Episode Nine: The Future with adrienne maree brown
In the last episode of the season, we are focused on building the future with one of the wisest people of our time, adrienne maree brown. This conversation is about emerging from our collective grief and about creating our future together. It’s about our interconnectedness and what it means to live a good life in community with each other. We love adrienne’s vision and clarity and hopefulness and honesty. We love adrienne, our memelord.
GUEST:
adrienne maree brown
adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of seven published texts and the founder of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, where she is now the writer-in-residence.
More about adrienne maree brown and her work here and find her on Twitter at @adriennemaree and on Instagram at @adriennemareebrown.
KEY QUESTIONS:
How does truth reveal itself in grief?
How much does reconciliation have to do with processing grief? Are they the same?
Does restitution have to do with grief?
How much does honoring our grief have to do with our future?
What can we learn from other places — South Africa, Germany — and how their culture has shifted by honoring grief?
How do we draw from our cultures to create a new Mash-Up American grief practice?
RESOURCES:
Repairing Generations of Trauma, One Lotus Flower at a Time by Elizabeth Dias, NY Times
This Atlantic article reports on multiple interesting studies on the power of ritual conducted by researchers Michael I. Norton and Francesca Gino at Harvard Business School.
The final letter in this group of Rilke’s letters on grief, published by The Paris Review, contains insights about how one journeys alongside a person even after they have died. An excerpt:
On the one hand, I want to encourage you in your pain so that you will completely experience it in all its fullness, because as the experience of a new intensity it is a great life experience and leads everything back again to life, like everything that reaches a certain degree of greatest strength. But on the other hand, I am very concerned when I imagine how strangled and cut off you currently live, afraid of touching anything that is filled with memories (and what is not filled with memories?). You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not, dear. You have to move. You have to return to his things. You have to touch with your hands his things, which through their manifold relations and attraction are after all also yours. You must, Sidie, (this is the task that this incomprehensible fate imposes upon you), you must continue his life inside of yours insofar as it has been unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours. You, who quite truly knew him, can quite truly continue in his spirit and on his path. Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you. If I could just convince you, my dear friend, that his influence has not vanished from your existence (how much more reliably I feel my father to be effective and helpful in me since he no longer dwells among us).
The Corpses that Changed my life - Caitlin Doughty
Caitlin's first experience in the death industry set off a nine year mission to change how the Western world deals with their dead. In her talk, Caitlin takes us around the world, to demonstrate how other cultures enjoy a more intimate, meaningful relationship with death.
Nancy Berns is a sociologist at Drake University. She looks at the space between grief and closure and has found that not only is closure a fabricated concept, it is doing us more harm than good.
WHITE PAPER:
Download the white paper here.
CREDITS:
Grief, Collected is a production of The Mash-Up Americans. Executive produced by Amy S. Choi and Rebecca Lehrer. Senior editor and producer is Sara Pelligrini. Development producer is Dupe Oyebolu. Production manager, Shelby Sandlin. Original music composed by The Brothers Tang. Sound Design support by Pedro Rafael Rosado. Website designed by Rebecca Fernandez. Grief, Collected is supported in part by a grant from The Pop Culture Collaborative. Please make sure to follow and share this show with all of your friends. Ciao.