Being Lost, Being Found, and Belonging with Autumn Brown

In this mini-episode of The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope, we return to Season Three for a powerful moment from Dwight’s conversation with artist, facilitator, theologian, and mother Autumn Brown.

Autumn reflects on fugitivity, freedom, and what it means to step into lostness so that belonging can find us. She explores how community, agency, vulnerability, and mutual care shape the conditions where people can come home to themselves and to one another.

This excerpt comes from
 Creating the Conditions for Belonging with Autumn Brown
 Season 3, Episode 2
 https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/2032871/13365431-creating-the-conditions-for-belonging-with-autumn-brown

Learn more about Autumn Brown

Website: https://www.iambrown.org/

 Autumn Brown is an artist, facilitator, theologian, mother, and freedom worker. She is the front woman of the soul-pop band AUTUMN and the co-host of How to Survive the End of the World, the long-running podcast she creates with her sister, adrienne maree brown.

Autumn brings twenty years of experience in movement strategy, consensus process, and racial justice facilitation, and has worked with community-based organizations across the U.S. and internationally. She is a former facilitator with AORTA (Anti-Oppression Resource & Training Alliance) and previously served as Executive Director of RECLAIM!, supporting queer and trans youth in reclaiming their lives from oppression.

Autumn will also be the guest host of the Climate Changed podcast, a project of The BTS Center. Learn more at https://ClimateChangedPodcast.org

NEW Video Version available at Pendle Hill's YouTube page.

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

Help us to grow The Seed!
Share your thoughts with us through our listener survey.

Follow us @PendleHillUSA on Facebook and Instagram and subscribe to The Seed wherever you get your podcasts to get episodes in your library as they're released. To learn more, visit pendlehill.org/podcast.

Online Quaker Worship with Dwight: Dwight will attend the Pendle Hill online Quaker worship on the last Friday of the month from 8:30 to 9:10 AM (Eastern Time). Visit Pendle Hill Online Worship for details.

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

Transcript

0:00

To me, an intact sense of belonging, an intact sense of community requires that I see myself as a responsible member of my community, as someone who has agency to care and be cared for. If I'm attached to being powerless, it's very difficult for me to access a sense of responsibility. you You're listening to a mini episode of The Seed, Conversations for Radical Hope, a Pindle Hill podcast. I'm your host, Dwight Dunstan. In this mini episode, we return to season three in my conversation with Autumn Brown in the episode, Creating the Conditions for Belonging. Autumn is an artist, facilitator, theologian, and mother whose work centers healing and liberation. She is also the front woman of the soul pop band, Autumn. In this excerpt, Autumn reflects on fugitivity, freedom, and what it means to be lost, to be found, and to belong. Here is our conversation. thing that's rising up for me right now is around pouring into your community, being nourished also, and you creating and cultivating ritual and sacredness. 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 reflections you might have on thinking about belonging. how we learn to come home to ourselves, how we learn to come home to one another, cultivating belonging through sacred practices, through rituals. Yeah. Any, things you want to share about that. Yeah, Dwight, thank you for this question. I'm just gonna sit with it for a moment. 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. 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 idea, the idea of being lost, what comes to me and what has felt like it has come to me through my own life journey and spiritual practice is that In those moments of a profound sense of lostness, 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. Belonging is the experience of being found by people who know how to find you. Does require a vulnerability to be able to acknowledge that you're lost or to be willing to be lost. 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 exists 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 can belong. Because to me, an intact sense of belonging, an intact sense of community. requires that I see myself as a responsible member of my community, as someone who has agency to 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 reciprocity and mutuality that is required when you're engaged in intact community practice. 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 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 life 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, all right, if I've been witnessed and my pain is witnessed and my pain is seen, then ideally means that there's a pathway towards a more intact life. Less bifurcated, less fractured. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, definitely. But what you just mentioned makes me think of two things. Dorothy Cotton, during, you know, who was very instrumental in the freedom movement, sort of had this same mindset of, right, if we remain attached to this way, just attempting to crush us, it hasn't crushed us, because we're still here, we're still dreaming, we're still being creative, imaginative, we're still building family, we're still building community. But if we allow our relationship to it for us to stay in a place of victimization, what does it do to our ability to dream and hope? and move into possibility. I think of Esau Jenkins and Septim McClark and many other people in the freedom movement, but they come to mind. Other stories about them riding a bus from the sort of off the coast of the Carolinas, believe it was South Carolina and training people to get ready to take citizenship tests or voting tests. Y'all we can do this. We'll prep you on this two to three hour ride, organizing and supporting people, having a vision for them to be more than what the system wanted them to be. And that was. citizens of the United States are voting members in their state, in their county. So that's one of the things that came to mind. And then I'm sure you've come across the Turning Towards Each Other book that came out a few years ago with William Godbeyan and Jovita. Sort of these four roles, ways that we show up in conflict. And one of them was victim, the victim space that some of us find themselves in. And I know that's something I feel comfortable aligning with at times of being in that hurt spot. can be harvested from that, right? It's like this way of building compassion. You never want anybody else to feel in that space that can build compassion. It can build a relationship to surrender in a new way, being in that victim space. know, almighty creator, God, divine love, universe, know, astrological sign. I need you to step in here because I can't see beyond, you know, those are some of the things that can come from really feeling into those spaces or that space. So those are two things that came to my mind. And I love just your reframe thinking about the edge, that edge. I love talking about edges too. What happens when we go to the edges within ourselves, within the relationship or what's possible in the relationship. There's some faith and some dreaming that comes with being on the edge or stepping into the edge. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Any other thoughts on that? piece about surrender, I'm not familiar with the book that you referenced, the Turning Toward Each Other book, although it sounds beautiful. I love what you lifted up, that there is this beauty in understanding that you are no longer in control. I can really vibrate with that because I think one of the journeys I've been on as a survivor has been understanding that what survivors often want most is control. is to be able to reassert control over their environments or over their bodies. I came to understand that that desire to be able to reassert control over my physical space and over my body was driving so many of my choices, which made sense. That's part of the healing journey when you have survived violence. And now I've gotten to a place like I'm really, really good at controlling my environment. And I've gotten better at it actually in the last few years. Like anyone who walks into my house would be like, wow, it's interesting that three children live here. Doesn't look like it. It's kind of like embarrassing actually. Like I remember I had a new person I was dating that was like coming over to my house for the first time. This is like a couple of months ago. And I remember being like, oh my God, I need to like strategically leave a mess somewhere so that this person doesn't think that I'm like a psycho. You know, it was like that. I'm like that level of I'm very, very organized, right? So I don't think that's ever gonna change. I'll probably always be that way about my physical environment. But what I'm trying to do now is to recognize that the need to assert control over myself and others in my environment has been an important survival strategy to get me to here and now. And now I'm in a time in my life where actively practicing surrender is going to be the most fruitful path forward. because it produces the most discomfort in me. It's not unsafe. I'm not unsafe. I'm just uncomfortable. this could have been last year, a friend, Eileen Flanagan, who was actually on the first season of this podcast, a writer, an activist based here in Philly, gave me this metaphor of how we think about prayer and how we can invite us to think about prayer in a different way. And she was like, often we think about. prayer, praying to God, the heavens, another force, as like walking up to a vending machine and pressing some buttons. you know, I'm going for the Twix, right? I'm going for the Twix prayer, know, like pressing A6. Come on now, you know, like a whole row of crunchies, all the A's are crunchy. m you Autumn, I am humbled, grateful, inspired by our time together. I thank you. thank your ancestors. I thank your ecosystem that nourishes you and pours into you. I thank you for taking seriously your life and your healing and your art. This honor you have to support all of us, including yourself to get free. Thank you so much for you, Dwight. It's an honor to be on this show. Thank you so much for inviting me. And just heard an excerpt from my Season 3 conversation with Autumn Brown. Autumn brings 20 years of experience in movement building, facilitation, and spiritual practice, and she brings that depth and clarity to this reflection on belonging. Learn more about Autumn, her music, and much more. Visit IamBrown.org. That's IamBrown.org. I'm excited to share that Autumn will also be the guest host of the Climate Changed podcast. a project of the BTS Center. You can learn more at climatechainspodcast.org. To hear the full episode this excerpt was taken from, visit the link in our show notes over at pendlehill.org slash podcast. I just completed a two hour tour of the museum in Hiroshima, Japan, exploring the impacts of the atomic bomb on this city in Japan. And this season of the podcast, this mini episode with Autumn, all of the conversations we've had with guests, for me, just came into a new kind of focus. When I think about love and power and justice, the ways that countries and cities and mayors across the world have since the dropping of the atomic bomb connected with one another, committed to disarming countries nuclear programs. I'm shocked. I'm humbled. It's quite sobering experience. I'm just grateful for an opportunity to explore some of these themes rooted in a uh place and a spiritual practice. My Quaker faith in this podcast certainly is for Quakers and Seekers and folks who are looking to cultivate their sense of hope. So I'm hoping this episode and our other episodes this season are resonating within your heart, within your spirit, within your mind. And as I sit out here, nighttime on December 2nd, after a powerful, powerful experience, I just want you to know that I'm breathing with you, that I'm reaching for you, that I'm feeling into the well of joy that we all collectively tap into as well as the grief that we are all holding in our hearts wherever we may be as you listen to this. So I just want to take a breath in. And out. And just want to say thank you for listening. Thank you for being on this journey. Thank you for learning alongside me. And I look forward to sharing with you more conversations throughout this season. Thank you for listening to this mini episode of The Seed, Conversations for Radical Hope. What spoke to you in this episode? How does this conversation fit into your journey? What would you like to add? Contact me directly by email, podcast at Pindlehill.org. That's podcast at Pindlehill.org. Or share your thoughts on Instagram, Facebook, or X. I want to personally invite you to join me for Pindlehill's online worship time. I attended this virtual Quaker meeting on the last Friday of the month. It begins at 8.30 a.m. Eastern. For login details, visit Pindlehill.org slash worship. At Pindle Hill, we host retreats, workshops, and lectures year round. To explore upcoming educational programs, visit Pindlehill.org slash learn. This episode was produced by Peterson Toscano. He is also the cohost of the Quakers Today podcast. Our theme music is the I Rise Project by Reverend Retta Morgan and Bennett Kuhn, produced by Astronautical Records. Other music comes from epidemicsound.com. You also heard music that I created. If you find these conversations meaningful, consider supporting our work financially. Visit pendlehill.org slash donate. These seeds could not be planted without you. Let us pursue love, power, and belonging together.