the dung beetles
Guess what? In every living organism, decay and regeneration are constantly occurring. Life is made of multiple rhythms, even in the invisible and underground alchemy.
The Emergence Network is currently still below ground. It is time for us as an organism to convulse, shiver, and transform; to digest and mature; to find new and different landscapes and remember old places. This web of multiple cells is rekindling, of its own accord and at its own pace. The assemblage is quivering, playing with other structures and arrangements. Across geographies, seven Dung Beetles are convening, learning new languages, remembering ancient translations, and rolling nutritious balls of shit for the next iteration of The Emergence Network.
We are engaged in a deep inquiry and inner research about what it means to commit to emergence. We delight in the commitment of weaving connections through lost souls, the old and the new, composting the ground to ask different questions, while working with the dilemmas of the local and the translocal. We are asking: How do we stay with the trouble as a collective? May our dung-balls fertilize the spaces in between, nurturing the reverence for Life, unfolding fractal dialogues, and breaking patterns while finding emerging and elegant matrixes.
There are currently no outwardly facing TEN programs or courses running. We’ll be sure to let you know when there’s some yummy compost ready to be feasted upon!
~ Our Projects ~
Kairos
A project of radical hospitality that allows people experimenting with postactivism and uncovering new places of power to engage in exchange and learning together in one, physical place in the spirit of gift, deep listening, co-inquiry and shared destiny.
Kairos Exchanges are unlearning journeys that bring communities of alternative activism and postactivist practices together. They are about seeing with new eyes, creating emancipatory knowledges together, and stitching quilts of solidarity especially with groups in precarious circumstances. It is about fellowship, sharing and siblinghood. It is about listening-together-with. It is making-kin-with in a performance of mutual fragility and radical hospitality. They are an opportunity to braid our lives together and an exchange of gifts between parties, honouring an old cross-cultural tradition of receiving the traveller and being generous to one’s host. They offer fissures in our day-to-day lives for both traveller and host that call upon a mutual openness to change. It is cooking together, singing together, picking mushrooms together, eating together, and crying together. Kairos Exchanges give potential host an opportunity to see themselves through their hospitality, to notice their own lives, as if for the first time.
Vulture
An INTIMATE CO-INQUIRY AND INTENTIONAL UNCERTAINTY. SIMULTANEOUSLY SKILLING UP AND SURRENDERING IN TIMES OF LOVE AND TROUBLE
We need new ways of knowing and being with the world. Our attempts at leadership, change and activism, while well intended are often too embedded in the very systems we wish to liberate ach other from. We need spaces to listen in for what might be wanting to emerge if only we had the courage to slow down in urgent times.
The journey of ‘Vulture’ offers a different shape of hope: hope not in saviours or solutions but in the smell of soil, the migration of birds, and the intense beauty of seeing each other dance at the edge of things.
steal a way
situated in the spiritual technology of shabbat (sabbath), STEAL A WAY is a fugitive praxis that seeks to regenerate time, imagination and sanctuary in the midst of systems collapse, utilizing the gifts of intimate fellowship, embodied research, and ritual storytelling.
informed by the lineage of the black fugitive invocation, “steal away”, we call upon the wisdom of encoded songlines rooted in negro spirituals that supported enslaved black folks to share subversive liberation paths toward freedom. In a time of hypervisibility and hypersurveillance, we inquire how studying and living maroonage and fugitivity in a translocal community of practice can weave an embodied research network of radical hospitality, regeneration and refuge across the country. casting the homophonic spell, steal a way, we intend to make a way out of no way; to reveal a path that invites us to retreat to a time outside of time.
Photo from Lead to Life Oakland Alchemy Ceremony 2019 by Ayse Gursoz.
Vunja
A multidimensional social art project that turns attention to the marginalized and the potentials for alternative worlds in their very conditions of exception.
Imagine other possibilities of being alive. Imagine ruptures and openings in spaces of suffering. Imagine other shapes and genres of being human. Imagine other futures and temporalities. Imagine the im/possible.
Vunja is a research/art/social justice/carnival project that celebrates black, invisible and marginalized bodies by attending to startling potentials for wiser worlds in their very conditions of exception. Going beyond the perennial fight for inclusion or concerns about exclusion, and noticing that there are other places of power, Vunja is a radical site for approaching the emancipatory possibilities alive at the edges of white modernity, of conventional hope, and of racial identity.