fa
MENU
School for Inclement Weather: Initiation
i am not in the forest so much as i am the forest. i begin to sense a communication through our mycelia that there is an exact choreography of thinning we need to create a shape that will resound a perfect harmonics. this perfect pitch will indicate the health of our forest body.
when i had this dream, i woke up in the middle of night, feverishly grabbed my phone, and immediately text Jiordi and the forester: our forest plan is about perfect acoustics! when Jiordi and i first moved to this land together and were listening for what the land was asking from us, we thought about the cultural memory of acoustic ecology. what if we just focused on the heritage work of protecting bird song as essential for the earth’s survival? what if the most important thing we could do was protect and restore that music?
later, a Kashia elder would instruct us that one of the most important ways we could pray here as non-Kashia people was through song. the root word of dream of course means music. there is a way the land dreams you, or sings you, when you listen long enough for their intelligence to rest in you. our work at the school for inclement weather is an attempt at the prophetic practice of listening long enough. how is our presence, our attention, a keystone species? how is our attention an animal we must protect from extinction?
this land is teaching us about keeping the animal of our attention alive. the enchantment of attention is an ancient practice that mainstream work dedicated to the climate emergency seems to long for but is desperately missing the music of. we are thinking of our work at the school as a demonstration site for this quality of attention, for land custodianship and memory-keeping for endangered practices. to be a place to study and be in practice with the changes that the earth is making. asking as the earth mutates, how do we mutate in return? (Jiordi Rosales). across research institutions there are land bases that act as living laboratories for demonstrating ecological regeneration. here at the school for inclement weather, there’s something about demonstrating that we seek to appropriate, complicate and lovingly disturb.
demonstrate as in to de-monstrify, to de-monster. there’s something about apocalypse, about the state of the world, that feels like a monster. our work as a demonstration site seeks to follow Bayo Akomolafe’s admonition: when you meet the monster, anoint its feet. we seek to find a posture that anoints, that bows before the monster we have inherited and offers the sacrament of our presence: the monster we have neglected and ignored, the monster the plantation, colonialism, extraction made of the land and our motivations, the monster we have forgotten to court with our dreams, the monster we have made of the weather.
ancient observatories were temples that paid attention to the universe as a practice of worship, to take in the data of synchronicity as prophetic insight. we are attempting to recover that prophetic research through the school. we met the Dream Office team through our shared care for attending to the musculature of prophecy.
Sharon was present for a workshop Jiordi and i offered at a conference on prophetic listening. at that same conference, Sharon witnessed Jiordi make fire-by-friction then of course reached out to cast Jiordi in Tomo’s short film called Prophecy with a curiosity to film it at the land where the school takes place. the now three co-directors of the school (Jiordi, Nathalia and myself) were all present for the film. Prophecy danced across mythos, prescribed fire, AI, and a flying usnea monster named FM that was born from the fire of this place. the year Tomo filmed Prophecy here was also the year 5782 in the Hebrew calendar, a shmita year, shmita in Hebrew means release, and is a commandment invoked every 7 years to let the earth’s body rest, permit their fields to go fallow, release the privatization of their flesh, abolish enslavement, forgive debt, give away any hoarding that had been stored up. release, release, release. our dance with the Dream Office has been asking us to study prophecy, the ongoing political imperative of shmita, and the way stories change matter.
some of that prophetic research for me happens through being with the sheep here and the liturgy of their rhythms. they invite me to wonder — why is there a consistent pattern of God and angels commissioning shepherds for the prophetic task? how does being accompanied by the pastoral care of sheep protect the animal of my attention?
as the land dreams me, they teach me to change my posture as a theologian before the monster. that posture has lifted my head and hands in worship at the sound of the lazuli bunting returning in the early spring, beholding their significant blue. that posture has invited me to kneel before a fox track bowed in prayer. these regular prostrations the land drew me into felt like the familiar postures of praise and worship in the black Christian tradition i was raised in. the land began to choreograph my research to examine the pattern and presence of praise in apocalypse and notice that worship is at risk of extinction. that worship has always been a cultural companion to caring for the weather. and to believe in the urgency of restoring praise as an ecological circulation that keeps the earth healthy and moving as much as i believe in restoring native grasslands. it’s all on the spectrum of worship.
Dagara ancestor Sobonfu Somé named “In my weakest moments I do not rely on my highest self but my strongest practice”. across the Tanakh and Christian bible, praise and worship are always present in the face of terror because worship is the strongest practice. worship is the inheritance and rehearsal of a covenant promised from Creator that liberation is on its way. our work here at the school is disinterested in the telos of “fixing” the land, or “fixing” the monster but recognizing the monster is still singing (or maybe growling in this case) and longs for us to join in the worship. and that when we begin to lift our voices and eyes and hearts in the pattern of worship we notice the monster was made from the projection of our own brokenness.
sometimes that worship is not awe. mostly, it’s awful. mostly, things here are always broken and our own brokenness is illuminated in the litany of broken things: water lines bursting, pumps breaking, power outages, sheep escaping, so much space but not enough space for the humans who live here, being broke as hell financially. if the prophetic is informed from paying attention, the biggest pattern i have witnessed here is something wants to break.
in my tradition, praise breaks are ruptures in the black church service where the atmosphere is overcome by an anointing that changes time through the trembling gospel of gratitude, tongues and testimony. it seems like the familiar modes of our activism, our attempts at repair, our capitalist temporalities seek to break, so that something as strange and courageous as worship can resanctify and mutate our despair. i am being called here to demonstrate a praise break.