does everything have to be so bright? How, you know, are we really being mindful about the resources that come in? Are we accumulating a lot of food waste and stuff like that? So many of the things that we actually need for our planet are rooted in how many of us can be a little uncomfortable at a fractal level in order to create room for something new inside of what we currently think is inevitable and lasting forever.

Lisa: Yeah, I really love that. It’s like that, that tolerance for discomfort. I think also I think we’re generally conflict, avoidant, and I think we’re also discomfort, avoidant.

Adrienne: Oh yeah, you don’t like it. I mean, especially, it’s hard in a capitalist system that’s like, you don’t have to be uncomfortable, you never have to be uncomfortable. Like you can buy something for that you never have to be uncomfortable. And it’s like, I think it’s true, that you can really live a life where you experience very little discomfort, and that life will probably have very little positive impact, right? So you can sort of go along down the middle of the path and not bump into anything, and not impact anyone. And I don’t know how satisfying that kind of life is. I am not familiar with how that feels, right, like I feel for me from a very early age in my life, I have surrounded myself with bumps, bumper people, you know, people who are like, hold up, hold on. I’m going to intervene, or I’m going to interrupt this moment for the sake of what I think will lead us to justice, or I think will lead us to things being more equitable when I think will lead us to lives that are more joyful. And that piece really resonates the most to me. I think that people don’t understand. In my life when I’m really uncomfortable and I express it and I act from that place, it actually almost always leads to a massive improvement in my life. It leads to me stopping participation in my own oppression and in my own repression. It usually leads to, you know, making a relationship more authentic.

I recently had a moment with someone who I deeply, deeply love, where, whenever we were talking, I was being I was being interrupted a lot, and I’m an interrupter, so I’m like, it’s all fair out here. But it was at times when I was trying to share things that were really big and important for me, and I was like, Oh, I could just not say anything because I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. Or I could say something because my feelings are being hurt, right? And by speaking up, I know that this person loves me and would never intentionally want to be shutting me down or pushing me away. It was worth the risk of the discomfort. Now our relationship is much deeper, and there’s a recommitment to how can we really make intentional time to hear each other out. You know, there’s stuff like that means fine tuning and micro, micro interventions on the self, but it’s really growing that like, you know, I tell people like, you don’t have to start with the biggest thing. You don’t have to start with the most uncomfortable thing. You can start with things that are just like, this isn’t quite right for me, and how things are for me actually does matter, because I’m a fractal of this whole thing functioning, you know, whether it’s my community system or my family system, my organizational system.

I also think there’s this discomfort, the attention, and I’ve had a friend recently really helping me with this, about being able to be in a righteous tension, right? Where she’s like, you know, my default is to be like, I’m in tension with someone. How can I make it as comfortable for everyone as possible, for us to be in some slight disagreement? But it’s okay, right? I’m really like, trying to contort and double around and do all this stuff when she was like, when you feel like the only option is to internalize the tension, then that is actually not a sustainable relationship, because what you’re having to do to yourself is so damaging. So let the tension be between you and other people and see what happens. And you know, it’s intensely uncomfortable. You know, I think that we, we have structured our society so we let some people hold the tension for the whole and I’m starting to understand the link between that and privilege the. Link between that and comfort, right? But I’m like, oh, there’s a certain degree to which being privileged really means I just don’t want to have to be uncomfortable. I don’t have to deal with the things that make me feel tension, and I’ll overlook it, or I’ll try to make it move away from me. For me, I’m like, Oh, how could I lean in and see that there’s actually had dignity intention, you know.

And I wrote about this in emergent strategy, that it’s like in a birthing process, the tension heightens to the max when the big change is about to happen. Right The Ring of Fire, that moment in a birth where you’re like, I’m not doing this. I’m getting off the bed, I’m going home. I cannot do this. My body was not actually designed for this. Everyone was really, really wrong. I don’t want to do anymore. As a doula, I witnessed that moment with so many birth giving people and as like babe, we’re already past the point of of no return, and we are already past the point of getting to make a decision about this. This is actually happening now. The same thing is true in our relationships. The same thing is true in our structures and our government, right? It’s like we’re past the point. I think with gun violence, for instance, we’re past the point of something is changing, and has to change around this, right? We’re already at the breaking point. Things are already torn apart. We have to figure out a way through it now, and if we can acknowledge that, that it’s like, so the tension is usually the silence, like we’re in the chamber, we’re on our way. So there’s a different set of actions that are needed. And if you can handle the tension, you can actually tell what are the right actions that are needed. If you take off the table, I could stop change from happening. It’s like, that’s not even on the table. That’s delusions. Change is inevitable. It’s definitely happening. It’s always happening. And so for me, that always gives me hope. When I’m overwhelmed by the conditions as they are, I’m like, well, they are going to change, and I am going to be a part of shaping that change, right? And so yeah, let’s let me get a little bit more comfortable with being uncomfortable, so that I can be a good agent of those changes.

Lisa: Yeah, I’ve never, I’ve never thought about it. That’s a really great articulation, that that tension right before a big change, right before a shift, that’s been my experience too, that if I I’m realizing how kind of stingy it is, ironically, that I keep tensions to myself, because I think that that’s the better thing to do, that it’s, yeah, maybe it’s just me that’s thinking this. Maybe I’m just being difficult, but it’s so valuable.

Adrienne: I mean, you know, it’s like the same thing. Other you know, people who might not be birthing bodies, not like, how do I feel that? I feel like people know it from a storm. You know, a storm builds up. And you can really feel, some of us feel in our bones, Storm tension building, and when it breaks, what it does for the world, for the sky, everything, you know, like, the way it’s just like, Okay, now we’re in the storm.

Lisa: I’ve got this mind map of things just out of shot here, and I’m kind of looking at all these juicy words jumping out at me that I want to talk to you about. But one thing I want to talk to you about is is science fiction, because I know that’s something it’s something I love. And I loved this quote that I found from you about with something like that, all organizing is science fiction. Can you unpack that for us? Like, what do you mean by that?

Adrienne: Yeah, so when you’re taking on the work of organizing, you know what I mean by organizing is people who are looking at the world and saying, How can I help mobilize the people in my community to affect a change, and ideally, it’s a change that is going to improve their own lives and improve the well being of their community. So organizers are, to me, a very special breed, a very special gift that humans have developed within our capacity to be but it can get kind of tedious. It can feel very difficult. It can feel very much like I’m knocking on the door having the same conversation over and over again, or I’m going up for this policy change over and over again, and I’m like, in the 500th page of like, trying to, you know, understand why and how these billionaire people are getting away with these like legal loopholes, and it can be very difficult.

So we can forget sometimes that we are also the super heroic figures of the action stories of the future, right? So, you know, Harriet Tubman was a science fictional character of her time that she had visions and she was like, I can see that my people are free. At that time, that was a science fictional thought, right? It’s just like, it’s both rooted in a reality, we are equal, we are free. That is true, but it’s also rooted in what at that point seemed like a fiction. We’ve been. In multiple generations of enslavement as black people. What are you talking about? And to be visionary in that way that could is continuously the work of organizers.

So in this moment, right organizers take on shaping the future, a future in which we can be in right relationship with our planet, a future in which we have abolished the prison and putative systems of you know, literally continuing to enslave people and continuing to hold people as if that’s going to stop us from harming each other, when the things that cause us to harm each other are these vast inequalities. We see a future in which everyone has access to home and education, and seeing all of that is science fictional behavior, right? You’re seeing something that is like it’s actually rooted in our scientific reality, that this is all possible. We live in an abundant world. We live in a world where we are structured towards interdependence. We live in a world where we actually have enough to eat and enough space and enough of everything we need scientifically to base ourselves in an abundant future. But right now, it feels fictional. It feels like we have to imagine and dream it and write it out. So I loved this reframe for myself of being like, can we look at the organizers of the world as people who are already engaged in futuring in that way, and if we start to see ourselves as people who are taking responsibility for the future, I think it can bring a little bit more thrill and excitement and purpose into the everyday work that we’re doing.

Lisa: Yeah, I It also makes me think about when I shared on social media that I was going to be talking to you. I mentioned, I mentioned that you were also a pleasure activist, and someone replied like, pleasure activist. Wow, that sounds great. What’s that? So, what can you share about that?

Adrienne: Well, what did you say?

Lisa: Well, my understanding is that, well, what I kind of resonate with is that it, it can be kind of desolate sometimes and and kind of frustrating and challenging being in the world, but especially being someone in the world that wants to see and make change happen. And what resonated for me in the pleasure activism idea was was rediscovering kind of joy and and kind of celebrating pleasure and not not kind of feeling guilty or or diminishing that as like, Oh well, that’s frivolous and silly. Like, now to the serious work, but seeing that as part of it almost.

Adrienne: Beautiful. You got it? Yeah. I mean, I think this is a big part of it. I root into the work of Audre Lorde, who was a black feminist poet and activist and wrote incredible things for us, including this essay called the uses of the erotic as power. And reading it and listening to her read it, kept rewiring my system a little bit at a time, because she talks about how if we feel our own aliveness like our erotic sense of aliveness, like sensationally at the level of the body, it becomes impossible to settle for suffering and self negation and depression, these other states that have been supplied to us, that have been normalized to us. It’s like, oh, we’re all just slogging through life. It’s like, actually, no, once you feel that aliveness, you understand that the slog should not be the norm, and that’s actually not what we should be settling for. We become impossible to control once we become in touch with and able to regularly access our own aliveness, which I think is a really thrilling reality, right?

And so I started iterating off of that idea and came to sort of two realms. One is that our pleasure is not frivolous. It is a measure of freedom. It is a way we understand how much freedom we have in our lives. So we have the freedom to make decisions over our bodies and over how we spend our time and who we spend it with, and what we get to create in the world. And that’s not very that’s not frivolous at all, actually being able to say, I can determine, in a lifetime my own sense of contentment and satisfaction and, like, what brings meaning to my life. So that’s really important, especially for people who have lineages of oppression, especially for you know, I sit at this intersection of being a woman who is black, who is multiracial, who is queer, who is fat, who is disabled, and none of those things feel like barriers to my joy, because I have figured out. How to occupy each of those spaces as being in a body. I am in a body. These are just the facts of this body. And is other people who see this as some kind of inferiority, but for me, I just see it as being in a body. And I’m I’m one of the freest people I’ve ever experienced because of how I get to be in my body.

So that’s one part of it. But then this other part is, what would it look like if justice and liberation were the most pleasurable experiences that we could have? And so that also clicks for me. What what does it mean to be in a movement space that is actually about creating contentment and satisfaction within itself, right? And creating that as the sanctuary that then people want to move towards, right? I want to create movements that feel irresistible, both in terms of what they’re moving on the world, but also as spaces that people are like. I want to come be a part of that.

And that doesn’t mean there’s no hard work. You know, I I always laugh about this, but I’m like, sex can be quite hard work. You know, like a lot of the things we think of as pleasure, it takes hard work to do them. A lot of the physical activities, you know, if you’re a marathon runner, you get this incredible high, this incredible endorphin release, this incredible, beautiful experience of being alive and having you know best at something inside of yourself, all of that, but it takes work to get there. Being a parent is full of miraculous, joyful pleasure of getting to see this little being who relies on you and is learning how to become themselves, and is tapped into magic and all the things, but it’s a shit ton of work, right? So it’s not to dismiss the fact that we will continuously have labor to do, but when you’re doing labor that you know is directly related to your healing, your liberation and towards building and deepening community. I mean, that’s, there’s, it’s deeply satisfying.

So pleasure activism is, is all of those things, and it has given me a lot of room to speak about sex and to speak about drugs and to speak about fashion and laughter and like what it actually takes to make life worth living. And it’s cute. You know, we’re having this conversation on 420 we just released the my sister and I have a podcast called How to Survive the end of the world. And years ago, we decided to now we just realized was six years ago, we did this episode, a 420 episode, that where I got high and let them interview me in a high state, and because I wanted to come out more about, you know, like pleasure activism, for me is a way to be like, there’s so many things that we are secretive about, but actually everyone’s doing or enjoying or relying on In some way, and we’re actually safer with light shining on those things. Right? To me, we’re safer if we can openly talk about how we move through the world, what we use, what we need, and that helps us reduce any harm that might come from it, especially because we reduce shame that comes from it. We’re just like, yeah, humans, we need things. We need pleasures. We need releases. Some of us need sobriety. We need to be able to talk about all of it so that we can be in relationship with each other.

Lisa: It’s bringing to mind a memory I have of listening to you on a live podcast, because I remember when I when I first started engaging with your work, because, you know, so many people were recommending it years ago and and I was trying to engage with it in a sort of intellectual way, like, okay, okay, emergent strategy. What’s this? Let’s unpack. And then I remember listening to this podcast where you, I think, you sat on a couch that had a cushion on it with Octavia Butler’s face on it, and you just sat on Octavia space, and believe me, I’ve thought about it or something like that. I just thought, Oh, it was great.

Adrienne: Yes, I was in, I was at a gathering in Dubai, and they someone had made these pillows with with all these different people’s faces on them. I still wonder what happened to that pillow, because they Yeah, someone. I thought I was gonna maybe be able to get it, but it was so sweet, right, to just have this awkward, hilarious moment of just, like, okay, like, we have our icons, and it doesn’t mean we don’t desire them, right? And actually, a lot of, a lot of the people that I look up to are people that in some way there’s a crush element, even if, like, the the main thing I’m receiving from them is their intellectual, you know, offers into the world, or their imaginative offers into the world. Like, I totally have a crush on Toni Morrison. I totally have a crush on James Baldwin. Like, you know, I look at Frida Kahlo and swoon. Like, there’s just these people that I’m like, I. Not necessarily because, in fact, actually often the opposite, not because they fit into the desirability politics of their time, but often because they were kind of breaking those politics in their time. And I find that a very hot thing to do across time and space, you know, and to see these people who are able to like I some of my favorite images of them, you know, James Baldwin dancing, Toni Morrison dancing like the idea that there’s no period looking back where people weren’t also able to feel their bodies and tap into some, I don’t know, glimmer sometimes of something good. Yeah, keeps us going.

Lisa: I want to ask you about leadership, because I see, like, in the movement that that I’m in, which I guess you could call, like the new ways of working movement. Yeah, I see that a lot of people, in trying to move away from kind of Dominator hierarchies, end up kind of shunning anything that resembles leadership or hierarchy, and it can create these kind of leadership vacuums, and it can be kind of constraining in its own way. And I was curious to ask, what are your thoughts about leadership and and what leadership you think is needed now and in the future. And yeah, what are your thoughts?

Adrienne: I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership as a spot from which we listen. So I think for like, the first decade of my like, movement, career space, a lot of what I thought of leadership was being someone who could really speak definitively and provide very clear direction, and I still think that that’s needed. I think I get really moved by the leaders who that’s their that’s their comfort zone, and that’s their space. But the leadership that I feel like I bring in the world, and a lot of the folks that I think of as emergent strategists in the world is one that is able to ask hard questions that get people to unlock new levels of their own sense of capacity, their own sense of direction, their own sense of what their gifts are to offer up. And then there’s just a lot of listening like I regularly, you know, I talk about that, I feel like I’m growing ideas in public. I’m trying to learn in public. And it’s not necessarily what I would call a safe time or a safe approach to try to learn in public. It’s actually quite daunting sometimes, but it still feels really important to me to let people know that I’m I’m always moving from a place of question. I’m always moving from a place of hypothesis. I’m always trying to say we’re not free yet. And we have thrown everything, we’ve thrown at the wall. We’ve tried a lot of things, but we’re not free yet. We haven’t found the right relationship yet with the earth, and that’s not to dismiss the indigenous legacies that sustain and that we hear about. That’s not to dismiss all the freedom fighting that has happened. That’s not to dismiss all the brilliant ideas people are experimenting with currently, but as a species. We’re, you know, we’re just really struggling over here, right where we’re in that near dinosaur realm, so that maybe it’s a humility, like a humble leadership is, is the move, you know, like, how can we be leaders who are working on, like, I’m constantly trying to figure out, how do I collaborate better? How do I release collaborations that are not functional? How do I move towards collaborations that are functional? I really think that there’s a lot of ways to work with others, and finding the right way for yourself is actually important thing as a leader, yeah, like finding places where you’re like, oh, I can actually relinquish, you know, whatever that individual part of me is, I can relinquish that into this collective work.

I recently had a collaborator. I was sitting down, and I was like, you know, I want to work with you, but I don’t want to lose myself. I don’t want to lose my my voice. I don’t want to lose what I’m bringing. And my collaborator was like, you know, when I came to the table, I had already released myself. I had already released what I was bringing I want, what we’re gonna make. And it was like, Duh, Adrian reminder. Like, that’s what you believe in. But, you know, moving into realms of art, making music, doing all this other stuff, I’m like, oh, yeah, yeah, right. It actually takes it. I have to constantly remind myself, let go of my way, to find the way, let go of what I hold to be my individual strand of an offer, trusting that that is woven into anything I’m a part of. But I don’t have to hold it so tightly and.

Then I would also say there’s something to me about leadership that is not allowing people to suffer in the name of of your vision, or in the name of what what you’re trying to pull off. And what I mean by suffering there, it can be a lot of different things, but I think right now, we are still often too comfortable letting people overwork, be in patterns of overworking, be in patterns of overriding their needs. And I’m really interested in, you know, how do we keep moving and how do we stay functional? But how do we also find the right amount of work to do?

One of the groups that I’m a part of is allied media projects, and they just formally shifted, you know, post pandemic, during the pandemic, they made this shift. And I think maybe it was like, Maybe this will be temporary, but now they’re like, we’re doing a four day work week because it literally is just too much. There’s just too much happening in the world and in our own personal lives to keep trying to push for a five day work week, we’re not pulling it off. So now, you know, it’s Monday through Thursday is their official work time, and Friday, Saturday and Sunday are considered the weekend of that organization. And I’m trying to align myself more and more with that, and I find it really hard, because what most leaders are in the practice of is overriding ourselves as well. So it’s like, try to figure out, like, how do I lead from a place that doesn’t ask people to suffer by overworking and burning themselves out just because they’re like, I’m so excited about what you’re trying to do, right? Or I get fired up about what we’re trying to do, there’s urgent work to be done, and I feel like we if we treat everything like urgent work, we don’t actually have the capacity to attend to the work that truly needs urgent kind of attention. When an opportunity comes up, like what’s happened this last week with Ralph Yarl, where it’s like we urgently need to be in the streets and we urgently to be making phone calls. We urge you to put the pressure on to get the right outcome here. We have more energy for that, for sustainably working in our day to day, right?

So those are some of the things I’m thinking about for leadership right now. There’s a beautiful piece that I just trying to bring up as often as I can that my my friend and comrade Maurice mo Mitchell wrote that’s really thinking about resilience and joy inside of movements right now. And I think there’s a pretty good deep dive on thinking about leadership in these times, and really about how to pull people’s attention away from the small and the petty focuses that we can get into and continuously bring us back to like, what are the large pieces of work that need all of our hands, and how do we do those in a way that that nourishes the bodies that are In the work? So, yeah, all of that.

Lisa: Yeah, I attended an event earlier this week with Mickey cash tan, who’s someone I really admire, and she is really championing what she calls the capacity lens, that it’s a radical act to honor and stay within your capacity as an individual, and that to be in a good relationship with, you know, other collaborators is to also respect when someone says that something is outside their capacity and not as we tend to do in the dominant paradigm. Kind of assume that that’s because of a lack of willingness or commitment, yes, but actually sort of honoring that, even if that means leaving a void, you know, temporarily, because, as you say, it’s more sustainable.

Adrienne: It is a little bit more sustainable. And I think what happens if we don’t do that is people burn out anyway, but it ends up being a crisis, right? And so for me, I just keep thinking about, like, how do I avoid any crisis being related to anything that I’m doing?

Lisa: Adrian, you’re part of so many communities, and have been part of so many different communities and movements and organizations, and I’m curious if you have any examples or stories to share that for you are kind of representations of what’s possible, you know, of another paradigm, of another way of being together.

Adrienne: I mean, yes, yes, yes, yes, the one I will uplift today, and part of this group called Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity. And I’m kind of in this orbital zone with them now, where they’re like, that’s our writer friend, and she’s over there. But I’m excited, because Black Organized for Leadership and Dignity for years, I’ve been thrilled by the way they work, which is bringing organizing like. Like rigorous organizing, interrelationship with embodiment and somatic healing and actually being able to feel. What does it mean to be a free black person in this moment? What does it mean to carry the trauma we carry and move it through and then all of that partnered with the political education like, Well, how do we place ourselves in a longer lineage and see what’s possible in this time. What’s exciting right now is that bold has acquired a new physical space in which to really root their work. And I see a number of organizations doing this like I don’t know if it’s specifically because of the pandemic, because I think a lot of people had these plans long term, but I think that it’s in relationship with what we learned through the pandemic, which is we have to have spaces where we can keep ourselves safe and we can hold a standard for our folks, and it would be useful to have places where we could actually go right?

So I keep thinking that that I’m like, what we have now is not the what we’re experiencing now is not the first or the last pandemic event, right? Or event where it’s like, Okay, now we need to lock ourselves down in some way. And the proliferation of organizations that are being like, we’re accumulating land. We’re acquiring land. We’re acquiring places to go and be able to be we’re learning how to be on the land. We’re learning how to grow things with the land. We’re learning how to dance with chickens and the egg stuff. You know, we’re learning all the stuff. And that thrills me, because it feels like it makes us more tangibly resilient in the face of the inevitable changes that are coming right now.

So I love that bold is a part of that. And I’m really excited by the embodiment Institute, which Prentice Hemphill and Kasha ho have, you know, pushed that boat into the water over the past couple years, and I feel like it’s making the technology of somatics accessible to more and more bodies, more and more people. You know, I mentioned amp, I mentioned that shift to the four day work week, which I’m like, super thrilled by.

There’s also through the emergency strategy ideation Institute, we did this process called Praxis projects, where people got some support and funding in order to spend time deepening in their practice of applying emergency strategy internally. And so, like one of the groups in that is a group called Feed Durham, and they do this project where they are like, how do we provide food to our community? For folks who are doing protests, folks are doing encampments, folks who are, you know, who don’t have necessarily homes, easily accessible homes. How do we actually share the skill of preparing food, and how do we share the access to food within our community? And so I love these kind of projects because they’re very tangible, but they’re figuring out how to how does what we do internally align with what we say we believe and want to bring off externally.

So those are a few you you know, I do feel like I’m in a very rich realm right now, like, which I’m always, you know, part of my work is always trying to figure out, like, how do I uplift all the cool people and thinkers and, you know, I don’t know if you know this, but so I’ve been working on this column for yes magazine called murmurations for the past year, and where it was just a place to be this sort of contemplate the shifts that are happening. I really focused around accountability, but we’re collectivizing that column now. So I reached out to like the emergent strategy community. And people, we interviewed people who are part of facilitation cohort, and I was like, Does anyone else want to contribute to this column? And so many people responded positively that we have, like, three years of columns that are going to be coming from all these other people, really. You know, again, like looking through the prism of emergent strategy at all these different parts of organizing life. So you’re going to see a lot, a lot of the other communities that I’m really excited about are going to be lifted up through that work. And then, you know, the AK series, the emergent strategy series with AK is like, you know, one book at a time, building this bookshelf of, you know, I really want to have a community of writers and thinkers who get to shape this time and be explicitly in relationship with each other.

Lisa: Love that so many things I want to ask, and we’re running out of time.

Adrienne: We’ve had, you know, I have to say it’s been a really rich conversation. So thank you, because it’s been a lot of great questions. I’m sure the next one will be just right.

Lisa: Yeah, I did also ask, I put, put it out there into the world. You know, what would you ask Adrian Marie Brown if you had if you could sit down with her and one of the guests that I had on the podcast. John Alexander, who wrote a book recently called citizens, he said that he would ask, if you were mayor of let’s say like a major city, what would you do? What changes would you make?

Adrienne: Oh, I love that. Well, my friend nada Petrus just put out a book that was like, what if we gave the police departments to our grandmothers? And I think I would do something like that. To start out with is I would create a council of elders across communities who I sat with and asked for guidance and for wisdom. You know, people who have lived the longest in the place, people who have an indigenous relationship to the place. I would really be interested in the holistic solutions that can emerge from those kind of conversations. I would take rigorous action against gun access and like, there’s just certain key things that I’m like, I would very quickly move for banning assault weapons. If that was not a thing that already happened, I would very quickly move towards normalizing all the recycling and composting and environmental controls. You know, I think the premise of my leadership would be, how do we get ourselves the right relationship with the earth and each other, and what are the policy moves that can get us there? I would also, I imagine I would also just do a survey or scan of all the government workers in my area, and just try to understand, like, what makes you happy about the kind of service you’re able to give to our community, and what takes away from that sense of really being able to impact and move things you know, with the people that you are in service of Yeah, yeah, I think I could have a lot of fun in that kind of role. But yeah, I think a lot of it would be leaving, you know, what are the moves I could make that would leave this better than I found it, and what are the moves I could make that would have the longest impact and, and I think the elders would have the best sense of that.

Lisa: I really like the question. I probably-

Adrienne: Also have a kids Council, yeah, yeah. They have such good ideas about everything.

Lisa: Yeah, I interviewed um SWANA, Lakshmi Ravi, who’s the former prime minister in India of the neighborhood children’s parliament. Ah, yes, it’s amazing that that whole movement is incredible, so much wisdom and maturity in those young people. I’m wondering, for people who are listening to this, who are on on journeys of their own, exploring new ways of working and leading and collaborating. What kind of tips for the journey would you give them? Or I know you’re also kind of Queen of practices, any practices that are giving you life at the moment?

Adrienne: Yeah. I mean, I’ve been really astounded by my Tarot practice lately, and I always recommend to people to have some practice that where you get to say, universe, give me some wisdom. And I think it can be in a number of different ways. You can go sit in your backyard and say, universe, give me some wisdom and see what nature shows you. You can sit with a tarot deck and you can ask, you can open the Channy app and ask you, can, you know, have a daily practice where you reach out to a friend and just be like, what’s something you think I should have in mind today? Here’s something I want to offer to you. I have a friend right now who’s doing a practice where every night she makes herself a voice message of gratitude and like what she wants to prioritize the next day, and then each morning she listens to it whenever she recorded the night before. So there’s a way, there’s many ways we can be wisdom for ourselves, and we can open ourselves to the wisdom that’s around us. I would add, I think a practice I’m in right now also is asking for feedback from people. It’s like, you know, how am I doing? How am I doing in our relationship, like, in micro points, you know, after I spend time with people, I’ll be like, how was that for you? I don’t want to just make the assumption that it was however it was for me, you know. And then I think for folks to figure out, like, what is your front line? What is the place where you’re like, again, willing to make people uncomfortable, if that’s what’s needed, what is that front line for you? Yeah, those are some things I would say to practice right now, you know. And then read books. I. Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. And you have many of them. There’s many to choose from. And I love, I love, like, some of your latest books that I’ve been dipping into, like the folks and fables one, oh, fables and spells, yeah, fables and spells, yeah. I love that you’re kind of drawing together these different I mean, that’s something that I really enjoy, like drawing from different, like disciplines and kind of, like finding overlaps and like cross pollinating things.

Adrienne: Yeah, it’s my thing. I’m just like, I really am enjoying letting myself just write what is in me right now. And it’s amazing how much of it is fiction and how much of it is like it’s not what I expected to be writing, but it’s what’s coming through, and I’m trusting it.

Lisa: Is there anything that you would be sad that you didn’t say in our conversation?

Adrienne: Really appreciate that. I mean, I think the thing that I keep that just come back to over and over again is like, the time for us to be is time now, right? Whatever changes you want to see happen, whatever you wish society was moving in the direction of whatever you wish your relationships were like, like, the time is now this is your one magical, incredible life, and whatever you think other people’s control over it is, it’s just yours. At the end of this, you’re going to be the one who’s responsible for what happens during this life. So harness it. Take that very seriously and live a life that makes you feel deep joy, deep satisfaction, and that you feel has some impact on the world. Get to it. Get to it. You don’t need to study another book. Get to the life part.