An invitation to join us in the cracks

On next week's workshop - come as you are

Jul 24, 2025

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
-Leonard Cohen, Anthem

Beloveds,

This is an invitation and last call to join me and my dear friends Chel Viteri and Zia Kandler of Mazorca Facilitation for our workshop next week on Cultivating Spaciousness in the Cracks. The workshop is sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds, everyone welcome, and is offered in the spirit of heart, creativity, collaboration, co-creation, and cariño.

Join us on July 30th, 12-1:30pm US Central Time. Register here (and if you have issues with PayPal or need free entry, please reach out to me directly).

I invite you - yes, you, dear one! - to join us in this exploration of cultivating spaciousness and agency amidst the crushing conditions many of us are feeling in the present moment. Come join us as we carve out space for reflection, community, and connection.

We hope this space will leave you feeling rooted and connected, to yourself, your place in the world, and each other. We hope the workshop gives you a space for reflection and some framing and tools for thinking about agency and action amidst the struggles of this moment, and ways for thinking about how you, uniquely you, from your position and location, can create more space and possibility amidst the challenges of today - never alone, always acting-with1. We hope you leave feeling empowered, grounded, and reflective.

This workshop was born from an ongoing conversation among us (the first conversation Chel and I had four years ago, as part of my dissertation research, was about cracks!), and a desire to share the space we were creating together in our conversations, and to create an imperfect offering-of-the-heart for this moment. It was created in the spirit of knowing so many people around us are wanting to offer their hearts and service to the moment, but feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenges we face collectively.

We find the framing2 of cracks to be generative for this moment, offering spaciousness itself. Many decolonial scholar-activists - among them Catherine Walsh, Maria Lugones, and Bayo Akomolafe - talk about the cracks. Catherine Walsh, in her book co-authored with Walter Mignolo, describes the praxis of decoloniality as “the continuous work to plant and grow an otherwise despite and in the borders, margins, and cracks of the modern/colonial/capitalist/heteropatriarchal order” (p. 101).

I like to think of the cracks as the places where I feel the tension of the pain and possibilities within dominant systems most directly in my life. I feel it most acutely in my position in academia (I wrote about a version of this in my article for the Ecoversities Alliance about my dissertation as a crack/in the cracks). My field, peace education, is inherently critical of dominant educational systems, and yet, we teach within them. This is a crack. I teach about (and for) education for liberation, but the system of higher education was not designed for such. As the great bell hooks wrote in Teaching to Transgress, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy,” and her words guide me as I try to disrupt hierarchies in education and plant seeds of possibility with my students - space to center collaboration, co-creation, healing, collective well-being, care, and love. The classroom is a crack, and in it, we plant seeds for worlds where it is easier to love3.

What fractures do you inhabit? Where do you feel the pains and possibilities of the present moment most acutely in your life?

Nature loves a crack.

Nature reminds us that nothing is permanent and everything gets composted and returns to the earth, whether that is in a week or a millennium.

This is particularly true in the tropics, where the climatic conditions mean life cycles so rapidly. Once when I left for a few days to teach in Colombia, when I returned home, there was a fuzzy, thick, white mold growing in the tiles of my house, just from the floor not being walked on for a few days. I imagined how long it would take for the building to be consumed by the forest. Not long, I imagined.

We exist amidst systems and structures - capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism - that can seem static, permanent, fixed, impenetrable.

But all of these systems have cracks within them. And in the cracks exist possibilities to plant otherwise.

We exist within the cracks - in this tension of pain and possibilities. We each inhabit cracks based on our unique positions and locations, on who and where we are. From our specific locations and positions, we have unique possibilities for creating openings and possibilities.

The cracks become a question: where can I create more possibility amidst these crushing conditions? Where can I find expansiveness amidst the tension? Where there seems to be a binary, an either/or option, where can I find a third way, a weird and wild path?

The cracks invite us into different questions: What would happen if I let go of fixing, of trying to find solutions? What possibilities would that open up? What would grow if I planted the weirdest, most loving, caring thing I can possibly think of here?

You can’t control the cracks. They have agency of their own. They grow and extend and expand beyond our human agency. And yet, we can contribute. We can plant otherwise. We can seed futures beyond present systems. We can act-with4 them.

Join us - come play! I will close by extending this invitation with my invitations poem (you can read more about my pedagogical invitations here), which is very much in the spirit that we offer this workshop:

I invite you, and you are welcome.
I invite you
To bring - as much as you want to - of your wisdom, life experience, questions, and complexities into this space.
I invite us, together,
To collaborate and co-create our space and time.
To slow down.
To sit with the mess and stay with the trouble⁴ of building a more loving, peaceful, just world.
To notice our interbeing and entanglement, both with what is beautiful and what is hard.
To engage in rigorous study, rigorous care, rigorous relationships.
To be stretched and challenged, but not stressed unnecessarily.
To center care, well-being, and healing in our learning process.
To be as present as possible during our time together - a radical act in a distracted world.
To value ways of knowing beyond the written word, the intellectual, and the rational.
To learn from each other, the wisdom of our bodies, the space we are in, the toucans, iguanas, trees, breeze - the beautiful land that is holding us and teaching us.
To embrace mystery and uncertainty.
To find the conversations that only the people in this room can have^[1].
To have fun together and play as much as possible!

We will slow down and cultivate spaciousness in the cracks we inhabit together. We hope to see you there!

With love and care,

Stephanie

P.S. If you can’t make it yourself but know someone who might benefit from and enjoy this workshop, will you please share it with them? Sharing is caring!

Enchantable

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