adrienne maree brown — Hope Portal, Episode 2

I'm going to anchor this experience with the voice and wisdom of Adrienne Maree Brown. I cherish her way of seeing and living and writing, how she shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking. She works with the complex fullness of reality to move towards a wholeness of living. And in exploring the idea of hope, the meaning of it, the practice of it, it also feels really important to begin with someone who works to shift realities on the ground. Adrienne Maree Brown does write but she's primarily an organizer. She is a social creative. And many words and phrases have been used to describe what she does and who she is, who she is to so many people, especially in younger generations. She is a student of complexity, a student of change and how groups change together, a scholar of belonging. She grew up loving science fiction, as I did, and thought we'd be driving flying cars by now. But she has found in speculative fiction a transformative vision and imagination that in its way for her might in fact save us. And we're starting with her because how she lives and works with the notion of imagination itself really beautifully illuminates what I mean when I say that hope is an act of imagination with real world consequences. So I want you to hear her voice and some of her thoughts. You're going to hear her mention Octavia, and that would be Octavia Butler, a science fiction writer twentieth century science fiction writer who is enjoying a very well deserved twenty first century renaissance. You're also going to hear Adrienne lavishly at every turn credit her friends and teachers, her ecosystem of support and living. And so in this way, modeling this new way of seeing and living. As I spoke about in the introduction, not living with an illusion that we have to carry the work, even the work of becoming the people we most want to be alone. She's part of this web of relationship that shares ongoing growth and learning. They use words that emerge from the science of what we're learning about the nature of vitality in the natural world, mutuality, reciprocity. Adrienne Maree Brown is a student of this, as was Octavia Butler. And so without further ado, here's a bit of my conversation with her. And it seems to me that, I mean, what you're getting at there is a core value of imagination and understanding the power of imagination in making the world and remaking the world. Yeah. Well, you know, I wanna shout out my friend, Walida E. Marisha, who named visionary fiction. And I was obsessing over Octavia, and she was also. Right. And we found each other, and we we wrote, pulled together this anthology called Octavia's Brood. And in that process, I started the work of emergent strategy. You know, started to …