Propagation Power
Plant Propagation: 1pm – 5pm
Community Meal: 6pm
Storysharing: 7 pm
Power is often defined as domination, as top-down force over others. But what if power is also something we can grow? Plant propagation is a vital powerful practice of food sovereignty and ecological restoration! It’s also a skill that has a lot to teach us about power that listens and liberates instead of confines and colonizes. In fact, the word propagate comes from Latin roots that means to multiply by layers and shoots! That’s what this is about: becoming plant allies with biodiversity to nurture gift-giving abundance of food and medicine for land and culture!
Join us at Dreaming Stone to scheme and dream ways to propagate nurseries that can support livelihood, subsistence, and sharing; learn easy tools and tricks for growing acres and generations of plants, and how propagation is always a dance with pruning; identify the differences between supremacist and liberatory power, in our bodies and society, and why that matters for agriculture and land stewardship; and conspire how to graft plant propagation with growing movements that resist violence and waste and emphasize ecological restoration as part of reparations and restorative justice. Come with your stories, knowledge, and questions while we propagate power and cultivate and celebrate healthy culture!
This event is limited to those who have been vaccinated.
Date
- Nov 20 2021
- Expired!
Time
- 1:00 am - 9:00 pm
Instructor
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Jonathan McRay
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Website
https://silverrunforestfarm.org/ -
Jonathan McRay is a farmer, facilitator, and writer in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He grew up in the Central Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee and worked overseas before returning home to take responsibility for his life and history. Jonathan helped found and garden Vine and Fig, an urban farm, education center, and supportive home, where he also served as house mediator. Jonathan co-founded the Cambium Collective and co-facilitated Uprooting Racism in the Food System trainings with Soul Fire Farm. He teaches classes and workshops on cultural ecology, conflict transformation and restorative justice, participatory decision-making, and agroforestry and agroecology. He farms with Silver Run Forest Farm, a riparian nursery, woodland collective, and folk school propagating beautiful and useful plants that cross-pollinate food sovereignty and ecological restoration with a vision for land reform and redistribution. Jonathan has facilitated circles of support and accountability in the legal system and community, as well as emotional support circles for a residential mental health and recovery program. He joined grassroots organizing against jail expansions, immigrant detentions, and white nationalists, and helped provide de-escalation and nonviolent protection for local youth-led uprisings in 2020. He has an MA in Conflict Transformation and Restorative Justice and trained with the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute. Jonathan does what he does because he loves trees and the land he tends, storytelling and reading out loud, the possibilities of community economy and turning conversations into action, outlandish jokes, and friends and family. He’s also learning to give up erosive perfectionism in favor of joyful growth.