Bird Songs for Liberation:

Nesting, flocking, and migration

Sandwiched between a Flocking in the Time of ’Rona Emergent Strategy call and the Highlander Center’s Training on Mutual Aid call, I cozied into a zoom room of artists, academics, technologists, and radical imagineers visioning session on speculative historical and future fiction. The Guild of Future Architects is hosting space for us to imagine how the world would be if we had walked a different path 20 years ago and what’s the world we envision 20 years from now.

All of these Hollywood Squares of strangers are grieving, reflecting, visioning, and strategizing. From slow dancing along with a video of elders in their chairs to Somewhere Over the Rainbow to a guided meditation and a reading of Janye Cortez’s poem There It Is — these spaces are insisting on an embodied and whole heart gathering.

Clarity comes: we won’t survive without songs, laughter, poetry, and the force of our imagination to convince our bodies of the truth: the systems in which we are entrenched are on a precipice of dynamic transformation.

“Little birdie, little birdie, what makes you fly so high?”

Will we give ourselves permission to freefall? To be hatchlings spewing snot and keening screeches of loss for who we were in our false security? Permission to grow tender and sturdy feathers to fly through a new world? In these Zoom rooms, I feel like an awkward fledgling — and above me are soaring the experienced flyers. The folks who have been practicing, planning, and imagining our next world for a long time.

Octavia Butler is lifted up. Perhaps she is dancing where she is. Perhaps the new ancestors are breathing easy on the other side of their journeys. Perhaps Bill Withers, John Prine, and Ellis Marsalis are singing lullabies to soothe our worried souls. If we are quiet we may hear them whispering to us: “Don’t take things for granted.” “Be gentle with yourself as you learn to fly.” “Migration is instinctual. Your body knows the journey it needs to take.”

The Emergent Strategy folks were flocking through the immediate moment on the theme of Intentional Adaptation. With care, fatigue, and uncertainty, this was a nesting space for connections among strangers who want to change. Masters of facilitation held us as we grappled with the personal implications of adaptation. Swapping tools for self-soothing, tapping gently on my chest, breathing deeply, we are changing at this exact moment. “Thank god, I’ve been in therapy.” A mantra emerging on this and many calls.

We’ve been gathering twigs and pine needles: quieting techniques, and understanding our fight/flight/freeze/fix somatic response. We’ve been braiding sweetgrass and casting circles. With these fragments and remnants we have built nests to stabilize us in the midst of crisis, constraint, and collapse. This nest was built to hold the durable yet fragile. The delicate and the ferocious. The home and the launch pad. This nest has nurtured and fed you. Now, you have outgrown this security.

Three little birds, pitched by my doorstep singing sweet songs

The theme of Thriving Interdependence sets the tone for The Guild as we vision 2000 and 2040.

Moving into two groups to re-imagine 2000 and create the 2040 of our imaginations we are brooding on the idea: What is possible if depending on each other is non-negotiable?

Remember the year 2000? We laugh and populate memories of critical moments and “What ifs?” Ideas of creating speculative histories on issues of intimacy, land use, universal health care, refugees, indigenous rights, urban planning, or manufacturing diversity surface. But in the context of this moment when millions are in self-isolation — and an opportunity to delve into the juicy pleasure of talking about sex and relationships — the group votes to dive into the root of intimacy and connection by deconstructing the “traditional” family structure. We are supposed to be talking about how we depend on each other after all… let’s look back and talk about sex and partnership!

We unpack the fundamental building blocks of how we understand the systems of intimate connection… and then imagine the year 2000. Would we be closer to our understanding of interdependence if the characters from Sex and the City ended up like wild turkeys in open and polyamorous relationships? If our family units were based on kinship not just biology? Would the architecture of our homes be different if we weren’t building for a nuclear family, but we were designing for collective care?

As I migrate to 2040, I’m aware that I wasn’t able to fully tune into what felt like a juicy escapist experiment in our understanding of nooky. I’m feeling residual guilt that we didn’t use this precious hour to dive into refugees, indigenous rights, or some other system of oppression. And, confession: I’m not alone right now. I’m safe in my nest in my own deliciously queer relationship. I’m not hungry for intimacy, in fact, my solo friends have charged me with the responsibility of having as much sex as possible for all the queers who can’t right now. Pleasure. Grief. Clarity. Migrate….

2040 is spiraling into fragments: trust indigenous youth,“create rituals,“we are all indigenous to somewhere, and can we be naturalized to where we are, “truth is subjective — resonance isn’t, develop the ECOsystem over the EGOsystem, and seeds… the original generative economy.

We’re fumbling towards some new vernacular that we haven’t imagined yet.

The stories we will tell post-capitalism won’t center around one solo antagonist. Let’s use this moment to hatch a new creation myth. There is no central character but instead some magical realism set of twins who are different ages.

Let’s write the manifesto for the common good! A collective manifesto centering elder and indigenous wisdom. Centering on the knowledge of plants, animals, and the earth. Centering on collective health and a value that no person is expendable. Robin Wall Kilmmerer’s ears must have been burning.

And back in 2020 — I’m hearing the desire to lean into Transformative Justice. Use this moment to build that world of 2040 that is full of funky fresh fun, medicinal/community gardens, zero carbon affordable housing, and everyone has access to a therapist. Make choices that will help us build the most authentically inclusive multifamily birdhouse.

Migrate. These Hollywood Squares look different and this call is being translated in real time to Spanish and ASL. Time slows even more as we practice inclusion and I find myself alighting on one of my social justice homes. The Highlander Center is leveling up folks on the fundamentals and “How To’s of Mutual Aid”. I see familiar faces from my activist community and folks on the frontline of organizing for basic survival and justice. These principles are laid out not via powerpoint or on some cool technology platform but from a loving heart that is nested onto a couch in a (self-described) anarchist’s living room:

• Solidarity not charity
• Liberation not recuperation
• Cooperation not competition

Cucurrucucú Paloma: Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay

2020, I close my computer and wander around my nest. I’m fucking full. Overstuffed with hope, grief, ideas, and eat my feelings of uncertainty, kiss my lover. I wonder if birds ever stress eat? How much will I need to eat to prepare myself to migrate into this new world. Who knows? But I should eat all the things now, just in case the answer is all the things.

We haven’t fallen out of the nest at this moment. We are just simultaneously moving through the stages of grief and birth as we become hatchlings, nestlings, and fledglings. Growing our feathers to test our understanding of what’s possible while above us are soaring… bad ass black queers, technologists with soul, ferociously loving anarchists, indigenous elders, witches, plant workers, the differently abled, artists, organizers, lovers, and doulas. They have been laying out a migration path for years.

Bird songs: A concert of instructions on designing the new world.

• Create spaces for communal and multigenerational living. Picture a flamingo colony.
• Expand your understanding of kinship, cooperation, and interdependence. Egrets and Elephants.
• Develop policies based in collective liberation. Red hornbills and dwarf mongoose.
• Duets are more dynamic than solos. Starlings flocking.
• Nurturing and caring guide our choices. Barn Swallows.

In this moment we have the instinct to migrate… but do we trust our bodies and hearts enough to open our wings and fly?