Join Me For Some Dreaming

Yes, two opportunities to hear Jason Wyman and me talk about dreaming, purpose, and other things that pop into our heads. We had two opportunities to talk about dreaming, change, money, our work and our wishes. And we had two chances to dream in public with the folks at Queer Body Podcast and The Queer Spirit Podcast . More often than not you will find my written words in this space, but this time you can just sit back and listen.

Crystal with a blue background, holding a mask. The text reads Queer Spirit in the upper right hand corner. There is a quote from Crystal that reads, “Dreaming in public deepens the practice. It creates alignment, and from that alignment comes action.”

Getting Ready For The Futures We Need

Hello Dreamers,

New year same old death cult, some call it the United States. Police still killing and maiming, politicians still doing the most to fill up all the jails and prisons. Profit still trumping life, people still full of fear of those who have been othered and filled with dreams of domination and supremacy. The very earth we live on is still being degraded past the point of no return. And still the institutions that are supposed to keep us safe are failing or have failed.

This empire is dying and we need to be co-creating the systems, structures and institutions that will create the conditions under which we all thrive, find joy, healing, abundance, and the ability to realize a brighter, safer future that allows us to live free of all systems of domination and social control.

There are many individuals, groups and organizations that are trying to move this mountain, and there are many who have fallen by the roadside because capitalism, white supremacy and other systems of oppression have turned us against ourselves and each other. Often we replicate the harms of the very institutions we wish to abolish. Often we forget who and what is the enemy and choose to strike out at those who are closest to us instead. Sometimes we forget accountability starts with self reflection, and we are all swimming in the same toxic brew that asks us to be active in unlearning the lies we have been sold.

We require spaces, where we can gather to dream, plot, plan, organize and build, not only what we need today but what we will need after Abolition, what we do need so we can continue to heal and to fight.

Join me and Jason Wyman for our timely and informative workshop Cultivating Belonging: Setting Culture In Virtual and Physical Space. This workshop is for anyone who holds space for others including facilitators, trainers, teachers, organizers, artists, researchers, etc. who want to build spaces that engender vulnerability, belonging and camaraderie. Make your meetings, workshops, convenings, and trainings more generative and welcoming, so real sustainable change can happen. Check out this great article Building Resilient Organizations: Toward Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis . If your organization needs some assistance with Change Management take a look at my work with Jason Wyman, Tree Of Change.

Why Is Being Tender With Ourselves And Each Other Abolition Work?

“When our communities lean into values that honor ourselves, each other, and the natural world around us, we see that punishment culture only deepens harm.”

                       - bell hooks

Growing up in my house, in Richmond Va, which used to be the seat of the Confederacy, there was a lot of punishment. Sometimes it was physical, sometimes it was harsh words, sometimes it was no words. Often it was isolation from friends and having fun, I grew up internalizing and then externalizing some of these forms of punishment. One of my favorite forms was the withdrawal of my attention, of my presence. My second favorite form of punishment was revenge and sometimes I was just plain violent. I say favorite as a joke, because in the end I always felt worse after meting out punishment than I did before, which began a vicious circle that started and ended with me wondering what was wrong with me. I learned to punish myself with destructive self talk and the constant fear I was not good, or good enough. Until the day came when I decided I didn’t have the right to feelings if I couldn’t control them. Until I saw my anger as a danger to myself and others. Until I started to see myself as bad, as weird as undeserving. Until I was as hard on others as I was on myself.

When I began to soften, it was with the help of chosen family, good friends and a good therapist. It was going to workshops full of black women, where we were invited to cry, without wiping away our tears. It was seeing fat dykes “letting it all hang out, for all to see. It was being on the front lines with a bunch of weirdos and queerdos, as cops tried to hurt us and punish us for being eligible to them and daring to fight back and to act up, for being sexy and sweet in the face of social ostracization For daring to live in a world that wanted us dead. And lord have mercy, the cops wanted to punish me for being Black, fat, queer and angry.

I came to see that my work in this brutal world was to create spaces where people could bring their whole selves. Spaces that allowed people to tell their stories, spaces that allowed us to lay our weapons down. While I was no longer putting my body and freedom on the line, I was still an activist, an activist for love and care, for joy and desire and the right for all of us to exist in the ways we need and want.. I came to understand if we want to create a different world, we have to be different. If we want to get rid of all systems of oppression and domination, it has to start with us. We have to understand how we support and internalize those systems and how they shape what we believe about ourselves and each other.

So I wonder, if we can be more tender with ourselves, if we can be more forgiving and understanding of the stories we all carry inside us, of the histories forced upon us, if we could extend more grace to those who have been othered, dehumanized and locked away. My hope is, if we can stop punishing ourselves for just being human, can we also imagine something beyond carceral systems that do nothing more that perpetuate harm and nothing to heal individuals or communities? Maybe the first step is to get rid of the judge inside of us, to heal our own wounds, to see ourselves as worthy.

I work with individuals and organizations to create change, to shift ideas and to help us all imagine the world we want, need and desire. I use deep listening, dreaming, and conversation along with  my years of experience working with a plurality of people in their best moments and their worst. I believe the act of creation saves lives and helps us see pathways to a just and better world. Let’s see what we can create together.

Queering Dreams, Looking Back, Looking Forward

Today's blog post is about a project that is very close to my heart and has come out of my need to make change in my own life. About seven years ago a dear friend and fellow artist, Tessa Wills invited me to take part in a residency she created. We were asked to create our own practice, which led to me creating a dream practice. That dream practice led me to my co-creator Jason Wyman of Queerly Complex, which led me to the work I am doing today. Part of that work is a nonprofit called Queering Dreams, co-founded by myself and Jason. We wrote this post together as we close in on our second year of dreaming together and in community. Dreams do come true and community is everything!

Hello Camarades,

What is the through line to all of Queering Dreams? 

What is the main ingredient in our whirlwind of creation and community-making in our first year? 

Dreaming together in community. As Harriet Tubman said, “Every great dream begins with a dreamer.” 

Jason and I needed a bit of space and time to just be and dream new dreams together. We needed to take a step back, so that a bigger picture could emerge from all the work, passion and love that went into our first year co-creating Queering Dreams. Co-creation is work and labor, y’all. 

We are also learning some things. We learned that dreaming is so important and is really a font of creation in big ways and small for us and for our neighbors, comrades and co-creators. We learned keeping it small creates space to be expansive. We learned we can only do this with others, and creating consensus with others takes time and energy. Dreaming cannot be rushed. 

And we made some things, too! Like, our Tree of Change, which birthed Queering Dreams. Thanks to our learnings, Jason and I have also launched a consultancy partnership, which provides tailored organizational development to businesses and non-profits. AND! Our work together on Queering Dreams and our Tree of Change has directly impacted our own small business endeavors: Crystal Mason Consulting and www.QueerlyComplex.com. 

 All of this started by dreaming together. 

Last September 2021, Queering Dreams arrived on the scene with an exciting and varied calendar of events, co-created with a truly diverse group of folks. Our first events prioritized the work, hopes and dreams of Indigenous communities, Black folx, immigrants, disabled folx, transgender and gender non-specific folx, queer folx, poor folx, displaced folx, and refugees. All in all we co-produced and co-created 10 different events in the month of November. And from this Calendar of Events, ways of dreaming, being, and co-creating became a bit more solidified for 2022. 

Like a stone tossed into a small body of water, the ripples of our intentions spread and continue to spread. November was only the beginning. Monthly for seven months, Queering Dreams held our A Space For Dreaming workshops, so our growing community could dream together and share those dreams with each other. We created spaces of intimacy, vulnerability and belonging, where all were invited to be their full, complex self.  

We also stretched ourselves a bit. Our A Space for Dreaming Abolition held in November, which was co-produced by Keyssh, Kapi’olani Lee, and the Alliance for Media Arts and Culture and convened six, intergenerational Black artists across the USA, became a toolkit and a workshop. Our workshop was then facilitated at two national conferences, the Technology of Participation (ToP) Conference in March 2022 and the Allied Media Conference held in July 2022. Our toolkit is now available for free online for others to use and share, so more can start (or continue) expanding what abolition looks, sounds, and feels like. 

Not only did we produce events and toolkits, we also birthed new practices to make sense of the world as we see it. Our Five Guides to Cultivate Belonging is being used by our Co-Creators from our November Calendar of Events, and we’ve been able to embed them into our consulting work as well. We also refined a process of introducing ourselves called Ethnographic Introductions that support participants in grappling with questions about relations to land, movement, relatives, and ancestors. This introductory process facilitates introspection, which in turn facilitates deeper, more engaging conversation and expansive dreaming. These practices were created and are continuing to be created in conversation and community between us, Jason and me, and all our Co-Creators and participants. This is how we begin to abolish systems, behaviors, and patterns of oppression and domination.

 Over 2022, Queering Dreams has also been supporting the collective creation of an Immigrant Artist Network and a Queer Art School.The Immigrant Artist Network, co-founded with Rupy C. Tut, is bringing together a diverse group of immigrant artists and their comrades from across North American to create distributive forms of sharing. The first model was a Virtual Salon that ran from March to June 2022 and convened 18 artists in sharing works-in-progress, developing language about their work, and creating a network of mutual aid, care, and support. We are now in a process of redesigning what comes next with artists who participated in our Virtual Salons. More coming in 2023. 

Our Queer Art School, co-founded by Juan Carlos Escobedo, is co-creating an Artist Narrative Boot Camp, launching in 2023. As a collective of Black, Latinx, Japanese, and white queer artists across the United States, we keep hearing from our fellow queer and trans artists that the arts industry is harsh, cruel, dismissive, and intent on putting us in a box not of our making. We are also hearing from our comrades a need to better articulate our process, our art, and our beliefs in our own words and with our own bodies. Our Boot Camp aims to not just teach these skills but create a peer-based pedagogy for curriculum development. This takes time, and we cannot wait to share more with you in 2023. 

Whew! You got to the end. Thank you for reading. We are excited to share more of what’s to come, including a BRAND NEW WORKSHOP called A SPACE FOR RAGE & GRIEF: Studying, Dreaming, and Creating, co-created in partnership with Lisa Bohórquez. But more on that soon! 

So make sure to sign up for our newsletter to find out what new dreams we’re cooking up for year two of Queering Dreams! 

Please keep supporting us by following us on Instagram, sharing our content, and donating to Queering Dreams.

We Need To Dream Again

How We Make Change Happen For Ourselves, Together

There is no normal to go back to. There is only forward. We must build the power we need so that we have a say in what the future will be. We can not let our dreams, hopes, and our beliefs in a better world be ground down by the cynicism of this death cult called the United States . We can not accept performance instead of change.

I have been trying to write this blog post for a few weeks. Over and over I start one post then another, angry and hurt by one outrage and before I could process that outrage, another outrage would come along. What do we do when death is all around us calling to us like a siren leading us to crash against the rocks and all the institutions that were supposed to guide us have left us to find our own way in the thick and dangerous fog of the collapse of empire?

I think we must become the light and the leaders and the change-makers. We must remember we are the messengers, the storytellers and the pathfinders because all we have is each other. We have to be the dreamers and the conjurers and the builders of the better world we need and desire. We must fight and heal while we discover and recover the myriad of tools that will be needed to bend that moral arc Dr. King talked about and reimagine what justice looks like for those who have been denied justice for so long; Indigenous communities, Black folx, immigrants, disabled folx, transgender and gender non-specific folx, queer folx, poor folx, displaced folx, and refugees.

Living in fear, chasing the ghost of a time that never was, ground up under the heel of a punishing state, our ability to dream of a better day is under attack. We need to dream again, because it's hard to build what you can not even imagine. In a world that is becoming more and more isolating it is hard to imagine connection and interdependence. In a time when so many people want to take us back and death and displacement becomes our daily bread, how do we celebrate life lived with dignity and the real possibility of having enough and being enough?

We fight and we heal by creating spaces that allow us to be vulnerable, that ask us to be accountable to ourselves and each other, where a plurality of people can feel belonging because we need each other. We make space for change and transformation. We dream, we imagine and we stay forever in a state of creation while we see clearly the moment we are in, while we learn from the past, and we build for the future we want and need.

If you would like to know more about how I use dreaming as a pathway to help organizations, groups, and individual artists re/organize, rethink and reimagine their work in the world contact me at crystalmason.net or treeofchange.net

We Can Dream Together

In 2012 I became a certified mediator, it had been a dream of mine for a while, but it was financially out of reach. Community Boards, the longest-running nonprofit conflict resolution and restorative justice center in the US made my dream come true by providing me with a scholarship to participate in their mediation training. 

Last week, it felt like a circle had been completed, Queering Dreams had the pleasure of dreaming with Community Boards. Much of the work they do is volunteer-based. The leadership at Community Boards wanted to offer their volunteers the gift of dreaming in community, where they could experience feeling held, and take the time to think deeply about their own wants, needs, and desires.  

We at Queering Dreams appreciate the work and the mission of Community Boards and we know how difficult it can be to hold space for folks who are in conflict with one another. We also know how important it is because we understand for our dreams of abolition to become reality, we need other pathways to resolve and, maybe, even transform conflict. We believe conflict can strengthen our relations and expand our abilities to live, love, and build outside of the prerogatives of the status quo instead of being a source of punishment and shame. 

Dreaming together in community is a space of discovery, and remembering, a space of creation and connection, and quite often a space of joy. Our dreaming session with Community Boards was all that and more. Queerly Complex (aka Jason Wyman) actually got to reconnect with an old friend who they hadn’t seen in over 15 years. 

We are intentional about creating time and space for such things. We all got to witness the real warmth and delight of their fond memories and the love and care that remained. As always, it was heart expanding to watch people discover or remember what it feels like to be invited to be vulnerable and to feel safe enough to let themselves be. 

In our time together, there were tears and laughter. We shared our disappointments and our hopes and dreams for the future. Some of us got to let go of old stories about ourselves while experiencing the power of being open-hearted to and with ourselves and each other. It was a lovely two hours we got to spend co-creating a space of intimacy, vulnerability, and belonging with comrades who are also doing the hard and necessary work of trying to make a better world.

As the co-founders of Queering Dreams, Queerly Complex and I believe the world is in a place of transformation. We know individuals and organizations alike are experiencing a great deal of upheaval as we decide who and what we want to be while we create something new, something better. We also know many of us are dealing with fear, isolation, and burnout and are struggling to make or even imagine the changes we need for ourselves and for our organizations. 

Like everyone else, there are many things we are unsure of as we try to navigate these chaotic times, but there are some things we are very sure of: 

Dreaming in community and sharing our dreams creates more connection, more camaraderie, and tenderness towards ourselves and for each other. 

How do we know that? Queerly Complex and I have been dreaming in community and with individuals now for over 6yrs, and the one thing we hear over and over again is how much folks need and desire the space and time to dream. Time and time again we have heard what a relief it has been for people to be able to lay their armor down and to just be and to feel safe enough and held enough to do that in community.

Like Community Boards, you can bring dreaming to your organization, group, or community, contact me here or at crystalmason.net If you would like to dream to gain clarity for an art project or to think about next steps, you can also reach out to me. Bring dreaming to your organization or small business or group at QC/CM Consulting