my dream about wrens
Artist’s statement:
I think about this question a lot, of how to live together in peace and also make space for the wrens to build their nests, because I like peace and I like wrens and it seems like in the world these days we are not making enough space for either. When I woke up from this dream, I had a solid sense of it ending on that rejection of curriculum. We do not have a curriculum for how to do this because we have not ever had to make it happen before with this many people living on the planet in the way that we do.
Some people out in the world have ideas about how we could do it, like Kate Raworth who wrote a book called Doughnut Economics. A doughnut economic model “consists of two concentric rings: a social foundation, to ensure that no one is left falling short on life’s essentials, and an ecological ceiling, to ensure that humanity does not collectively overshoot the planetary boundaries that protect Earth's life-supporting systems.” This is a brand new way of thinking about how to structure life on our planet, and how to center the most important things in our world.
When I had this dream, I had also been reading this book about unschooling called Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work by Akilah S. Richards. Richards argues that schools as institutions are ways of learning adopted and leftover from colonization, and that they do not serve humans or children, especially children of color for whom they were never designed. I didn't agree with everything in Richards’ book but I thought she had an interesting perspective counter to the idea that school is the answer to every child’s wellbeing. I agree with her that the answer to the world’s problem may not lie in a curriculum.
In the foreword to These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home by Bayo Akomolafe, Charles Eisenstein writes that during his and Akomolafe’s ambitions to fix the world, they both found that “it was the whole formula for making and following a map that was wrong… The very recipe for change-making was part of what needed to change: the smart guys in a room coming up with a brilliant idea, a plan, a blueprint, and then convincing the public and especially the elites to enact a change.” The method that will find us collective peace and places for wrens to nest is not something that we can plan for and then vote on and build, it’s an unexplored way of change that is unknown even to me. That’s what I feel is at the heart of this dream: the complete conundrum of trying to do something that we can’t make an outline or a plan for, that we can’t even teach children in the ways that a school would teach because it has no curriculum.
It feels like the dream ends on a question, so I will just stop here. Thank you for reading and please pass it on if you know someone who might enjoy these drawings and words.