Session 3 of Earthseed Book Club focused on the Emergent Strategy principles of Interdependence & Resilience.
These principles go hand-in-hand; through mutual reliance and authentic relationships, we are better able to be resilient and adapt to changing circumstances. To build resilient communities, we need to meet our relationships with radical honesty and transparency of our boundaries & needs. Doing so gives us agency to build relationships that are reflective of our needs, wants, and desires.
From Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, pg 87:
“Most of us are socialized towards independence- pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps, working on our own to develop, survive, to win at life. Competition is the way we hone our skill and comfort with the opposite of mutual reliance- we learn to feel proud with how much we accomplish as individuals, and sometimes, to actively work to bring others down in order to get ahead. The idea of interdependence is that we can meet each other’s needs in a variety of ways, that we can truly lean on others and they can lean on us. It means we have to decentralize our idea of where solutions and decisions happen, where ideas come from.”
In this month’s session, we reflected upon and shared their definitions of resilience and interdependence. Participants highlighted that it is important that we actively practice these principles on a communal scale, rather than placing the onus of resilience on the individual, as the term is often used to dismiss marginalized peoples. Rather than focusing on resiliency in a personal sense, interdependence was emphasized as a means to build communities that support people in their healing.
This month’s co-facilitator was Adesina Brown (they/them), a queer, non-binary author who centers QTPOC in all their work. “Where the Rain Cannot Reach” is their debut novel. To learn and read more about Adesina, please visit their website adesinabrown.com
Adesina led the group in exploring these principles through a group visioning exercise, which focused on communal & liberated futures. By envisioning what these futures look like in tangible ways, we are able to shift our individual actions towards shaping this change. What we do on a small scale ripples outward; by tending to our personal relationships, we are able to create a reflection of a more liberated world.
