“gathering is not the same as being held”

I am reimagining what community looks like and I need your help. After hosting hundreds of events from play parties retreats, festivals, play parties, workshops, embodied trainings, and places for us to expand into the corners of our bodies, I have learned a lot about what we call community.

Mostly, I learned that something was missing. We need people who are willing to take on the responsibility of space tending. Someone who is responsible for tending to the conditions of the spaces we are gathering in and the people who are gathering us.

There is no community without infrastructure, and I believe that if we want community to be realized, we have to dream differently.

In a little over 90 days, I enter into my 50th year. My vision for this era is to hold the space where dreams are born. This December I am moving into that space, a finca that sits on almost 10 acres in the hills above Panama City.

This is a space for the writer to retreat, for the abolitionists to gather, for the healers to learn and for those worn down from patriarchal capitalism and white supremacist delusion to find their whimsy and land back safely in their bodies.

I have done the initial legal and financial leg work, the lease has been signed and the deposit paid.

Now I am asking for your help.

I need to make sure the first 3 months are sustained ($9,000). I need to make sure the first artist can be in residency here ($1,000). And I need to make sure that the staff I need to support the space doesn’t leave to look for better, more consistent pay in the first 3 months ($2,000).

That’s it. I got the rest.

I have a complete prospectus on the vision that you can see here: https://canva.link/pcbleiprkjteczc

It invites us all to reimagine how we are holding space and retreats and what care looks like for the space curator. It divorces the role of space holder from space tender. It invited more care.

Care is how we build collective freedom.

We can’t afford for it to only be a private service that we purchase after the world has exhausted us.