World-Building in the In-Between

Contributed by Triniti Watson

“Survival [is] a promise…worth keeping”

-Alexis Pauline Gumbs, The Shape of My Impact

Image sourced from Black Quantum Futurism

In her essay “The Shape of my Impact” Alexis Pauline Gumbs cites Audre Lorde defining survival as “a now that can breed futures/like bread in our children's mouths/so their dreams will not reflect the deaths of ours.”

I came across this line as I entered the second week of quarantine. I’d avoided COVID for three years up until this point, and felt lost in the reality where my defenses to not get sick failed and my punishment was to sit with the anxieties of “what’s next?”. Google defines quarantine as “a state, period, or place of isolation in which people or animals that have arrived from elsewhere…are placed.” For me, isolation placed me in between fears of the present, my past, and future. I began the typical routine of using my phone to scroll past my emotions, but once my body grew restless, feelings of frustration, negative self-talk, and memories of past attempts to change started to shape my perception; I was building a world of doubt within the walls of my solitude. Isolation reminded me of what I’ve survived, but also how those battle scars still remain on my conscience. I began to wonder about the “elsewhere” I’d arrived from to not trust my ability to change or to question my purpose. Instead of staying inside of fear, I wanted to build a dream world, and imagine landscapes that held all that I wanted to become.

I chose the Aquarius New Moon to practice world building. With the guidance of Ari Felix (@saltwaterstars on IG) and the moon’s energy, I explored the depths of my imagination and the tensions of the present. Time feels fleeting in an uncertain world, and as I attempted to invent a new one, I realized I have a deep fear in creating for myself what I don’t know, haven’t been taught, or have forgotten to do. This reality offers accelerated material existence, and my biggest tension with living in it is the desire to find moments of pause to process the experiences of my life. Yet, when granted space and time to be still, my world only becomes invaded with the things I’ve buried while trying to exist in the uncertain. Time arrives too late, or I feel like I don’t have a chance at anything due to the griefs that’ve traveled throughout many pasts to disorient my present and future; a constraint of living in the in-between. My current reality is constantly collapsing what I thought to be true, and is ending my phases of comfort. But the greatest promise of world-building is that there is no end or destination, it is simply a process of being.

Ari provided a space to play with the power of dreaming, and this practice revealed to me that much of building a dream world is tied to the dream-self: the embodiment of self-destiny and purpose rooted within. When I think of my dream self, it is a inverse of what linear time offers me, and is shaped through multiplicity. My dream self/world enacts new visions of wholeness and uses memory as a tool towards naming destiny rather than a tool of shame. I can only build my dream self by shifting my perception of time and how I respond to what I endure. It takes allowing new natures and practices to take root, and submitting to the power of change. When Audre Lorde and Alexis Pauline Gumbs talk about survival being a promise, they remind me of how my present is the future of ancestral world-building technologies, and that I hold the wisdom to become who I desire to be. My survival persists through the uncharted maps my ancestor’s left behind, and though it scares me at times, in other worlds, fear has been my friend. While in the in-between of my purpose in this world, I am simply a doorway to realities that have yet to be seen. That is my promise towards my myself.