Practicing Hope(Punk)
The Making of Newfire
Hi friends!
I'm absolutely stoked to share "Notes for the Curious Traveler," a travel guide to Newfire written by 15 of its most hospitable residents.
As I state in the brief history, Newfire is a coastal city rebuilt after natural disasters and worker rebellions using principles of sustainable community care.
Here is a flipbook link (it feels more interactive than downloading and scrolling). A user experience note: click the four squares in the top right to access the table of contents (the actual table of contents works, too). You can pinch to zoom in, etc.
If you insist on things like color accuracy and visual quality (one of the first few pictures is worth it), download the pdf here.
What follows is a small reflection and some personal context for the project, none of which is necessarily subscribed to by the individual writers.
What is this?
“To create a better world, we must first imagine her into being.” — Tessa Hicks Peterson
Three weeks ago, I invited collaborators to imagine a place where problems get addressed through care rather than competition. Contributors received random prompts—one about an event, one about a place, one about an object—and had one week to respond with six sentences or less.
The other explicit instruction: we’re making it hopepunk.
What’s “hopepunk”? It’s a genre of a gritty kind of optimism, one that doesn’t deny difficulty, but devises responses despite them.
What emerged was a city with air-filtering glass bricks, rickshaw transit powered by reciprocity cards (really a formality, a good story also works), and memorial traditions that honor past loss while welcoming the New Year. Every detail came from someone different, and the city holds together as a living whole.
While imaginary, many details in our city already exist. The question isn't whether these solutions work, but whether we can imagine them in our own neighborhoods.
Let me give you the first step toward building a better world.
Step 1: Repair the Human Spirit.
“This is a call to intentionally support the creation of structures informed by our sense of social justice and spirituality.” — john a. powell
The contributors to the guide make it easy to forget that play is a form of reclamation and rebellion most are not used to.
Several people who requested prompts ultimately responded with multi-sentence apologies they simply didn’t have time to write a single line of make belief. (An observation, not a judgement.) Many have no time to meditate—time for ourselves—let alone “play” some non-professional, non-networking “game” with a rando from the internet.
I do not take this personally because I feel it, too. The collective compression of our capacity to be present with ourselves and broader environment shows one way out.
We practice expanding on purpose. Taking up space. Making place. Owning our time.
An excerpt from Rev Dr. angel Kyodo williams (my emphasis).
We cannot have a healed society, we cannot have change, we cannot have justice if we do not reclaim and repair the human spirit. We simply cannot. Imagining anything different is to really have our head buried deeply in the sand of hundreds of years of a culture of domination, colonization, the theft of this land, the theft of a people from their land, and the continued and ongoing theft and appropriation of peoples and cultures on a day-to-day basis that every single one of us is colluding with and participating in consciously and unconsciously.
[…] Paradoxically, once we release the proposition that we are going to get rid of the suffering, then the potential to alleviate the suffering becomes possible.
My goal with this project was to show that even if we need to duct tape it all together, even if a hyperlink doesn’t work, or I find anoter typo, or some don’t respond, or some responses align better than others, everything can belong and we can imagine together.
That’s huge.
Step 2 is on the last page of the pdf.
Thank you for visiting. I hope you enjoyed your stay so much, you’re inspired to make where you live a little more like Newfire.
Or is it already? Tell us in the comments or tag me in a post to tell me about a local initiative you admire.
Light Hive offers weekly essays on embodied and engaged mindfulness. If you read this far, you might consider subscribing. Upgrading to paid ($8/month, $2/essay) supports my work and gives significant discounts to future workshops or events.
If you liked this, consider checking out:
⛰️Creative Coalition: The Ground Itself — September 21, 10-12:30 PT
A place-making game about the echoes and traces we leave for others after we are gone.
You walk past the same corner every day. But what about ten years ago? Was that corner there 100 years ago? What stories would the land tell about 1,000 years from now?
Over 2.5 hours, I'll guide you through the storytelling game The Ground Itself by Everest Pipkin. Come talk change, memory, and the ground itself.
The vast majority of Creative Coalition offerings have been writing games, essentially shared solo play. September’s CC will be a structured conversation limited to five players. We’ll open with a meditation, include one screen break, and debrief at the end.
September 21, 10-12:30 PM PT
Limit 5
Base price: $150
Some seats will always be free for the curious or cash-strapped. There are two full scholarships this month. Email or DM to claim them.
Paid subscribers get 50% off using the code in the chat.
🏔️ Ready to make space a place? Sign up here!
Takeaway Practice
What can you implement?
Check out the guide. What does your neighborhood or city do already? What could you implement?
Now: think about your embodied response to reading the word “implement.” Did you feel stress? Anxiety? Overwhelm? Excitement?
What would the first step of implementation look like?
Bio
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a queer, transracial adoptee with a PhD in Performance Studies. They are currently a continuing lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. Their creative work has been staged in London and New York. They do all the Light Hive things, co-edit Notes from the Inflection Point, where they write to share reflections and practices amid ecological and social uncertainty. In the past month, they have taught poker to two different groups of people. Wild.
Wonderful experience of play informing practical transformation!
utterly beautiful.
(the car-free elements in particular... :D)
also -- 'hopepunk' -- love this.