Vanessa Andreotti: Allowing earth to dream through us (ep338)
“We consume not only stuff but also knowledge, experiences, critique. And this consumption, many times, is not even digested. It is the consumption for consumption’s sake so that we can feel better.”
What might it mean for humanity to reach a level of maturation to be able to confront the multilayered crises we now face—calling upon us to “grow up and show up” for ourselves and our planet? And how might recognizing the differing historical contexts that we were raised within help us to have more empathy when navigating our generational differences?
In this episode, we welcome Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, a Brazilian educator and Indigenous and Land Rights advocate. She is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change at the University of British Columbia. She is one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and part of the coordination team of the "Last Warning" campaign.
Vanessa is also the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and Implications for Social Activism.
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Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Brown Leaves by Desmond White
Episode-inspired artwork by Erica Alexia
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Vanessa Andreotti: I come from a mixed family from Brazil, where my dad, who has German ancestry, was trying to make a stand against other members of his family. His brothers were involved in the agrarian expansion in Brazil in the fifties and sixties, which meant that they were involved in an Indigenous genocide in Brazil. He heard the stories and he wanted to do something about it. So he decided to marry an Indigenous woman, who is my mom. But he also believed in the superiority of the German culture over other cultures, and there was this desire to “help” others by improving the genetic stock.
So part of my work, or maybe the focus of my work around the paradoxes of global and social change stems from having been born or even conceived in a paradoxical context where somebody wanted to change the world but also carried baggage, right? A cultural baggage where these hierarchies were being reproduced and the social violence was also being reproduced. So having been born in that context, I think I developed a sensitivity and a sensibility towards identifying the complexities and the paradoxes of social and global change.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for sharing that. Your recently published book is titled Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and Implications for Social Activism. And to get to the core, I want to ask a big but basic question, which is: What is this thing called modernity? If our ancestors or future generations, thousands of years later, were to travel through a time machine to this moment, how would you portray a broad picture of modernity, whose characteristics and context, as well as its main elements, need hospice?
Vanessa Andreotti: Probably the easiest way to respond to this question is to say that modernity is a ubiquitous story of linear progress, development, evolution, and civilization that is all around us and that informs the ways we think, the ways we imagine things, the ways we hope, the ways we desire. That also informs our neurobiology in many ways: where we source pleasure, what we're afraid of. So modernity is that water for the fish that we're all swimming in.
A more extensive explanation we would talk about, for example, using the metaphor of a house built on Planet Earth, and the house right now is exceeding the limits of the planet. So the foundation of the house is a foundation of separability, of the separation between humans and the land, and then there is the higher accusation of different animals in relationship to each other, with those that can reason being at the top of the scale. Then also within humanity, [there is] the hierarchy between cultures and how they contribute to this single story of progress, development, evolution, and civilization.
Then we would have two carrying walls, one carrying wall being the modern nation-state, which we tend to think about as protecting its people. But the history of the modern nation-state is to actually protect property and the dispensation of rights, civil rights, labor rights, and human rights only occurs when there is an interest convergence between the protection of property and the protection of people. The other carrying wall would be the wall of enlightenment humanism, which is one specific way of relating to knowledge where there is this attachment to universality, to trying to describe the world in order to control it. It's a mode of relating to knowledge where other cultures would only be perceived as contributing if they have the same orientation, right? So whatever doesn't fit in that wall is perceived as invalid to the upkeep of the house of modernity.
There have been different types of roofs for this house, and the current roof is a roof of shareholder-speculative financial capitalism, which is one that is very harmful to what's happening within the house. It's a structurally damaged roof because it's focused on profit and it is largely anonymous. We're all invested: whoever uses a credit card or invests in pension funds is invested in the success of this roof, with the success of this roof happening at the expense of other people and of the planet. So the house of modernity itself is perceived to be something that for some, doesn't include everybody. And that's true, it doesn't. But the main problem is not a problem of exclusion.
The problem is that the creation, upkeep, and maintenance of the house happens at the expense of the planet and of people. It is predicated on expropriation, destitution, dispossession, and genocide.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, you touched on something that stood out to me because I've been thinking about this and I haven't had the proper words to articulate it per se. But this whole idea of rights to me, I don't know if it's indicative that there have been conflicting interests between, say, properties or corporations and people. And we've created conditions where a lot of people have been barred from open and free access to our basic survival needs and therefore the concept of rights in and of itself is even necessary.
Vanessa Andreotti: Part of the discussion, if we could go back to the idea of the house, is that there is an understanding of basic needs that is based on the minimal comforts that the house provides. Then the question would be who has access to the house, who has access to these minimal provisions, in terms of ideas about sanitation, access to water, and so on and so forth. But if you think about it in the context of the house, then the question would be, do we expand the house or do we restrict the housing and create other possibilities for people to move around the house? Because if they are knocking on the door wanting to enter the house, what's our relationship to them?
There's another way of thinking about it, which is that the house itself is unsustainable. It's both created and maintained through social and ecological violence, and it's inherently unsustainable. In that case, we need to be thinking about what has the house tried to eliminate in terms of possibilities of living, understanding basic needs, and understanding rights in a different way.
So for example, if we're thinking about toilets—this is one of the things that I address in the book. We have been led to think that flush toilets are the best solution to the problems of sanitation. Many people today are questioning that because flush toilets are also extremely unsustainable in many other layers. If you're thinking about it, they may be better in some context or in certain layers in terms of managing disease, for example. But even that, depending on the context and depending on where shit goes, it may not be the most appropriate solution.
Dry toilets have had a bad rap. In relationship to the house, back to the discussion, they are a much more sustainable solution that not only helps us manage human waste but also helps us understand the whole dynamic metabolism that we are part of, right? So it's not just that they won't use water, but they also help us understand that there's no disconnect, there's no “away,” the shit doesn't go away somewhere. This “somewhere” is also part of life itself and also part of what we have to consider as we consider different needs and different possibilities for existing in the planet.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. So we're really not just going for equal rights within this unsustainable house. We really have to question the foundations and how the entire house and way of living have been set up. And the synopsis of your book shares that it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, it presents us with a challenge to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities and the living earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we're a part of.
From what I interpreted of your message, our maturation calls on us to not just do differently and to not just know differently, but to be differently and to embody differently. So can you illuminate this further for us and share why? Perhaps learning new information and changing what we're doing might not be enough and that there is a deeper deprogramming and reconditioning that we need?
Vanessa Andreotti: Hmm. Yeah. The self-actualization in learning more information can also be perceived to be a form of consumption, which then goes back to a mode of consumption within the house of modernity or consumption as the mode to relate to the world.
We consume not only stuff but also knowledge, experiences, critique. And this consumption, many times, is not even digested. It is the consumption for consumption's sake so that we can feel better.
I think that that pattern of consumption also indicates that we tend to use, for example, hope and future forecasting as a way to escape the difficulties of the present. In my research collective, we talk a lot about the metaphor or analogy of composting shit. If we want to jump this process of composting to go to a better world without actually doing the work that needs to be done, which might be not what do you want to do, but that's the work that is necessary right now.
So part of this maturity is actually shifting the waste that we've been conditioned to think about, [and] even, what is the work by the house of modernity and within the house of modernity, right? Part of this mode of consumption is also to consume what's pleasurable but to give us a sense of certainty of control, of authority, of autonomy, and a sense of arbitration in the world that is also connected with a sense of righteousness and gratefulness. So this mode of relating to the world is antithetical or is not conducive to us actually sitting with the proverbial shit that we have to compost together. It's not just individual shit that we have to compost, but also collectively, the collective shit that comes from the bad decisions that have been made in the past that has brought us to the mess we are in.
Many people want to think about hope and the future as a better space, but this "better space" depends on what we do today, on us building our capacity to compost this shit, which is not necessarily a pleasurable process.
It is a process that requires stamina and that requires us to be able to sit with painful, difficult, uncomfortable things without relationships falling apart, without us feeling overwhelmed or immobilized, or wanting to be rescued from discomfort. So if this is the first step for me, it is a call for maturity, for us not to turn our back to what is difficult and complicated and complex and painful.
So if we keep up just the mode of relating to knowledge as a form of consumption and self-actualization, we might be missing out on the opportunity to really change this moment of relationship to a mode where we can not only know differently but exist differently together. For that, we would need to tap capacities or reactivate capacities that have been exiled by the house of modernity. Capacities of knowing and capacities of being that are part of our neurobiology and part of our bodies, but that haven't been encouraged within the house that we are conditioned by.
Kamea Chayne: I know you're good friends with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe. So I'm hearing a lot of common threads in what you're saying and what I've been thinking about, especially being affirmed by my conversation with Bayo, is that we're often giving too much weight to our words and language and human-created concepts because we create these concepts essentially based off of reality to try to make sense of the world. and yet a lot of us base our realities on these concepts, rather than remembering that it's the other way around—that we base our reductive concepts off of reality.
You've shared about our need to live beyond meaning as well. What do you mean by this, and how might this shift the ways that we approach the whole idea of coming up with solutions to address our converging crises?
Vanessa Andreotti: Yeah, that's a very good question and a very interesting discussion. So part of enlightenment humanism, which is one of the walls of the house, is this attempt to index the world into language. So we describe reality in order to be able to control it and to predict it. And in that, to a certain extent, it works.
But if our relationship with language is one of indexing, we may miss out on the fact that reality's much more dynamic, and it exceeds what words can say and do.
So one of the ways to relate to language differently is to see words as entities of reality itself that do things in the world. If you take that position— which is what I played with in the book—if you take the position that language is an entity that works through you, that plays with you, but it also goes beyond your intentions in your own body in uttering these words, the focus of what you're doing shifts from describing something to moving something in the world.
So then, stories, for example, are trying to help things land in the world, for sometimes difficult things to land right for people. So the relationship with language and the relationship with knowledge shift from one based on a specific form of aesthetics to one based on the ethics of moving things and holding space for things, allowing things to synchronize and to work together. It's a process that requires a lot of decentering of the self, in participating in a movement that is not just of your own, that is not about you. It is about what something can do. And I think that's how it would change the way people relate to social change.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. And on a similar note, you say that our problems are not informational problems. They're basically deeper problems with our senses of being. And with that, I also wonder if in this "fight" to take down this current world order, we end up playing and mastering this game, doing the same social ladder climbing for access, hungering for control, with a righteousness to have everyone think the ways that we do in the solutions that we think are the answers and then ultimately becoming that which we despise, wouldn't we just feed into the repetition of domination and destruction and recreating more monocultures?
And so if we cannot shapeshift the ways that we show up as we create the conditions for something more beautiful to emerge, then we put ourselves at risk of furthering the same patterns, even if at the moment they may feel radical, like we're dismantling the status quo.
Vanessa Andreotti: Exactly. Yes, you said it beautifully. I think that happens quite a lot if you're focused on form because you're also coming from the same desires, right? It's not in the book, this came out of something that happened through the book, but we're trying to think about what is intelligible as subjectivity and in terms of politics within the house of modernity. We mapped five different things that make politics intelligible.
So the first thing is exceptionalism. We are looking for a sense of being special. So exceptionalism would be like if it's not this group, it’s another, it's not the right, it's the left. It's not the rest. If it's not white people, it's going to be BIPOC people. So that sense of exceptionalism, then there is a way that one group of people would be separate from the rest. Right?
Then there is the second theme which is exaltedness. This group needs to be above and great in a specific way, and this greatness needs to be reinforced by constant repetition of how great this group, activist, or party is. Then there is the externalization of culpability, which is this group is also innocent in some way. The empowerment of the ego and the expansion of entitlements are the two other things. So it's five E's: exceptionalism, exaltedness, externalization of culpability, empowerment of the ego, and expansion of entitlements.
A politics that is based on decentering ourselves and on not communality, but commonality—and not commonality as in sameness, but as in sharing the commons, sharing a world and being responsible for it—currently is basically unintelligible and unimaginable, within modernity.
Although this politics still exists within some Indigenous groups, other communities are not interested in the same game. So how to exist differently would depend on us actually learning from the existing forms that are not working so that we can make different mistakes and experiment with things that can actually interrupt some of this pattern. But we cannot interrupt something that we still idealize or that we still romanticize, and we need to figure out a way of getting out of the seesaw, a way of relating to the world again, where we either romanticize and idealize or we pathologize and vilify.
We have to figure out a way of getting to zero: where we can see it with the good, the bad, the ugly, the broken, and the messed up, within ourselves and all around us, within humanity, within us, rather than romanticizing idealized humanity. I think that an approach more based on decolonial forms of sobriety, maturity, discernment, and accountability would be about sitting with what it is in the present and with the broken parts, with the messed up parts, the beautiful parts, without trying to select what makes us feel better. That's hard because most people won't want to do that.
Kamea Chayne: This may speak to the role of the different types of societal conditioning that we receive, but from your talk Beyond Inclusion, you share that different generations have had different ideas of inclusion based on the context in which they grew up. So, for example, earlier generations may view inclusion as assimilation, then later ones might view inclusion as representation. And then even later, ones might view inclusion as basically requiring us to move beyond inclusion, requiring a systemic overhaul.
Can you elaborate more on this clash that you see between different generational ideals of what it means to better the lives of their people? And perhaps how it leads us to understand things like aspirations and ideals as fluid and conditioned by broader cultures and context of the time?
Vanessa Andreotti: Yeah, and conditioned by what's happening historically around you as well. So we've been having these intergenerational conversations both with Indigenous communities, because this is what is happening there, and also with the mainstream.
So looking at how, for example, for societies in the Global North, we've had a bubble of prosperity for people who were born just after the war that were presented with certain promises of progress of incremental social mobility. For them, now in their 70s or late 60s, it's very difficult to understand why people who are in their twenties or late teens want to bring down monuments and statues. They're saying we need something very different. The generations in between are also being asked to do this role of translation and in mediating a little bit of this conversation.
We've been talking a lot about the role of translation, not just the translation of words, but the translation of feelings in cultural context and time in temporality in this conversation. So thinking about Gen Z, the young people that are coming and saying we need decolonization, we need to go beyond inclusion, inclusion is not enough. They are looking at climate change. They're looking at the world and the amount of information we have and the hyper-complexity and volatility of what they're facing and saying, “The promises that were made to the generations before are not promises that can hold for this generation.” They know that this incremental social mobility is not going to happen.
I was talking to two students yesterday who were saying it feels like they have to live their lives based much more on the present, rather than making plans to have a family or to buy a house, for example. So my daughter actually described it once when she was 16 as watching the world is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You don't want to be here to see what's going to happen next, but there's also a desire within you to have the Gucci bag, that is creating the context where the train is being derailed, right?
So there is a generation that already, also because of technology, has more ability to deal with different layers of complexity. Talking to a generation that never had to do that and that had an analog childhood, in most of their lives, they haven't had to deal with this tipping point. That's where we're reaching right now. And that becomes very difficult for people to feel each other's pain, to see what each generation is going through. But for Gen Z, too, there is a sense that there is no adult in the room and that they, with what they have, actually have more knowledge about technology and about different perspectives, and maybe even about complexity that they can make that change. And the problem is that because there is no precedent for this, eldership in this is something that has been negatively affected.
So how do we? Because one of the functions of different generations would be to provide to each other some sense of what works and what doesn't work in what context. We not only have lots of time to do that to technology, but we have also lost the practice of documenting this in oral histories or even in written form, what we would like to pass down. It has become much more of a somewhat narcissistic exercise about ourselves rather than what we're going to be leaving to those that come after us.
We have a project around that which is called the Pledge of Generations, where we invite people to pledge to work intergenerationally. So the pledge talks about what you would pledge to two generations before you and two generations after you and to the generations right before and after yours, and also to your generation. What would be the mode of relationship and the call to responsibility that you would want to have as a basis for the conversations? It has been very interesting to see how different generations respond to the Pledge of Generations itself.
But we have seen that even for young people, there is a sense that if there are no adults in the room in the world at large, there is a yearning for that connection to happen. Although there's also a lot of anger because they feel shortchanged by the other generations that have created a world that is being inherited that is a mess. There's also the need for some stories to be passed down, especially stories about what went wrong so that they can learn from the mistakes already made and make only different mistakes in the future.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I really think that understanding our generational differences in terms of the different contexts gets us to be less reactionary towards our broad intergenerational disagreements because we understand perhaps how different generations have come to think and be the ways that they are.
And parallel to this, your book shares practices that guide us to interrupt our satisfaction with modern colonial desires that cause harm. So I wonder, given that our dominant culture has been severed from a lot of place-based ecological systems, if this is an invitation for us to realign our desires with what feels pleasurable for our greater bodies of our landscapes and planet.
Vanessa Andreotti: So in our project, we make a distinction, it's a strategic one and it's artificial in many ways: between desires and yearnings. It was just a sense of separation that has been imposed. But I think we are deeply entangled still with the Earth and with each other, and we have now deactivated the capacity to feel each other's pains. Not entirely, though.
So that yearning stems from the understanding that is something that is wrong, you can use the word disease or greed or destruction, that is happening around us. This affects our bodies, and part of our bodies know, and it may be that we may be numbed or deactivated, but it's there. And from that, a yearning for a different form of existence emerges.
But this yearning then in the supermarket society that we are conditioned to live in becomes associated with desires.
Pleasure is one thing. Joy is another, right? I think that that your team is looking for the joy of being together. The joy of overcoming struggle together. Pleasure is something different. Pleasure is much more associated, in our society, with dopamine, which is this sense of achievement of getting somewhere or feeling superior to other people. There's the sense of exceptionalism as well, right? Or it's all a sickness.
It's also associated with oxytocin, which is the sense of a transactional relationship where you have control and you are accepted on your terms, rather than seeing yourself as something much bigger than what your identity can contain, for example, and engaging in the relationship for growing together, growing old together and having the joys of this process of maturity, including the mistakes and failures that are part of it.
There's also endorphins and adrenaline that are mobilized in different ways. But the sense of righteousness is also a desire for that adrenaline, for feeling alive and doing something. So I think there are other possibilities for grounding this yearning for healing and for being together, and a chemistry that has been exiled from modernity and that Indigenous peoples still have practices that remind us that another way of being not only in conceptual terms, but in terms of our neurobiology.
Another way of being is possible. We are much more than what we have become.
And we could access other forms of existence by, for example, looking at the production and reabsorption of serotonin in our bodies and how different cultures have practices that that work precisely with that. Like when we talk about ayahuasca, for example, or mescaline, or psilocybin, we would be looking at practices that try to open up different ways of experiencing the world with more responsibility, although they are consumed, especially in the West, in a very different way as personal self-care, personal healing.
In communities that are committed to entanglement and the responsibilities of entanglement, these medicines are not used as a personal practice, but as a collective practice of understanding and opening up this exiled capacity so that the Earth can dream through you and the plants can tell you what's the next step for health and well-being for your community and for the planet.
So I think the Western culture has focused a lot, as we talked about before, on concepts in an articulated knowledge. But it is in the sense of of being alive and part of something much wider and bigger than your own body and your own temporality. That's another way of being maybe possible, but this cannot come if we don't interrupt this in the Western culture: the other desires for individuality, autonomy, authority, arbitration, and control.
It requires a surrender of a specific form of subject so that something else can emerge in its place, and that's why we talk about hospice. Saying “hospicing modernity” is not just hospicing modernity as it dies around us, but as it dies within ourselves and that happens in many different ways. But we feel it when the promises that modernity issues are no longer working. You can see that the promise is broken and then try to find somebody who can fix it. Or you can see them as unrealistic and harmful from the outset and then set your compass towards something else, something that is more sober, more mature, more discerning and more responsible ultimately.
Kamea Chayne: That's so beautifully said, and I'm really looking forward to re-listening to this conversation so I can really feel everything that you said to my core. But to tie what we discussed here to a current happening, you've been working with the Last Warning Campaign, which focuses on protecting the Amazon's Indigenous peoples and forests in Brazil.
So what are some lessons you think we can learn from this, and how does the work of maturing ourselves and our ways of being tied into this very material and more urgent work of supporting Indigenous communities and landscapes facing threats of destruction right now?
Vanessa Andreotti: Right. So, yeah, the campaign is about the Brazilian government passing several bills and also a landmark Supreme Court case that can cancel Indigenous rights in order to open up the Amazon for predatory enterprises. It is an emergency, because the pain of the forest and the pain of the guardians of the forests who are part of the forest is generally invisibilized in the discussion. Sometimes we have people trying to defend the Amazon as a place without people. But the Amazon performs the functions to the plan, in relationship to carbon filtering and water cycles, because the Indigenous people were there in that part of the forest itself. So it is a tragedy, basically.
But what I think the campaign is trying to do is prepares to witness something extremely painful that is happening right now. But that can actually reactivate some of those capacities that we've been talking about if we do it with attention and care, right? So how do we witness something this big happening? Because if the Amazon goes, climate change will accelerate exponentially because of its functions, right? And the fact that we would be shooting our own foot and creating another wave of genocide in Brazil in relationship to the Indigenous peoples who are putting their lives on the line to protect something that is important for all of us is something that is part of that turning towards what needs to be done rather than what we want to do. Turning towards composting the shit.
So I think the campaign itself is geared towards supporting the communities to be able to exist in this in this context and to advocate for the forest and for all of us. So we talk a lot about placing Indigenous rights and Indigenous people at the center of the climate agenda. But more than that, it's about learning to educationally relate to what is happening from a very different space, even if we can't have any immediate big outcome coming out of this because the campaign that the government has mounted against the Indigenous people in the Amazon is really well thought through. It's extremely clever.
So we have, for example, several bills going through Congress, and even if some of them don't pass, the same text is in the other bills. So they will find a way legally to be able to to do what they want. And we will have to witness this.
But this witnessing is something that moves something as well, and that may call us to a much greater level of responsibility. And that's, I think, what we hope for.
Kamea Chayne: And for listeners wanting to learn more about this, they can head to lastwarning.org. And the last thing I would love to touch on because I was personally so moved by it. I didn't know how much I needed to read this until I did, but you coauthored a book called Radical Tenderness, which it's quite short but so impactful to read that people can probably go through it within 10 to 20 minutes or so. But it's a part of the broader artistic pedagogy collaboration, engaged dis-identification and the collaboration attempts to translate post representational modes of engagement into embodied experiments that reconfigure the connections between reason, affect, and relationality.
Just to give an example to our listeners in one reiteration, you say that "radical tenderness is being critical and loving at the same time.” My soul and being resonated really deeply, particularly with this one. And in another iteration, you share that "radical tenderness is assisting with the birth of something new, which is potentially, but not necessarily, wiser...without suffocating it with projections." I just wanted to preface my final question with this to see where you might go with it.
But as we wrap up, what might radical tenderness orient us towards as we ponder more about how we're going to grow up and show up for ourselves and our planet, even with all of the contradictions that modernity might force us to live with or confront.
Vanessa Andreotti: I think for me...
What radical tenderness does, or tries to do, in the world, is to try to get us to walk this tightrope between naive hope and hopelessness, which are two traps that we often fall into.
If you're involved in social activism, in walking on this tightrope, you have to walk with a bar of the weight of both rational rigor. But it's not just one type of rationality. There's the reasoning that needs to be rigorous, but the relationality also needs to be rigorous in this work. We talk about four “ages:” which is honesty, which is the ability to sit with everything; then there's humility, the ability to center yourself; hyper-reflexivity, which is about tracing where things come from and where they're going to and also how we are complicit in harm...
And humor, because in order to be able to to carry the weight of what we have to do together, we need a light container and communities of struggle have shown us over and over and over again that humor, even in its near biological relief, they really help us carry each other in a good way. It has to be the right kind of humor, but laughter is part of the struggle. And if we if if we don't have that relief, we end up burning out. So we've learned that the hard way is if burnt out in the collective, many people have burnt out, especially by the people have worked out so many times that we had to have this lesson hammered to us that...
It's important to look at the miracles. It's important to look at the small things. It's important to laugh at ourselves, and to laugh together.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Vanessa Andreotti: So Finding the Mother Tree is a book that I'm reading at the moment, and it's making me think about myself in relation to the forest that is across the world in a very different way.
Kamea Chayne: What are some personal mottos, mantras or practices you engage with to stay grounded?
Vanessa Andreotti: The compass of decolonial forms of sobriety, maturity, discernment and accountability. So the idea of not acting from compulsion or addictions and figuring out what's happening on my personal bus of people with who's driving and what the passengers are doing?
Kamea Chayne: And finally, what are some of your biggest sources of inspiration right now?
Vanessa Andreotti: Working in a collective is one of the most rewarding things I think that I found and what helps us not do this work in isolation, but also the communities, the practices of the communities and the support that we have from the Indigenous communities we work with in Brazil and in Canada, always offering ceremonies and medicines and practices that that help us not have our vitality depleted. I think that's very important.
Kamea Chayne: Vanessa, thank you so much for joining me here on the show. It's been an honor to have you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Vanessa Andreotti: So if we start from the premise that our dreams have been colonized, our unconcious is colonized, paying attention to the decolonization of the unconscious, so that we can allow the Earth to dream through us, which requires this decentering of the self, right? So Green Dreamers can mean a number of different things, but one of them would be allowing the Earth to dream through us, and the work necessary to get to that point could be framed as a decolonization of our unconscious.
