Planting Earthseed at B.A.R. Houston

1 Year Writing on Substack

Happy Sunday Beloveds 🌞, here is this month’s piece. 

I appreciate y’all so much and I really do hope that you find something to take with you. ✨

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How can I truly be in right relationship with the land, with God, and with my own spirit? 

This is the question that I am asking myself after spending three beautiful, enriching days attending B.A.R., a Black Artists Retreat here in Houston. B.A.R. began 11 years ago at the behest of visual artist Theaster Gates and other artists and art workers as a way to make space for artists and creatives to be seen and nourished. This year, B.A.R. took place from September 27th-29th as a collaboration between the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston (CAMH), Theaster Gates (@theastergates), The Freedmen’s Town Conservancy (@houstonfreedmenstown), and Rebirth in Action. During the weekend, artists, art workers, and creatives of all kinds were gathered in Houston to coalesce, connect, collaborate, and confer with one another. We witnessed together as visual artists, performance artists, academic artists, poets, writers, collagists, musicians, filmmakers, and creatives of all kinds shared their work and inspired one another. 

During each day of the retreat, artists shared their work with one another and we got to be inspired by the creative spirit that lives within all of us. As it were, each performance, presentation, and discussion seemed to magically embody consistent themes:

Black folks’ connection to land. 

Rematriation.

Land stewardship. 

Sowing.

Planting.

Tending.

My initial question also comes in response to the sweet synchronicities that life has shown me lately. Before the retreat weekend began, I attended a series of weekly Bible studies with a beautiful group of women where the biblical story of the ‘Parable of the Sower’ (scripture) was the foundational text for the lesson of Jesus as the ‘Prince of Peace’. Spending time with this scripture in both my Bible study and my daily devotional prompted me to begin listening to the audiobook of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. I have always been curious about how the Bible and other religious texts inform our storytelling and creativity—how we take these ancient stories and their themes and interpret them for ourselves, in new ways, to say old things. How we make meaning and try to understand new things about God, life, and what it means to be a human at this moment in time. 

Witnessing artists at B.A.R, all I could think of was the line from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower:

“We are Earthseed and our purpose is to take root among the stars.”