Guiding Questions:

• What is unimaginable one day becomes imaginable the next, and mandatory the next. We have demonstrated that when there is a mass will or need, major shifts are possible. It is within the realm of possibility to stop all evictions, to shut down the factories that are directly causing polluted cities. Whose will and whose imagination will be enacted? 

• What forces are shaping our imaginations right now? Beyond the next three weeks, what are our notions of “normal”? What does it mean to “get back” to a “normal” that has already been disastrous? What do we want to be our future “normal”?

• How is internalized capitalism showing up in our lives and relationships, including tensions between using this time “productively” versus impulses toward dissociation or slowness? 

• How can legacies of resistance from movements of community care, such as the ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), inform the ways we navigate emotional decisions about supporting loved ones and building movements in this time?  How can we learn from our people who have survived apocalypses past, surviving and transforming in seemingly insurmountable circumstances?

• How do narratives around “isolation” and “distancing” make conscious gender, race, class and ableist domination, and what does transforming those systems mean in this moment?

• How do narratives about the virus as a “natural cycle” of the earth reproduce violent spiritual bypassing and eugenics? What are the stories we want to amplify as we attempt to make meaning of this time?

Resources

Prentis Hemphill,  “Contagion, Consent, Connection” 

Movement Generation, “From Banks and Tanks to Cooperation and Caring: A Strategic Framework for a Just Transition,” 

Dean Spade, “Solidarity Not Charity” SURJ Webinar Recording

Dean’s Spade’s Mutual Aid Curriculum

Corona Virus Resource Compilation from generative somatics 

Bay Rising: Preparing for Coronavirus Crisis: As Organizers, It’s Time to Do What We Do Best

Dialogue Notes:

These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.

MUTUAL AID IN UNCERTAIN TIMES DIALOGUE NOTES

Starting with grounding, feeling weight of body and support of the earth, grounding breaths. Breathing practice with arm expansion and contraction with breath via generative somatics. Centering practice via generative somatics.

Go round check in

• High school teacher, recently moved to distance learning. How to support students, especially in government and economics. How to reframe in terms of mutual aid. How to leave behind a capitalism curriculum.
• This moment is a test for me as a Buddhist. My practices are really helping me. Part of why I can feel into it is that I am privileged. I don’t have to be challenged by not enough money or a place to live. Feeling for people and animals who don’t have what they need. 
• Many connections with people I don’t talk to often. Each day feels like a new dimension of this pandemic sinks in and becomes more real and felt. Super inspired by what is being made possible by this crisis of people that were unthinkable. A week ago feels like a month ago. Feeling the reality of healthcare workers without basic protective equipment. Reality of how many people will be dying alone. Early background as a hospice worker, what does this look like virtually? 
• People dying alone, and the aloneness of this time that is changing how to process feelings and reach out to other people. Having trouble processing. Not being grounded, trying to work as if things were like they were before. How will I peel apart the time to process what kinds of actions I can participate in. It has been hard to reach out to people. Very little human contact for 4 weeks, impacting ability to process. How to connect into mutual aid systems already in place and find new ones. 
• In school doing a physical theater program in a cohort. Very physical. This organism that I was a part of now we can’t all be together. We are asked to work on pieces over zoom. It is very challenging. Isolated from family and partner. Drawn by how internalized capitalism showing up in our lives, including using this time productively and dissociation. Pressure to produce. How do I be creative right now? Come to peace internally about not being produce, doing what I need to do to process. 
• Echo previous shares. Job advocating for healthcare workers. There is no rest, very much in contrast to others. It is tragic, hearing everyday about people getting exposed. Really resentful that I am doing this, all these other types of mutual aid happening which I want to be a part of but I can’t. Privilege to be housed. Don’t have time or energy left. Basically no vacation or rest. Plugging in to some decarcerate. Fundraising. Nothing ever feels like enough. Not a lot of time to sit with my feelings, trying to fit in a little bit of self care. Longing for other people’s problems right now. 
• I work in theater, my job is secure, but other jobs not so much. 80% of the people I know have lost their work indefinitely. Worried about loss of art we were creating together. Friend and sister pregnant. People to have to give birth alone. Part of a transformative justice workshop, tonite was supposed to be a share out from that work, and a launch of a podcast we put together. We will be able to do it later, but it was disappointing. Feeling more stable in my position than a lot of other people, wanting to do something with that. Feeling very inundated by all the need. How to grasp onto one thing.
• Need to not look at the screen because of so much screen time, nervous system shot. Primarily as a restaurant worker, currently laid off. Many doctors and nurses, as well as organizers and restaurant workers in my community. Loss of seeing grandmother again. Being impacted at every level, but have focussed on research in the last week. I still feel adequately safe amidst so much uncertainty. I know a lot people with wealth. I am trying to engage those folks. How to look at resources and strategize. 
• Rocky year. Reflecting on existing mutual aid networks, frustrated with some of them. In trauma therapy. Fired from job in january related to gender antagonisms and status as a disabled person. How to get unemployment. Feeling uncertainty and privilege that i have. How to stay in community with roomates, family far away. Feeling collective grief. Lack of resources in the us for mental health care. Trying to share what i know. Suicidal ideation. Metoo behind bars campaign. Wanting there to be social safety nets, and seeing the way our communities are establishing mutual aid networks, relying on mutual aid networks. So frustrated. 
• Feeling flurry of reaching out to community, but not in this farther out orbit yet. Lost work in various forms. One org is connecting with the involved elders. Online classes. Riding the waves, body in sympathetic arousal state – acute, familiar. Pendulum swings between hyperarousal and dissociation. Pressure/tensions increasing in relationships. Talking to herbalist friend re: ACT UP! Elder sharing about the joy de vivre in spaces, even as friends were dying, the elders who have survived apocalypses before, and with care. Pull out from dialogue description – What is unimaginable one day becomes imaginable the next, and mandatory the next. We have demonstrated that when there is a mass will or need, major shifts are possible. It is within the realm of possibility to stop all evictions, to shut down the factories that are directly causing polluted cities. Whose will and whose imagination will be enacted? I’m resonating with the call, with decarceration is happening right now. Considering what is the learning. But not needing to tie it up in easy way.

Opening up the circle

• Imagination right now. Apocalypses that center care. We are being very still, holding our breath. And global forces are moving – social, political, economic. Inspiring and terrifying. What forces are shaping our imagination? What notions of normal are getting upended? What does it mean to get back to a normal that has already been a disaster? What do we want to be our future normal?
• Referencing Octavia Butler in this moment – God is change. The need to be agile and responsive. We offer these readings and resources because we see them as grounding, essential, and expansive, but also recognize the information overload we are all currently experiencing. You are also invited to simply show up.
• Also thinking about Octavia Butler and these visions. Right before this call I was on a webinar about decarceration. Every time there is a disaster, I realize how important it is that orgs have already been built and are ready. Mapping projects to be poised for any opportunity to channel. Sci fi is part of it – we get to craft a future here. It feels hard as an individual to imagine, but there is something there around the ways we are preparing ourselves. Prentis Hemphill – there is some relief in this moment, we already knew it was this bad, and it is being revealed. Now, we can all see it and feel it. 
• I am teaching a speculative fiction unit, we are reading Octavia Butler right now. How much lines up with her work, whatever we change, changes us. Reciprocal nature of change. Butler talked about how we needed breaks. To break these giant technological leaks. Scary that it is an opportunity. 
• As someone who has grown food – when you are saving seeds, like beans – there is a hull, inside is the bean. You stomp on the hull to break up the bean. Using wind, you drop a hull and the bean will fall. Then we compost the shell and have the seed. Articulating this concept of composting these systems we’ve known are failing us, also benefiting us in certain ways. There’s already a seed there. 
• Original meanings of apocalypse – revelation, parting of veil – certain things are becoming visible and business as usual is made visible. I see the news and see things like “UN chief calls for global cease fire” – a moment of wonder – is this real, or sci fi exercise? Amazement and disbelief. New York suspending evictions, etc. These things that are moving so fast. Psychic break. Radical break in biz as usual. So much is possible there. Some organizing focused on how to harness psychic breaks when they arise (natural disasters, etc). 
• Trump election in 2016 – constant state between outrage and numbness. Hard to remember a day/week later and hard to still feel that outrage. Shortened attention. But this pandemic has a longer quality of attention and togetherness.
• People without records being released from ICE – remarkable. But also sitting with the huge increase in purchases of guns. Fear about the backlash to this opening up of human rights. Right wing is not becoming more humane. 
• Paying more attention last week to people coming home, this week price gouging, lack of due process, as Naomi Klein said, picking up what is lying around. How can I hold all these things coming to us, how to surf over other stuff, in my heart I see how neoliberal.3 will take over. Weird normalization/shock, now grounded into that. What is the feeling of grounding into this normal? Let myself have a little bit of peace. Hope and conflict. 
• Naomi Klein is an environmentalist and activist. She wrote a lot about distaster capitalism. There is a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFqNAEx1lm4) about pandemic capitalism and risk. Just as movement workers have been efforting to gain wins now, so are developers and capitalists. Terrible and beautiful things are happening every day. How do we keep pushing and not getting bogged down in despair. 
• The question of what shapes our imagination is really powerful. Where we source our information is very powerful. Democracy Now (a news source) and the Intercept, radical education school. It is also getting influenced by my parents and my partner. There are so many influences. Part of the work for me and all of us in different ways is discerning what is true and what we want to act from. Where are we acting from in any given moment. How I am acting is very rooted in neoliberal, globalized capitalism. Not because it is what I want but because it what I have been born into. I have eager urgency to work against that. I feel part of the we of we have to make that shit happen. I feel fearful that so much of our navigating and organizing is now online. It is important we are isolated for safety. Not only is online not the same, and tiresome on our beings, data storing has a massive carbon footprint. Digital security is a thing. Fear of ways we will be continually being monitored. Fear of mobilization. Surveillance capitalism and geolocating. Reliance on devices like Apple, tech companies like Zoom and Google.  
• Thinking on just walking down the street. Feeling strange to avoid contact – new etiquette that’s becoming normal now. Projections that this time might alternate – peaks and containment for 12-18 months. What gets normalized in a week. 
• Appreciating listening. What’s on my mind is that I have all this time now – last few years, untethered. Enjoyed being nimble and available to friends and for community care. Having a hard time not being able to do those things. Miss the connections. 
• Feeling blocked off from pushing back on anti-Asian racism and stereotyping. 
• Everything we’re practicing right now. And mutual aid is the future. Thinking about economic reality of severe recession – what do long haul sustainable creative networks look like? 
• Struggling with what to do with my activism right now – since Trump, we have organized to feel like we are resisting, but hard not to feel able to access that right now. How do we continue to support liberation when so many avenues closed off right now. 
• Read adrienne maree brown quote. “…Same systems we see crumbling in society are being called to crumble in each of us…as if mother earth is saying: we can longer carry on this way…” 
• Can’t help but think that I can ponder that bc I have food, shelter. How do we expect those struggling with survival to ponder the deep philosophical questions? There is privilege and opportunity. What if we shut everything down until we fixed these systems? Such as mass boycott. The luxury in it. But not a luxury to practice survival. Makes me think of Gloria Anzaldua – art as part of activism. Not a binary. Those struggling with survival are still pondering existence. But – they have military on their side. 
• My roommates and I are sharing more than we ever have before – energy about putting money back in. Trying to get the stock market back.. Why don’t we instead create little community pockets. When I think about systems crumbling, it’s the idea that money equals shelter, food, healthcare. What if we get rid of system of money as security and create other systems of security. Just think about resources, not the money we need to get them. 
• Attraction/repulsion from different normals – with systems that are crumbling – what are we in a hurry to rebuild, proposals to mint new coins, out there ideas that are in the realm of possibility. 
• Narratives that are circulating that are making meaning of this time – being the earth’s way of getting us to stop destructive systems. For some greater design. The shadows of the narrative that can justify tragic things. Narrative has a close relationship with imagination and strategy.
• Two parts of myself – want to understand where they are coming from – want to understand the humanity of every life lost. No one deserves to die for this other thing – a lot of friends under guise of spirituality – souls are leaving this world so a new one can be created – feels dismissive. Feeling loss. 
• Brings up traumatic feelings about not caring for other people – ie maybe it will kill all in power – but that’s horrible to wish death on anyone. If narrative is about life and living, there is no place to hope anyone is hurt. There was this I don’t want to give/get it – sitting at home is mutual aid so that we are not spreading. That is huge. 
• Different narratives will keep swirling and competing.
• Grounding as we move toward closing