Hello friend,
Gathering is a portal.
Gathering is a doorway for ideas to move into action.
Gathering is a pathway to build collective power. It is a container for ritual and healing.
And that’s why gathering is one of the most dangerous and necessary things a service organization can invest in.
Nobody has to ban art (although they keep trying) to keep artists from coming together. Those who fear justice, power in the people, and new ideas only have to make gathering too expensive, too far, too tiring, too scary, and people will close their own doors to togetherness.
The system barely has to lift a hand, because we do the breaking ourselves. We leave over a word. A slight nobody meant. A hurt nobody named. We have left group chats over less. We cut people off instead of staying at the table, and rooting in discomfort with the knowing that we can move through it and repair. Every room we split is a door they didn't have to shut and lock.
We don't have to agree. But we do have to choose to stay, and let each other come back if we want to break toxic cycles.
Those protecting inequity and injustice have always known the innate power artists hold in activating and galvanizing a people towards revolution. History has proved it in movement after movement. We are the ones who forget; and apart, we can be taken one at a time. Every regime that ever ran on terror knows it.
Look at this year. Men in masks are pulling people out of cars in my neighborhood and the rest of us are learning which corners to avoid. Kids are coming home from school to empty houses and nobody official will say where their parents went. Black people are being found hanging from trees and the first word out of the official mouth is suicide even though we know it ain't so. Food and health coverage got cut by law for millions of people who were already deciding between the two, and the people who signed it called it freedom.
None of this is happening to someone else. It is happening to the people in your cast, your audience, your block, and if you have been telling yourself it has not reached you yet, that is the only lie the moment needs you to believe. Resist this notion.
And.
Resisting becoming numb and resisting the idea that we are too small to make change is why NET insists on the inconvenience of gathering. We are not powerless. We have been trained to believe we are.
Here is what I know about rooms. A room built intentionally is transformed into a sacred site that connects you to people to be responsible to. That alone is the whole reason to gather. You walk in alone. You walk out holding somebody's name, and from then on what happens to them happens to you.
If you can leave a place and call whatever happens next someone else's problem, you just went to an event. Events are fine. Events are also how a field feels something without changing anything.
Gathering is also what gets cut first, by the very people who know how essential it is. The networks, the intermediaries, organizations like NET that exist so you are never alone in this, are going dark one at a time, because a network can be invisible right up until it is gone. NET has built community for thirty years through gatherings and through the proliferation of ideas, resources, questions, and the practicing of new worlds. And all of that requires some serious financial resource. But what is more important than financial stability is the health of our people, practice, and depth of our relationships to one another.
A commitment to each other that does not require a financial transaction is what keeps our lanterns burning.
We aren't going to keep letting each other go out one by one and alone are we? There are bright lights out there, and one is the Intermediary Manifesto, hosted on NPN. Crafted by a collection of intermediaries who have been meeting for three years and last week launched a call to support struggling organizations that are vital spaces for political education and collective action before they disappear completely. We encourage you to read it and sign it.
I think what I am taking two million words to land on is this: Being together is the only practice we need to pour everything we have into right now. What we do with togetherness is the tingiest ting ting of all.
Friends. Please sit with me and with the idea that power only counts if you spend it. Power is not a thing to hoard, but a resource to move like water.
Isolation is a weapon and relationship is the resource. We are in an age where the only real option is to throw everything you’ve got into the people you are responsible to, especially when inconvenient. The ride at midnight. The rent covered. Your name spoken in a room you were not in. It is how everything in ensemble ever built got built - in relationship, with each other first. Unlike budgets, relationship grows every time you cash it in.
I have been turning the word renegade over in my hands this month, wondering if it is mine. I think it is. A renegade is somebody who builds the thing before permission shows up, because she already knows it is not coming. NET has no building, no endowment, and a team you can count on one hand, and yet we believe we can do anything at any scale and we set that delulu into motion this month. Eight rooms in six days in Huchiun, so called Oakland. Rooms on Lisjan Ohlone land, at a restaurant owned by the people cooking in it, in a parking lot under a wall where three liberations are painted as one, inside the Black Arts Movement Business District, in an AirBnb that was somehow big enough to hold us all, because we build a residency relationship by relationship. None of it an accident. We chose Chicago earlier this year and the Bay Area next because we are building a Federation focused on cooperative models, solidarity economy, and the idea that the arts are long overdue for a labor movement, and these two cities have been holding the line for decades.
And, admittedly, from the outside it can look fabulous. A plane, a city, a table full of brilliant people, the photos. And there are moments so fabulous I feel myself exploding out of my skin. But I don't want to be a part of romanticizing and not sharing the cost. So, here is how it actually is. It is sliding down a wall in a hallway between two rooms because the thing holding the week together is the capacity of a few people, committed to delusion and dreaming, juggling multiple jobs and responsibilities. It is the constant math on work nobody wants to fund, in a year when the funders are backing away from exactly this.
It is spending cash in hand without a guarantee of more because the intervention is necessary. The shine is a lie of omission, and the hard part is where the responsibility lives. Being responsible to each other and to our communities is taking the call when it is not convenient. It is showing up when it is not easy, from the floor, from the car rushing, from the day you had nothing left. It is covering somebody's exposure while yours is wide open, and trusting them to do the same.
The conditions we have are the conditions that build. The better room, the funded one, the one where everybody finally feels safe enough to say the true thing, is not coming. The room we have is the room where we invent what we need. We stand tall in it, and trust the solutions are already in it with us. I believe that with my whole chest, and I believe it because I have watched three people sitting on “borrowed” furniture do what a building with an endowment could not.
So gather. Three people in a hallway. A parking lot anywhere counts. Somebody brings the food. Somebody puts on the song. Somebody laughs so hard the hard thing finally gets said. Decide out loud who you are responsible to and act like it before you feel ready. Cover somebody's exposure and let them cover yours. Pay the artist first. Say the dangerous thing with witnesses in the room.
Who are you responsible to? No, really. Who?
Write me back and tell me their name. Then forward this to one person who has been going it alone and tell them there is a seat. It might wobble, but it is waiting.
Gathering is the most dangerous and necessary thing we do. That is exactly why they want us home, and exactly why we won't be.