with adrienne maree brown

Krista Tippett: I'm going to anchor this experience with the voice and wisdom of adrienne maree brown. I cherish her way of seeing, and living, and writing, how she shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking. She works with the complex fullness of reality to move towards a wholeness of living. In exploring the idea of hope — the meaning of it, the practice of it — it also feels really important to begin with someone who works to shift realities on the ground. adrienne maree brown does write, but she's primarily an organizer. She is a social creative. Many words and phrases have been used to describe what she does and who she is, who she is to so many people, especially in younger generations: She is a student of complexity; a student of change and how groups change together; a scholar of belonging.

She grew up loving science fiction, as I did, and thought we'd be driving flying cars by now. But she has found in speculative fiction a transformative vision and imagination that, in its way, for her, might in fact save us. We're starting with her because how she lives and works with the notion of imagination itself really beautifully illuminates what I mean when I say that hope is an act of imagination with real-world consequences.

So I want you to hear her voice and some of her thoughts. You're going to hear her mention Octavia, and that would be Octavia Butler, a 20th-century science fiction writer who is enjoying a very well-deserved 21st-century renaissance. You're also going to hear adrienne lavishly, at every turn, credit her friends and teachers, her ecosystem of support and living — and so, in this way, modeling this new way of seeing and living that is not — as I spoke about in the introduction — living with an illusion that we have to carry the work, even the work of becoming the people we most want to be, alone. She's part of a web of relationship that shares ongoing growth and learning. They use words that emerge from the science of what we're learning about the nature of vitality in the natural world: mutuality, reciprocity. adrienne maree brown is a student of this, as was Octavia Butler.

So, without further ado, here's a bit of my conversation with her.

Tippett: And it seems to me that what you’re getting at there is a core value of imagination, and understanding the power of imagination in making the world and remaking the world.

adrienne maree brown: Yeah. I want to shout out my friend Walidah Imarisha, who named "visionary fiction." I was obsessing over Octavia, and she was, also. [laughs] And we found each other, and we wrote — pulled together this anthology called Octavia’s Brood. In that process, I started the work of emergent strategy, started to listen to what is up with the natural world? What can it teach us about how to be humans, and how to be humans in a better relationship with each other?

And what I realized is it is the work of radical imagination to do so. But also that we’re living inside of imaginations that other people told us were true and told us were, this how the world is. And I always uplift my friend Terry Marshall. He was the first person to say this to me: that we’re in an "imagination battle," which just blew my mind. I think about it often — that we live in this abundant world, and we’ve been told it’s scarce. Then we’re given all these stories of scarcity.

So, so much of the work, for me, of radical imagination is, what does it look like to imagine beyond the constructs? What does it look like to imagine a future where we all get to be there, not causing harm to each other, and experiencing abundance?

Tippett: You’ve even spoken about that "organizing can be treated like time travel."

brown: Yes, it is.

Tippett: Say some more about that. What does that mean?

brown: It’s like, we are reaching into the future, we are trying to project what we can imagine into the future. And organizing is a way of saying, we are going to put our hands directly on the future.

But it’s also time-traveling backwards. So much of organizing is looking back at, what did our ancestors try? What did they learn? What were they up to? What was Harriet Tubman doing? I’m obsessed with Harriet Tubman. [laughter] I’m obsessed with, what was it like to walk in her shoes and to face her fears? So I always want to reach back and be like, OK, well, now what is the Harriet Tubman activity to do in this time? And what is Harriet Tubman up to in 2063? Because there’s always someplace that needs justice and liberation.

Tippett: A minute ago you were talking to me about your childhood, and you said your parents, having an interracial marriage in the ’70s — they were making a world that didn’t exist. And that’s what visionary fiction does, that’s what fiction does. And I hear you saying that’s what organizing does.

brown: Yeah. And there’s a way — just like I think my parents ran into — it’s like, you have to bring that imagination into relationship with reality. And that can be devastating — being with what is, and then figuring out how do we make it more possible.

Tippett: This notion of the place of imagination in social change, and sometimes how the limits of our imagination can hinder us, is very alive for me from the experience I had of living in divided Cold War Berlin in the 1980s and experiencing the world to absolutely turn inside out in ways that no one saw coming. As I look back at that, what I understand is that our imaginations did not reach far enough to believe that that kind of transformative change could happen. And that, in some ways, has equipped me for this world we inhabit now. To live in this faith, this belief, this knowledge, that there is at any moment more change possible than we can begin to imagine — and probably more change underway that we don't know how to take seriously enough. That's all with me as I listen to adrienne.

What's also with me is the conversation I was so honored to have with Congressman John Lewis before he died — and hearing him talk, and this is another live human signpost for me, of what it means to have a leap of imagination with real-world consequences. The way he talked about how he lived in and through and beyond a world that he had a hand in utterly changing was "to live as if." He said, you imagine the world you want to inhabit, you imagine the beloved community that you want to create and be part of — and you live as if that is the reality. You just have to walk into making it more visible and more true for everyone else.

So the journaling, the creative challenge, coming out of this is to test the boundaries of your imagination: what you would dare to hope for. I suspect that this exercise will carry the seeds of a more nuanced, and complicated, and maybe contradictory sense of your own working definition of hope. See if there's resistance that surfaces in you, in this idea of moving toward life and orienting around an abundance that is already present. See if you find yourself captive to a scarcity mentality. There are some prompts for this in the journaling.

I do want to offer, before I finish, a little bit more about adrienne maree brown's notion of “emergent strategy,” which is really like stretching a new canvas on which you might place an expanded imaginative capacity. What I love about this is that it also brings us closer to the way the world actually works.

So “emergent strategy” is based on what we're coming to understand about how the natural world works — which is to say how vitality functions, original vitality. I'm drawing on adrienne's words here:

"Emergence is another way of speaking about the connective tissue that holds everything together."

"Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass."

"The crisis we are in at scale is in part a response to control or overcome the emergent processes that are our own nature, the processes of the planet we live on and the universe we call home."

"Emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies."

And I love this line of hers: "Emergence is our inheritance as part of this universe. It is how we change."

Again, this is antithetical to how I grew up learning — how we tend to structure, and plan, and strategize, and imagine that we can bring about change. But really it's just about honoring reality.

In our lives, we know that life does not proceed by strategic plan, that our strengths and certainties are rarely the most reliable catalyst for genuine transformation — we know that in life, day-to-day, in our workplaces, in our families, in our fields of work. The things that don't go according to plan or what goes according to plan and leaves us wanting, the failures, the mistakes, the things we call serendipity or coincidence or miracle or tragedy — these are defining features not just of how we live, but how we grow. They do not proceed by strategic plan. They emerge moment to moment, relationship to relationship, conversation by conversation, experience by experience.

Take all of this as food for thought, for pondering in your head, and on paper, and in conversation with people you care about as you move through the interactions of your days. I want actually to give adrienne the last word here as I close:

brown: This is, to me, the most exciting thing right now: we are aware, if we wake up, we are in a place where we can create so much history and so much change. Everything is falling apart, but also, new things are possible. And Octavia said that “[t]here’s nothing new / under the sun, / but there are new suns.” We are in a time of new suns. We’re in a time of new suns. We have no idea what we could be, but everything that we have been is falling apart. So it’s time to change. And we can be mindful about that. That’s exciting.