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Welcome to day two of our five-day community invitation series to this year’s NTI Folx Tales gathering on Friday, May 30.
Throughout the week, we want to remember that language is alive, shifting, culturally referent, not universal, and not permanent. The language we have shapes our sense of possibility, connection, understanding, and action.
We don’t want to allow our language to become stale, empty — keeping us in thin understandings of each others’ rich and alive worlds. We want to make and remake it together.
Today, we want to loiter in the word Community. We feel it holds some deeply necessary meanings right now. We can’t do any of this alone. We need each other! What meanings of Community would support you now?
There is no right answer to the question of what this word means. What could it feel like at Folx Tales if we spend some time exploring possibilities of it together?
We’ve asked some of our growing Folx Tales team the following questions about the word Community.
- What does this word mean to you?
- What more might it mean if we bring the fresh, raw urgency of these times to it?
- Where does it live in you?
- What emotions does it bring up?
- What metaphors or images does it evoke?
Here are a few excerpts of responses to these questions we’ve gathered so far:
It holds mystery, it is not fully understandable, and it's definitely not predictable. New things can pop up any day, any moment. It offers an invitation for what is new to join and to share in its delights — but it also asks for accountability for the space that one takes up, and what effects one might have on the other beings around.
Relationships; relationships are in jeopardy and are being threatened; I think community connects to the concept of living; when relationships are being threatened, life is being threatened; relationships can save lives.
We're all trained, inculcated, and educated to view White Supremacy as the thing. It is the air we breathe, and the ocean we live in. It's hard for white folks to notice that. And it's hard even for the rest of us to notice that. It is something that has to be interrogated all the time. And we can't do it alone. And that is the whole thing about community. The power structure wants to cause fear in us, and cause us to basically abandon our own agency. And kind of lay down dead. And they do that by causing us to feel alone. And that is what this is about.
We hope you might consider sharing your responses to these questions with us, too. You can email them to folxtales@gmail.com. We’re thinking this could be one way we begin weaving meanings together leading up to Folx Tales.
Join us!
In solidarity,
The Folx Tales Team
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