A Short Story.
From where Rooted emerged
I’d like to tell you the story of how the Rooted Global Village came to be.
The seed of this communal space has lived in my heart for a very long time. For so long, in fact, that I suspect it isn’t mine at all, but is the echo of something more distant and ancient, ancestral, even.
If you’re drawn to this space, that echo likely exists in you, too.
I'm Karine, I'm a bi-cultural Black woman and mother, and, on the surface of things, the starting point could be said to be an online event I organized and hosted in February of 2020 called the Embodied Trauma Conference. This was a 5-day event that attracted more than 27,000 people from around the globe interested in understanding some of the context out of which trauma can happen.
What stood out from that event was the ground of community that we touched.
How do we keep this going? was the prevailing question.
What began as an attempt to carry on, from that event, a fledgling sense of connection, longing for community, and co-learning birthed this online communal space we’ve called the Rooted Global Village.
What stood out from that event was the ground of community that we touched.
How do we keep this going? was the prevailing question.
What began as an attempt to carry on, from that event, a fledgling sense of connection, longing for community, and co-learning birthed this online communal space we’ve called the Rooted Global Village.
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Rooted has evolved since that time, sparked by:
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Cultural shifts and movements
Cultural shifts and movements happening in the world around us, not the least of which were the reckoning with the legacies of harm and a global pandemic that accentuated inequities rooted in those legacies.
Generative tensions and conflicts
Generative tensions and conflicts that took place in and between us, and the desires and yearnings born from them.
Voices, perspectives & cosmovisions
Engagement with a host of voices, perspectives and cosmovisions that have touched, open and transformed our hearts.
In that sense, Rooted has been a responsive, emergent and body-centered organism from the beginning, and continues to be.
The arch of Rooted has been...
...a shift away from being individually-led, where healing centered personal trauma to a space that centers communal (as well as personal) processes of body-centered transformation and relational education and relationship building.
We’re BIBOC-led with a mixed facilitation and co-dreaming team, and a small (and growing) circle of friends and guides whose wisdom has shaped the many evolutions we’ve experienced.
Our communal gathering space (membership), the Rooted Global Village, hosts scholar-activist teachers and healers, and experiential body-centered and communal practice each month.
As a mixed space focused on embodied anti-racism, decolonial work and culture building, we’re presented with the challenge of understanding the impact of racialization on experience and relationship, and un/learning the ways we’ve embodied coloniality in its many forms.
We’re BIBOC-led with a mixed facilitation and co-dreaming team, and a small (and growing) circle of friends and guides whose wisdom has shaped the many evolutions we’ve experienced.
Our communal gathering space (membership), the Rooted Global Village, hosts scholar-activist teachers and healers, and experiential body-centered and communal practice each month.
As a mixed space focused on embodied anti-racism, decolonial work and culture building, we’re presented with the challenge of understanding the impact of racialization on experience and relationship, and un/learning the ways we’ve embodied coloniality in its many forms.
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We’re also curious about where we might find the portals and the openings of possibility into new ways of experiencing ourselves, each other and our world.
At heart, we’re building an ecology of care that can hold us as we challenge the impact of colonial structures and their harms on our lives.
And we’re exploring how we might undo and disrupt the firmament on which colonial paradigms stand and heal across lines of division through friendship and kin-making practices.
Acknowledging our Influences
We want to acknowledge the intellectual and spiritual, as well as ancestral lineages (human and non-human) that guide the creative and imaginative culture building we’re up to. We're still re/claiming these connections while acknowledging their legacy.
The work of un/learning and un/tethering from harmful colonial systems, of healing in and through relationship the harms that have created deep lines of division between humans, and the human and more-than-human world, has been the work of people and communities for hundreds (thousands) of years.
We acknowledge them. The people and traditions, the wisdom keepers, freedom fighters, and resistance movements, who have kept the flame of wisdom alive.
The world doesn’t only come alive in those crucible experiences of trauma, loss and suffering, but through the world being turned on its head in a playful, trickster, ways. It’s also in the new lenses we’re offered by those whose lives don’t fit into neat and knowable categories. In this way, we've been deeply inspired by the work of Black feminist thinkers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Jacqui Alexander, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Saidya Hartman, and Chicana feminists like Gloria Anzaldúa, Maria Lugones and Chela Sandoval.
The work of un/learning and un/tethering from harmful colonial systems, of healing in and through relationship the harms that have created deep lines of division between humans, and the human and more-than-human world, has been the work of people and communities for hundreds (thousands) of years.
We acknowledge them. The people and traditions, the wisdom keepers, freedom fighters, and resistance movements, who have kept the flame of wisdom alive.
The world doesn’t only come alive in those crucible experiences of trauma, loss and suffering, but through the world being turned on its head in a playful, trickster, ways. It’s also in the new lenses we’re offered by those whose lives don’t fit into neat and knowable categories. In this way, we've been deeply inspired by the work of Black feminist thinkers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Jacqui Alexander, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Saidya Hartman, and Chicana feminists like Gloria Anzaldúa, Maria Lugones and Chela Sandoval.
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These writers, thinkers, and feelers of the borderlands have not only unsettled-in-the-best-way-possible my own, always nebulous, thinking around identity, but they have invited us, implored us even, to consider the ethical dimensions of traversing borderland spaces. As these voices have done, we acknowledge our multitudes and intersecting identities; sometimes contradictory, always plural, never fixed and always in processes of becoming.
We are also actively feeling our way through the world with mycelial threads, reaching for others with whom to build relationship and with whom we can “tie our roots together” (Sophie Strand) in the creation of a vast underground network of people, projects and organizations in a rhizomatic network of decolonial healing. We are grateful to the many people who have shaped, guided, and greatly informed the world(s) we’re creating toward inside The Global Village. In particular, our elders, guides, friends and family who make up our cast of co-dreamers and co-conspirators in Rooted.
To learn more about me and the Rooted cast of creators - click here.
We are also actively feeling our way through the world with mycelial threads, reaching for others with whom to build relationship and with whom we can “tie our roots together” (Sophie Strand) in the creation of a vast underground network of people, projects and organizations in a rhizomatic network of decolonial healing. We are grateful to the many people who have shaped, guided, and greatly informed the world(s) we’re creating toward inside The Global Village. In particular, our elders, guides, friends and family who make up our cast of co-dreamers and co-conspirators in Rooted.
To learn more about me and the Rooted cast of creators - click here.
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