Seed A Practice Inside the Treehouse
A monthly membership holding you accountable to weekly returns to your Zone of Desire through live workshops, open studios, guided meditations and black feminist worldbuilding tools.
Join UsIn Search Of A Treehouse...
"So how do we save or preserve ourselves? Sometimes we retreat into thought, sometimes we retreat into literature, sometimes we retreat into ideas and...find those to be a form, at times, of respite if not salvation. I used to climb into treehouses in Texas and just read for hours and just show up at home when it was dinner time. Maybe this becomes the attraction of the academy because, maybe, we think it's our treehouse, it is a sanctuary. That's not really how it functions. If it's a state university, it is an extension of the government...If it's a private corporation...It is literally capital."
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— Joy James, "How the University De-Radicalizes Students, Professors & Social Movements|Joy James & Rebecca Wilcox" published on Feb 18, 2022 by Villanova University
Learn More About the Treehouse
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Build worlds while building your email list. Build your email list while building worlds and practicing creative copywriting with visionary fiction prompts. Your weekly dispatch might not be an essay, a poem or short story but creative writing is often the balm that will attract the folks we dream of working with inside our offers. So many of the systems of oppression, colonial imaginaries and worlds of white supremacy we find ourselves inside of originated in ink. Manifested with pen and paper. Inside the Treehouse we invite you to pick up your pen, paint brush, music instrument, voice, camera, etc. and once a week, share a portal to otherwise.
Worldbuilding Workshops
1ST TUESDAY @ 12PM EST
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In the first week of every month we will gather for a creative marketing workshop informed by The Worldbuilder’s Way Compass and engage in a writing prompt for practicing intuitive storytelling and seeding a weekly creative offering to release.
Weekly Dispatch Open Studio
3RD TUESDAY @ 12PM EST
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In the third week of every month we will gather to engage in a show and tell style showcase of one of our weekly offerings for the month. Not a critique session, more of a call and response ceremony informing the next offering.
The Treehouse Dashboard
GLOBAL ASYNCHRONOUSITY
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Inside your Treehouse Dashboard you will find workshop, open studio and guided meditation recordings for black feminist breathwork alongside a link to the Treehouse Discord Server for checking in with a global community of worldbuilders in between live gatherings.
The Worldbuilder's Way
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The Worldbuilder’s Way is a cycle of practice informed by the elements speculative and visionary fiction authors use to build a world on a page and a screen. If the reality we’re inside of once existed in someone else’s imagination, we can imagine and actualize new worlds through our daily, weekly, monthly and seasonal practices. This is one way, out of billions, to return. This way of being is a cycle of practice rooted in memory, spirit, surrender and eroticism informed by 12 worldbuilding elements, actions and meditations. I invite you to worldbuild with us inside the Treehouse and perhaps, along the way, you find another route.
Summer Inside the Treehouse: Ancestry
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This summer we address the overwhelming fear of uncertainty and transformation by shaping containers of change we can safely control. We do this with a sankofa sensibility by locating the energy source of our desire, collaborating with our ancestors and finding clarity in the timeless worlds calling us home.
JULY 2024
Seed A Practice Rooted in the Truth of Your Desire
ELEMENT: ELEMENT X
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ACTION: REMEMBER YOUR DESIRE
This month we are going to start by locating your “Element X”. N.K. Jemisin describes “Element X” as a creative device that powers speculative fiction. She frames it as a, “What if...” question that establishes clarity on some magic, mysticism, fantasy or advanced technology. Inside Seeda School we frame it as a “What if…” question that establishes clarity on your deep desire. Your “Element X” is the premise of possibility that will charge your public practice. Turn consistency into pleasurable permission and discipline into devotion.
AUGUST 2024
An Essay is an Attempt: Write A Newsletter in 20mins.
ELEMENT: HERITAGE
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ACTION: COLLABORATE WITH ANCESTORS
This month we are going to learn how to write a newsletter in a tight time box by collaborating with our ancestors. We abandon word count, paragraph constraints and rules on form, remembering an essay translates to “an attempt” in French. Even if your weekly dispatch isn’t a text-based offering, we still want to be sending a weekly/bi-weekly newsletter with a link to our offering in order to build and nurture our list over time.
SEPTEMBER 2024
Use Visionary Fiction to Write A World Around Your Desire
ELEMENT: HOME
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ACTION: VISION HOME WORLD
This month we are going to “go back and get” in order to imagine and seed a world as a framework informing the creative copy and intuitive storytelling inside our practice. We will be able to use this world as an organizing framework informing our weekly dispatches, offers and honey creating sweet invitations that keeps you and your audience coming back.
“What if it is not an experiment, this creative life of refusal. This rarely institutionally-funded disloyal life of practice for a world as yet unnamable. This insistence on transformation when the bank account screams “conform.” What if this life as an independent experimental artist is not itself an independent experiment? What if it’s an interdependent ceremony?”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
The Summer Syllabus
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The seasonal programming inside the Treehouse is informed by a rotating theme of creative practice for black feminist worldbuilding. This summer is all about practicing a sankofa sensibility by returning to our ancestral memory. Drop your name and email below and I'll send your Summer Guide!
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The Practice
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Locating our desire is the first step, actualizing our desire requires us to practice inside it. The supportive tools for practice inside the Treehouse are Daily Seeds and Weekly Dispatches.
Weekly Dispatches
CADENCE: WEEKLY
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A weekly offering from inside your world made possible by the daily seed practice and a sacred time block protected on your weekly calendar.
Dispatches usually fall under 1 of these 5 categories:
- Creative Writing
- Podcast
- Video
- Social Media Live
- Wildcard: Playlists, collages, meditations, recipes, self portraits, code snippets, photographs, experimental recordings, a quilt of all the above etc.
Regardless of the container, we need your weekly dispatch!
Daily Seed
CADENCE: DAILY
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Worried about committing to cadence of weekly/bi-weekly dispatches from inside the world you’re building? Gathering “daily seeds” is another supportive tool inside the worldbuilder’s way of practice. Carve out one divine hour every morning to free write, engage your political imagination through research and breathe into the day and you’ll end up with an abundance of seed data to plant inside your weekly dispatches. Perhaps the years aren’t up to us, but the days are.
30 mins:Write20 mins:Read10 mins:Meditate (Move, Masturbate, etc.)
Need daily seed source material? Check out the monthly breakdown in the seasonal syllabus and Are.na channels for reading recommendations and the Treehouse dashboard for guided, black feminist breathwork meditations.
Join Us In The Treehouse!
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Summer 2024 Open Enrollment: July 15th-July 29th
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See You Inside?
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Plant seeds with us for as long as it feels fruitful. No minimum monthly commitment to join! Practice alongside us every first and third Tuesday at noon EST where we will vision worlds rooted in our desire for collective liberation and practice the reading, writing and mindfulness skills we'll need to actualize them.
Why You Need A Weekly Dispatch
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There are countless reasons why we need your weekly dispatch and here are nine reasons why you may need it too.
Increase Your Income
Practice Reciprocity
Contribute to Collective Healing
Unlearn Fear of Accountability and Perfectionism
Steward An Archive
The Ecstasy of Release
Attract Creative Community
A Practice of Actualization
Ghost the Algorithm
The Seeda School Treehouse Is For You If...
You have an email list you want to release a creative offer to but they haven’t heard from you in a while.
You feel your radical imagination being activated by the politics of our time and want to commit to a cadence of watering that imagination inside a community of practice.
You don’t have an email list and want to build one so your offer release strategy isn’t dependent on social media.
You have a creative offer in the research and development phase and want to iteratively incubate your ideas alongside the folks the offer will serve.
You want to develop a practice of learning in public, co-creation and accountability with the understanding these are necessary skills inside the work of liberation.
You want to give yourself, and generations forward and back, the gift of an archive. You want to fill in the gaps of what white supremacy deemed not “valuable” enough to research and preserve.
You’re ready to drop the “I’m not good at writing” story and understand creative copy writing is a skill that serves your desire and a skill that can be learned and practiced.
You are craving communal ceremonies of rememberance. A consistent clearing for returning to your values and engaging in speculative practice aligned with your political commitments.
“You’re on the right path if you are intentionally trying to reduce the gap between your values and your actions.”
Mariame Kaba
What Seeda School Worldbuilders Are Saying
"It’s been so incredibly powerful to see the way each prompt, each assignment, each framework, in such a short amount of time, brings the threads of my practice into harmony and makes it so the universe can clearly respond. I can’t even count the number epiphanies I’ve had since I’ve started working with you. Thank you."
Ravon Ruffin, Fall Seed A World Retreat 2023
Gloria-Sherryl François (G L O W Z I), Fall Seed A World Retreat 2023
“Ayana Zaire Cotton, is, to me, a being whose radically tender ways of loving, teaching, and questioning mirror the revolutionary labours of love of bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, and the list goes on. Through Seeda School, Ayana plants seeds of responsible hope, of revolutionary reimagining(s), and most importantly, of communal (and personal) pursuit(s) of the erotic into the body, mind, and soul of whoever has the chance to waltz with their teachings, with their being. Being a student of Seeda School is constantly being reminded that one’s desires are needs, and therefore that we — as people — have the power to materialize the conditions we yearn to have in order to thrive, to be free. Receiving teachings and exchanging with Ayana and the lovely beings who tap into their care-full-y crafted [offers] is a blessing that keeps on giving, and I trust that this will remain the case in near and distant futures.”
"Seeda School is the most nourishing, electric, brilliant, inspired, held space I have been lucky enough to be a part of. I entered the retreat from the depths of a creative winter, and Ayana built the container for a true and revelatory spring. She has architected the balance of structure, rigorous tools, juicy inspiration, accountability, and relational support that will help you (finally) recognize and birth the thing that has been calling you. And more than that, Seeda is the invitation to manifest the luscious version of a life you didn’t know you were allowed to have."
Olivia Vagelos, Winter Seed A World Retreat 2024
Join Us In The Treehouse!
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Summer 2024 Open Enrollment: July 15th-July 29th
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See You Inside?
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Plant seeds with us for as long as it feels fruitful. No minimum monthly commitment to join! Practice alongside us every first and third Tuesday at noon EST where we will vision worlds rooted in our desire for collective liberation and practice the reading, writing and mindfulness skills we'll need to actualize them.
Why Now?
The Desire Animating My Decade of Creative Practice
You’re longing for a cadence of creating beyond the logics of social media and the metrics of capitalism. You want to engage your creative audience and community with, beyond, before the algorithm. You want to give yourself the gift of an archive and leave breadcrumbs for generations forward and back — to find you, to find us — as you find yourself. You’ve lived long enough to know locating your desire and answering the call is the first step and every step after that is just the practice. In the face of so much uncertainty, change and generative transformation, the groundwork of planting seeds in the everyday and sharing the harvest every week, is perhaps the only practice we can control.
Time moves differently here between starshine and clay and we treat it as sacred. The Treehouse community of practice is right on time for you if you know, locating your desire is good, in theory but the actualization happens inside the praxis. Build worlds while building an email list. Commit to a cadence of relationship and trust building through sharing vulnerability and embodied wisdom, then release the project or income generating offer we’ve all been waiting on.
