What does it look like to dream in black?

What oracles can be found out in the black of the cosmos?

What is already emerging that we have
not yet been able to read into or see as possible?

 

This December, we’ll be exploring futures steeped in blackness, and would like to invite you to join us.

 

Have you met Oceana Sawyer? How about Cliff Berrien?

They are both beloved members of our facilitation team at the Rooted Global Village, and together, Oceana and Cliff have been working on a truly unique – Live online Experience – one focused on and dedicated to our liberation and belonging…

Within the Rooted communal membership, we have been exploring the edges of our lived experiences inside racialized bodies, and Oceana Sawyer, on our team, has provided the space with soul and heart and heat for bodies of culture within the village to gather, rest, and unfurl.

Oceana Sawyer is an End of Life Doula who specializes in the liminal spaces of active dying and grief. Her work with the Rooted Global Village is focused in the area of somatic grieving as a liberatory praxis as well as holding space for people of the African diaspora.

Cliff – is our beat. He provides us with sound in a unique and fascinating way – leading us into deeper explorations of place, peoples, and the resounding effect of hearing and singing the songs of another, with grace, depth, and joy.

Cliff’s work opens us up to playful celebration, somatic education, and cultural dexterity practices that explore the world’s diversity through music and sound. His contribution to the village has been profound.

The event that they have planned is going to RESOUND with futurist joy, somatic healing, music, dance, and depth.

We would love for you to register to join us this coming this December 9 -11 for We Dream Worlds: Wandering in the afrocene, afrofuturism, and womanism at the end of the world

As you may know, the Rooted Global Village was always intended to be a playground where things emerge, shift, change, get messy, evolve.  What began as the “Afrocene” has become a new anchoring title – “We Dream Worlds: Wandering in the afrocene, afrofuturism, and womanism at the end of the world”. Yes, that’s right.

This event is truly alive, organic and has been every bit of an entity that has been unfolding every step of the way. And we’re excited to share this aliveness with you. You can be a part of the emergence with us. Some of you already are.

All of our dreams are coming true with this event even better than we imagined. For instance, we are now able to also announce that we are going to be including the pioneering work of Mikael Owuuna in a gorgeous mind-expanding carousel of images that will be featured in the liminal space between presenters.

EVERYONE is welcome to attend this free to the public offering that will center the dreams, imagination and creative impulse of the African diaspora.

You will have the chance to explore with a variety of liberatory instruments:

 

  • Film!
  • Dialogue!
  • Lecture!
  • Music!
  • Rest!
  • and journaling!


We will tease out ways of knowing and being as we gather around campfires for connection, art-making, movin & groovin, and co-dreaming into the cracks.

“Afrofuturism is more than just breaking down racial constructs, it is really a way of triggering the imagination so that people can look at themselves and celebrate. . ..It is about reclaiming humanity outside of racial norms. As one might guess based on the name, imagining the future of black people is an intrinsic part of Afrofuturism. ‍However, not every futuristic setting that contains Black people constitutes a work of Afrofuturism. Central to the movement is its commentary on the place of Black people and Blackness in the future.” ‍— Ytasha Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture‍

Explore your belonging as it relates to the depths of the cosmos itself during our 3-day BIPOC led Live event – Dec 9 -11. Perhaps we’ll find a way forward together.

 

we-dream-worlds

 

About your hosts for this live experience…

Oceana Sawyer is…

… an End of Life (EOL) Doula who specializes in the liminal spaces of active dying and grief. She is currently researching the intersection of embodied grief and somatic abolitionism as well as developing and holding space for healing through a sensual (all the senses) lens.

Here work with the Rooted Global Village is focused in the area of somatic grieving as a liberatory praxis as well as holding space for people of the African diaspora.

A certified home funeral celebrant, living funeral ceremony facilitator, and Conscious Dying Educator, Oceana also holds graduate degrees in counseling psychology and organizational development.

Cliff Berrien has…

35-years experience as a percussion student and teacher of several music traditions, including drumming styles from Brazil, the Caribbean, Africa and India.

He has long been interested in the work of Afrofuturist writers and has had the honor of exploring the genre with his colleague and mentor, Dr. Barbara Holmes, author of Race and the Cosmos and Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church.

These conversations deepened Cliff’s appreciation of womanist thought as a visionary landscape influenced by indigenous spirituality and woman-centered perspectives which place humans in a sacred web of life that includes plants, animals, elemental forces, the earth, the cosmos, and the living and the dead.