More Coastal Reading Group
We Weave and Heft by the River is an all night communal event that explores the role of grief in our time. Massive environmental shifts are usually described to us in terms of data or through curated images, such as a polar bear on a piece of ice (Todd, An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn, 6). As a temporary community of resilience against the numbing accumulation of quantified extinction, we court the mystery of grief that abides and sometimes eludes us in the realms of the sublime. In so doing, we radically re-orient our temporalities, communing with what has been, and praising its capacity to leave us heartbroken in its wake.
In this act of collective grieving we frame it not as a despaired accounting of all that is wrong with the world, but rather as an understanding of grief as the act of praising that which has slipped from view; of grief as an ethical responsibility for communities; as a skill for engaging a broad spectrum of life - including its end; and as a crucial act of political resistance to narratives of progress. We suggest that a ‘great-forgetting’ of the skill of communal-grief is fundamental to the late capitalist obsession with exponential growth and accumulation and its techno-epistemologies that inhibit reckoning with a landscape beyond-the-human-scale of concern and knowing.
From dusk until dawn’s light, by the light and warmth of a bonfire, we gather to weave stories, songs, and memories of our eco-relations against the backdrop of cataclysmic unraveling that defines our age. Activities throughout the night include: working with natural materials such as yarn, seeds and clay, story-sharing, contemplation, and active listening. By dawn, we will have a meaningful, co-created object to offer the landscape. Participants have the option to attend all or only the first part of the event.