Creating the Conditions for Belonging with Autumn Brown

How do we create rituals to witness each other and our communities in transformative moments and cultivate a sense of belonging? What role does forgiveness play in our individual and communal spiritual practices? 

Autumn Brown is a writer, musician, facilitator, and organizer. Here, she and Dwight explore the power of choosing how we want to be witnessed, the vulnerability required to find and create community, and how forgiveness allows us the space to reclaim our senses of self.

Read the transcript of this episode.

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Autumn Brown is a writer, musician, and facilitator. She co-hosts the podcast How to Survive the End of the World, and supports liberation movements and workplace democracy as a worker-owner of the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA). To learn more about Autumn’s work, visit www.aorta.coop and www.iambrown.org. 

The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/

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The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center open to all for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people.

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This project is made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. & Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

Transcript

Dwight Dunston  0:30  
You're listening to The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope, a Pendle Hill podcast where Quakers and other seekers come together to explore visions of the world that is growing up through the cracks of our broken systems.

Dwight Dunston  0:42 
I'm your host, Dwight Dunston. Last season, we explored the Quaker testimony of integrity, and our guests shared stories and learnings of how this testimony showed up in their life and the work they do in the world. This season, we're exploring the practices that enrich our connections to ourselves and to each other. How do we cultivate relationships and spiritual community? How do these relationships and practices support our work for liberation and justice and transform our sense of what is possible?

Dwight Dunston  1:19 
Our guest today is Autumn Brown. Autumn is a writer, musician and facilitator. She co-hosts the podcast How to Survive the End of the World with her sister adrienne, and supports liberation movements and workplace democracy as a worker owner of the Anti-oppression Resource and Training Alliance, also known as AORTA.

Dwight Dunston  1:39 
Thank you so much Autumn for joining us on this season of The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope. I am delighted, excited, fuzzy with what whatever may come over the next bit of time together, and I don't want to get ahead of myself at all. And so I want to just start with asking you, what's it like being Autumn Brown today? How are you landing in this space on this day?

Autumn Brown  2:29 
I definitely feel like I am Autumn Browning right now. A week ago today I started my sabbatical, something that's been on the horizon for almost two years. I was on a very long journey to come to this moment, and now I'm actually in the moment that I've been journeying towards for so long, and that very much informs how I'm arriving to this conversation today. The feeling that I'm experiencing over the last few days is one of unfurling and spreading. That's the language I would use to describe my current state.

Dwight Dunston  3:10 
I'm so curious about many things, but just hearing you talk about the two years to get to this moment, perhaps even more before then, any piece of that journey you want to you want to talk about. How did you arrive to really cultivate and give yourself the time and space to take the sabbatical?

Autumn Brown  3:30 
I am a worker owner of a cooperative called AORTA, the Anti-oppression Resource and Training Alliance. AORTA has a policy that when you once you've been an owner for six or seven years, you receive a sabbatical. Right now I'm just in the gratitude of being a part of a democratic formation that truly values the sustainability of a human individual and all of the facets that each of us have.

Dwight Dunston  4:08 
Yeah, there's this beautiful way that I'm hearing your ecosystem, your community pouring into you, and you pouring into you, you really taking this seriously for yourself. And I'm curious if there's other moments in your life where you really felt poured into by or nourished by community, and how that may be shifted your ideas of what's possible in your ecosystem or in our movements or in our relationships.

Autumn Brown  4:39 
I just had one of those experiences actually just this weekend. Over the weekend, I invited a group of people that I'm very close with and all of whom have very depthful spiritual practices into ritual with me to hold a space of ceremony. And so it really was quite literally inviting my community to pour into me in a very structured, ritualistic way, to speak words of power to me, to hear me name, what it is that I'm manifesting in this time and then reflect back to me that I have the capacity to manifest it. And it was an interesting experience, because it was a couple of months ago that I realized that I needed a ceremony. And I had to work through some of my own some of my own negative stories about that being indulgent. I had to kind of confront the part of myself that felt like it was wrong to call attention to myself in relationship to something that feels deeply momentous to me, which is interesting. It's interesting the things that we imagine it's okay to call attention to ourselves for and the things that we imagine are not. As I'm getting older, the things that I want attention and ritual around are not--they're just different now. When my divorce was completed in 2020, after that was over, I was like, I need a party! I hosted a virtual divorce party for myself, where I like called people in to witness me in this like momentous transition I had made of completely changing my life. What I needed was a circle of ritual, to witness what for me feels like a moment of rebirth.

Autumn Brown  6:52 
We have all of the practices at all times at our disposal, the practices that we need in order to have nourishment and community and that experience of being poured into, we have it available to us. Many of us will not avail ourselves of it because of the stories we've internalized inside of racial capitalism and white supremacy, that the very form of sacred practice we most need is not the one that we deserve. And then we're made to feel that some of the things that have carry the most meaning for us internally are supposed to be carried out in private, and not witnessed by community. It's been a powerful part of my own soul and spiritual journey to say I choose. I choose what forms I want to belong to, and I choose what events in my life I want to have witnessed, and how I want to be witnessed. And that allows community to pour into me, because what I experienced this weekend was that every person who I invited to show up, was delighted to be there. Just absolutely delighted. Everyone inside the experience of the ceremony got as much out of being there as I did. It's automatically reciprocal. Everyone's pouring into me, and then they're also receiving as a result of that.

Dwight Dunston  8:22 
The thing that's rising up for me right now is around the pouring into your community being nourished also, in you creating cultivating rich ritual and sacredness around this transition for you--it makes me think about how we create the conditions of belonging in the spaces and places that we're a part of, and where it is afforded to us in our society, or where it's stripped away from us. And I want to hold any space for for just reflections you might have on thinking about belonging and how we come home, how we learn to come home to ourselves, how we learn to come home to one another. Cultivating belonging through sacred practices through rituals--any things you want to share about that.

Autumn Brown  9:09 
Yeah, thank you for this question. I've been thinking a lot about being lost and being found in relationship to this question of belonging. A significant part of the political work I've done over the last bunch of years has been centered around the concept of fugitivity and fugitive practice, imagining what are the conditions of freedom? What are the conditions by which we make ourselves free or free ourselves? When I think about the actual encounter that a fugitive has with the world, it's the actual encounter is one of saying, 'I don't know what freedom actually is. I just know that I have to get out of here.' And that means that on some level, I have to make myself lost from what I know. As I've sat with that, that idea, that idea of being lost more and more, what comes to me and what has felt like it has come to me through my own life journey and spiritual practice is that it is in those moments of have a profound sense of lostness that I am then able to be discovered. I'm able to be found by the people who know how to find me. That is belonging. To me, belonging is the experience of being found by people who know how to find you. And it requires, does require a vulnerability, to be able to acknowledge that you're lost, or to be willing to be lost. You know, the thing that I've been thinking about more and more lately is that it also requires a sort of fortitude, and strength. Under racial capitalism many of us source a sense of belonging from being victims of this system. It is my opinion that that is not real belonging. Without denying the very real conditions of victimization, which exist all around us and within us, for me, it has been important part of my spiritual practice and spiritual journey to like root out within myself, my own attachment to being powerless, and fortify myself and strengthen myself so that I, so that I can belong, right? Because to me, an intact sense of belonging, and intact sense of community requires that I see myself as a responsible member of my community, as someone who has agency to like care and be cared for. If I'm attached to being powerless, it's very difficult for me to access a sense of responsibility. And it's very difficult to access a sense of like reciprocity and mutuality, that is required when you're engaged in intact community practice. You know what I'm saying. And it's challenging, of course, because you're working right at the edge of how do we have to change as individuals and how do our communities have to change. Our communities have to get better at recognizing the conditions of harm that cause us to feel so attached to our victimization. My therapist loves to talk about how we get very attached to being victims, because we get gaslit by society and the harm we've experienced is not recognized by our society. So long as people are feeling gaslit by the world around them, they're going to be more and more attached to 'This is my harm that I experienced, it needs to be visible, it needs to be seen.' So that's where like, community has to do a much better job of being able to witness to bear witness to the reality of the pain that people are in. And then there is the interface or the interplay between community and individual, I think as as individuals, we have to be willing to be witnessed and then to be changed as a result of being seen. You know, it's like, if I'm been witnessed and my pain is witnessed, and my pain is seen, ideally means that there's a pathway towards a more intact life, less bifurcated, less fractured.

Dwight Dunston  13:57  
Something many of our audience members might also be thinking about, but it's definitely something I've been thinking about in my own life, is the roll slash, maybe the tool, maybe the practice of forgiveness. A dear friend, Reverend Rhetta Morgan, once said to me that there's some things in this lifetime, that some of us will be able to forgive that others others just can't. And just that being true. Just curious how you think about forgiveness as a practice and maybe as a tool in our lives or in our movements.

Autumn Brown  14:32 
I love this framing from Rhetta that there are some things that some of us will be able to forgive for but others won't. Where that intersects with my way of thinking about this is the notion of what is on my spiritual path in this lifetime and what is on other people's spiritual paths. You know, like, what is the spiritual work that I have the honor to do during this time that I'm on the planet? Because increasingly, I think of freedom work itself as a thing that I am spiritually honored to do as a part of my life's purpose. That it's not just about, I want to fix a problem so that I can have a better life. It's more like, Oh, this is like a way that I get to very directly experience being alive is by like working on ever more freedom. Well, okay, let me back up and first say, forgiveness is something that was modeled in my immediate family as a core value. Particularly my mother, who is white, consistently modeled a willingness to forgive the, at times, very abhorrent behavior of her white family, towards her, towards my father, towards us as her children, in order to be able to maintain a relationship. One of the things that she demonstrated to me is that that activity of forgiveness is not usually connected in any way to the other person's behavior. It's not contingent on the other person changing in any way. That is extremely countercultural to this moment that we are living through right now. People don't even really talk about forgiveness right now in our social movement context. The frame is more this term accountability that everyone uses but no one seems to understand. It's like there's a real allergy, I think, to talking about the notion of forgiveness outside of spiritual community. I've always understood forgiveness as something that is not connected to a change in the other person, that forgiveness is connected primarily, first and foremost, to the extent to which I want to carry a burden of hatred inside me. And I often think about Martin Luther King's  very famous speech, the "Love Your Enemy" speech. But that specific line of where when he says, "I love you, I would rather die than hate you." To me, that is like the root of forgiveness as an act. Forgiveness as an activity is fundamentally about being able to recognize how toxic and poisonous it is to carry the burden of hatred within. It is critically important to forgiveness that it isn't contingent on, it doesn't hinge on, the other person acknowledging what they've done. If it's a whole community that's responsible for harm, that it's not contingent on acknowledgement, actually, from anyone else. It's only contingent on acknowledgement from within myself: I know I carry this wound, I know I've been harmed, I can witness my own harm, and say to myself, that I do not want this to define my identity any longer. Because that's the incongruence, to me, is the notion that the worst thing that's ever happened to me defines who I am. I'm multifaceted! I'm multitudes! I have so many sub selves within me, I have so many versions of myself that I've been so many versions of myself, I will become. I mean, may it be so. Forgiveness allows me the freedom to keep changing, to keep growing to keep becoming who I am meant to be.

Dwight Dunston  18:48 
I love what you said also about, you know, it's an honor to take up this responsibility or it's in this lifetime to be on this path towards freedom, right? It's an honor, I feel to be able to practice or stretch what my forgiveness can do in my lifetime.

Autumn Brown  19:06 
One of the things that I think can cause incongruence is that in our society, white people, overvalue the notion of forgiveness, which is part of the gaslighting of whiteness and white supremacy, right, is this overvaluing of the idea that like, everything should be forgivable and that there's like an entitlement to being forgiven. But there's this superficial shallow notion inside of whiteness of what forgiveness does. It can counteract what goodwill there might be towards being more forgiving. It counteracts that when people feel like they're entitled to it, or they're owed it for whatever reasons there are. In what I witnessed with white folks, and inside of whiteness and white supremacy is that sense of entitlement to being forgiven fundamentally comes from like self loathing, it's like I can't even I can't do it for myself. Someone else has to do it for me. Right? And so when I'm working with white folks around whiteness is always like, your first and foremost responsibility is to be working on healing your own belonging wound, forgiving yourself.

Dwight Dunston  20:21  
Yeah, just just getting back to what you said earlier about creating those rituals, like what would a ritual look like for a group of white folks to, I don't know, make it sacred about coming back to the coming home, yeah, to ourselves, which we're all on a path to do, I feel like.

Autumn Brown  20:38 
And again, like I said, at the very top of this conversation, the practices are available to us, it's not a matter of not having the practices. Which isn't to say that, that we don't still have further work to do around recovering cultural practices that had been denied to us. There's always more that we can uncover. But the basics are with us, because we're, we're humans. We're humans with innate capacities for ritual and ceremony: we sing, we dance, we make symbols we make meaning. That's what it is to be a human, whatever we need, in order to be able to make ritual together, we already have it. It's about will. It's about the will to gather people and the will to say, we're going to have a ritual now. And we're not going to wait for someone else to give us permission to be in ritual together. We're gonna start having ritual now, because we believe that we're worth saving.

Dwight Dunston  21:37 
Autumn, as we close our time together here, I would love to just hold a little space for any last things that are on your heart that you want to share. Or, as our listeners turn away from, from this episode, maybe there's a practice you want to invite them into that could support them on that journey of belonging or to create ritual. Just want to keep it open for you whatever's on your heart.

Autumn Brown  22:05 
One thing that's on my heart is love for you. The other thing I just wanted to name for listeners who are going off into the off into the world being like, 'Well, how would I make ritual?' It's very simple to do. I just did it. And I didn't know exactly what it was going to be. The ingredients that made my ritual work for me were: I invited only people who I knew had clean energy with me, right, people who wouldn't be bringing anything negative into the space, who were only relating to me with love and respect. That's one. I asked a friend to help facilitate the ceremony. And we met up together in advance to make a plan for what might happen. And then we just did it together. And then we ended with food. So those are the three ingredients: people who love you, a friend to help, and a meal at the end. Yeah, you don't need a lot.

Dwight Dunston  23:12 
Autumn, I am humble, grateful, inspired by our time together. I thank you, thank your ancestors. I thank your ecosystem that nourishes you and pours into you. This honor, you have to support all of us including yourself to get free. Thank you so much.

Autumn Brown  23:36 
Thank you, Dwight. It's an honor to be on this show. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Dwight Dunston  23:47 
The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat and community. We're located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni Lenape people. Visit us at pendlehill.org. 

Many of our guests are teachers, leaders, and speakers at Pendle Hill, and we host workshops, retreats and lectures all year round. For full list of these upcoming education opportunities, visit pendlehill.org/learn. 

This episode was produced and edited by Anna Hill, with production support and advising from Peterson Toscano. Our theme music is the I Rise Project by Reverend Rhetta Morgan and Bennet Kuhn, produced by Astronautical Records. 

This project was made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. and Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund. 

If you're finding these conversations meaningful, you can support our work financially by heading over to pendlehill.org/donate. And we would love it if you can subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. It helps us to continue planting these seeds.

Feel free to get in touch with us by emailing podcast@pendlehill.org. You can follow us @pendlehillseed on all social media platforms.