What does it mean to really be with the land? What does the land have to teach us? Land steward and executive director of the Acorn Center for Restoration and Freedom, Emanuel Brown, is answering those questions through his work. After being guided by his ancestors to acquire his own land, Brown began a journey of stewarding the land and creating projects that center the wisdom of Black and Trans folks. Alongside his personal journey, he has offered his land as a hosting ground for the Acorn Center’s programming that nurtures the creativity, spiritual wellness and wholeness of Black and Trans folks.
In our conversation, he discusses the community of practice that grounds the center, the power of innovation when it comes to our collective freedom and the relationship between our joy and the land.
Tell me about HEARTS justice. I was reading about it on the site, and it looks like it’s in conversation with the center’s blending of the healing, spiritual, land and arts justice.
Over the last seven years [we have] built up a community of practice of about 750 folks that we serve annually. And from that community of practice, we get about 150 practitioners who cover a wide range of earth-based spiritual traditions. And as we were having more opportunities to hear from our practitioners, they were like, “So what’s the deal with the differences between healing, art, land, justice? Why is that all so separate? I do many things. I am a writer and a Reiki healer. I am an Orisha priestess, and I run a media organization. Why is the social justice movement separating us out into these discrete categories?” And so, what we did pretty early on is we started off [at] “What’s the core of this work?” And for us, the core of the work was the heart. Also, if you put together healing art and spiritual justice, which is where we started, you can make the word hearts out of that.
We’re trying to get to the heart of people. To the heart of communities. And we agreed on…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply