Murmurations: Wisdom From Women Changemakers
It’s more important than ever to commit to collective practices that generate hope, love, care, and community.
Murmurations
In 2021, adrienne maree brown created Murmurations, a monthly column exclusively for YES! Media. The author, emergent strategist, and thought-leader spent the next year exploring accountability—within oneself, community, and as part of a global ecosystem. brown also marked each solstice and equinox with a “Spell for a Season.” By the end of 2022, brown was eager to grow the chorus of voices amplified within these Murmurations, and curated a new cohort of emergent strategists to author the monthly column and seasonal spells. Readers can expect the same depth, nuance, and empathy they’ve come to expect from Murmurations, with an even greater breadth of experience, perspective, and wisdom to share.
Murmurations: Flying Into the Spring Equinox
Like moths emerging from a cocoon, the spring equinox beckons us to embrace our re-imagined selves.
Murmurations: The Healing Power of Film
Centering healing justice in the filmmaking process offered this creator—and everyone involved in the film—a powerful way to begin to heal core wounds.
Murmurations: Making Space for Intentional Adaptation
Moving at the speed of trust has allowed this cooperative to create new visions of abundance—far beyond what white supremacist patriarchal hegemony deemed possible.
Murmurations: Balancing Duality on Winter Solstice
Alexis Pauline Gumbs offers a Winter Solstice spell to help us embrace the darkness and light of this moment.
Murmurations: There Will Be Living, After All
If we do not turn away from our grief, we can use it to craft armor, building a new demographic that will rise from the rubble to dance like dust.
Murmurations: Moving from Punishment to Accountability
How can we hold accountable systems that are designed only to understand punishment?
Murmurations: Growing Through Grief
Grief not only reminds us that we have loved, it serves as an acknowledgement of our divine humanity.
Murmurations: Loneliness As Fermentation
Solitude can create something new out of the process of decay.
Murmurations: at the equinox
Poet Alta Starr invites us to embrace the stillness of the quiet, fleeting moment between seasons as we approach the equinox.
Murmurations: Black Imagination Can Build a Better World
Black Imagination is an abolitionist tradition that offers us an invitation to act with hope amid times of great transition.
Murmurations: Experiencing Urban Earth Beauty
A note from adrienne maree brown: Suhaly offers her healing touch to the world through her Moon Mother Apothecary. I always have one of her healing salves on me. She
Murmurations: Lessons from Pride and Parades
In a world obsessed with the concept of forever, Cherizar Crippen encourages us to recognize the beauty in impermanence.
A Summer Solstice Spell for Prideteenth
To mark the summer solstice, Juneteenth, and Pride month, Junauda Petrus offers a spell rooted in the erotics of abolition.
Murmurations: Embracing Black Earth Wisdom
Leah Penniman encourages us to recognize Earth as teacher, text, and kin.
Murmurations: Grow the Chorus
adrienne maree brown reflects on the lessons they’ve learned authoring this column for the past year, and lays out a path for what’s to come.
Murmurations: A Final Winter Solstice Spell
In their final “Spell for a Season,” adrienne maree brown explores the beauty and grief that come with a year that felt at once interminable and brief.
Murmurations: Accountable Endings
The end of a world built on toxic ideas of supremacy can make way for a better, more collective and connected existence, writes adrienne maree brown.
Murmurations: Accountable to Our Ancestors
adrienne maree brown ponders how (and whether) we should be accountable to ancestors who held beliefs vastly different from our own.
Murmurations: Accountable to Earth
In their September column, adrienne maree brown asks how we can hear beyond the human cry for help.
Murmurations: A Spell for the Fall Equinox
As the days get shorter and the nights get longer, adrienne maree brown offers a seasonal spell to honor the fall equinox.
Murmurations: Breaking Is Part of Healing
Talking about endings can be scary, but they are necessary if we are to create something better together, writes adrienne maree brown.
Murmurations: Love Looks Like Accountability
Being accountable to ourselves and in our relationships with others helps to create a broader culture of accountability, writes adrienne maree brown.
Murmurations: Returning to the Whole
To heal ourselves, we must remember that we are a small part of a much greater whole, writes adrienne maree brown in their June column.
Murmurations: A Summer Solstice Spell
With longer days comes more joy, but also more risk, adrienne maree brown reminds us on the summer solstice.
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