Earthseeds, Memory, and Mancala with Field Meridians

In response to the crisis our communities are facing in Crown Heights, Field Meridians’s Fall Nature School is offering programs that support the creation of tools for ecological and social resilience and restoration. We will be grounding our artist facilitated workshops and activities in Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 speculative fiction, Parable of the Sower, continuing our year-long dialogue with this transformative text. In it, the protagonist Lauren Olamina begins to craft a book of tenets that organizes a religion she dubs Earthseed against and through a time of environmental catastrophe, societal collapse and great violence.

Using the Kinfolk monument to Octavia Butler as a starting point, we’ll be discussing the importance of seeds—seed saving, planting, and harvesting—in the text. Participants will then "sow and harvest" with a round of mancala, the oldest board game in the world, before gathering a few seeds to plant in your own garden this spring.

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