Fractals + Free Will with Abrah Dresdale and Adam Brock
About the Episode
Have you ever been a part of something that, though it once served as a deep place of belonging, eventually felt like you no longer fit in that same community? Or, maybe it even became unsafe to you to be in spaces you once belonged? I’m talking about anything—like, a religion you grew up in, a social club you joined, friend groups between people with similarly marginalized identities, a bunch of guys you used to go camping with, or even the career you chose.
Like, at some point, you realized that whatever “script” you were all following was damaging to you in some way. Or you’d just grown beyond it. So then, it became clear that you needed to move on. If it was really bad, “escape” might have even been more accurate. And, to do so, you had to fully separate and dissociate from the original thing. Until you realized far later, at some point, that you actually still wanted and needed some of what you gained from those original identities and spaces?
In this conversation, I talk with Abrah Dresdale and Adam Brock aboutt the “scripts” we’ve each been born into and how those scripts have either opened doors for us or kept us locked in cages. But also, what it means to practice radical agency and self-empowerment inside of those cages, even if they’re the tightest and most constrained circumstances; how practicing radical agency in small ways can scale up to much larger, collective change; and how we can critique the stories and identities we’ve been given without “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” In other words, what it means to live “yes/and” lives, full of adaptation and creative visions for the future.
Episode Details
About Abrah (she/her)
Abrah Dresdale, M.A., is a cultural artist, visionary educator, and consultant in the fields of regenerative social design, prison food justice, and Jewish earth-based traditions. Abrah is on Faculty in the Sustainable Food and Farming program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and at Omega Institute’s Center for Sustainable Living. In founding both the nationally acclaimed Farm and Food Systems degree program at Greenfield Community College and the Franklin County Jail-to-Farm-to-College & Employment program, Abrah leads with her ability to envision systems change on the ground and enact it. As a core organizer of the Northeast Prison Food Justice movement, she has curated conference tracks on the subject at Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), Farm-to-Institution New England (FINE), and the Northeast Prison Garden Collaborative. She served as a David Bird Ecological Design Fellow to India and an Africa Conflict Transformation Fellow to Rwanda. As a cultural artist dedicated to justice and healing, she is well-versed in anti-oppression work, systemic constellations, rite of passage ritual design, and Jewish eco-social traditions. She teaches peer-to-peer counseling focused on eliminating racism. She is founder/director of Regenerate Change and author of Regenerative Design for Change Makers: A Social Permaculture Guidebook. (Launch event here.) Abrah is a spoken word poet who believes in the power of words to shape and call forth a liberated future into being. She lives with her beloved husband on a Jewish multi-family farm engaged in land-based reparations work in the Mahicantuck / Hudson Valley of New York.
About Adam (he/him)
Adam Brock is a Denver-based cultural artist practicing regenerative social design. For over a decade, he has worked to create the conditions for regenerative relationships among individuals, grassroots initiatives, and institutions throughout the country. As co-founder of food justice nonprofit, The GrowHaus, Adam led the transformation of an abandoned half-acre greenhouse into an award-winning hub for healthy food and urban agriculture. While at GrowHaus, Adam co-chaired Denver’s Sustainable Food Policy Council, spoke at TEDxMileHigh, and was named one of “Colorado’s Top Thinkers” by the Denver Post. A trained permaculture designer since 2008, Adam has led over a dozen Permaculture Design Courses and is a national leader in the field of social permaculture. In 2017, Adam published Change Here Now: Permaculture Strategies for Personal And Community Transformation, a recipe book for social change inspired by the more-than-human world. Since 2019, Adam has served as co-director at Regenerate Change, a national consulting and education group focused on regenerative social design.
What We Discuss
How they teach a kind of “social biomimicry.”
What Abrah calls the “principle of positive contagion”—a way we create our own weather patterns and exhibit personal agency, power, and free will.
How healing can ripple to the past, which is one example of fractals.
How we can create a “yes” where the world has told us there’s a “no,” like one beautiful story about a man locked in prison who nonetheless found a way to run the Boston Marathon.
How tender and exhausting it can feel to constantly have to reassert your own agency in spaces where your whole humanity isn’t seen.
The alienation we’ve all experienced in our early spiritual traditions, but how we’ve each grappled with reintegrating “ancient technologies” in ways that reflect ourselves and our values today—including the ability to discuss how some of our “new” traditions, even permaculture, often include problematic practices.
And so much more.
Sources Mentioned
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, which includes the quote “Fractal theory suggests wholeness in our organizers yields wholeness in our futures.”
Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Annals of the Former World by John McPhee, the book that Adam was reading at the time of our interview, which is showing him how the earth itself exhibits fractal patterns.
Grace Lee Boggs, and critical growth over critical mass.
Carol Sanford and working “nodally”
Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” concept in his ubiquitous TED Talk
More on Ashkenazi Jews
Here’s one video of Joanna Macy on “Deep Time”
Winona LaDuke, also mentioned by Abrah
Here’s the piece I wrote, called “Land + Love,” for a project from Sigri Strand on her “Love Indefinable” project
Here’s the documentary on Rob Bell, called “The Heretic,” and the quote I mentioned from it is actually, “Doubt and questions and curiosity aren’t leaving the tradition; they are the tradition.”
Abrah mentions Isabella Freedman, a Jewish retreat center
The Call Your Girlfriend podcast, with Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman
Info on the Tulsa Race Massacre, which Adam mentions
Saul Williams, Michael Franti, and Alixa and Naima of Climbing PoeTree—the poets that have inspired Abrah
Links on land acknowledgments and the Land Back movement:
A link to the Land Back campaign, from the NDN Collective.
Calling “land acknowledgments” “decolonized greetings” instead, which more inclusively recognizes that stolen land was also worked with stolen and forced labor—one reason why Land Back and reparations are intimately intertwined, including how 90% of black farmers have lost their land.
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Credits
Audio engineering by the team at Upfire Digital.
All of my music is provided by the in-house musicians at Slip.stream.
Episode Transcript
Coming soon, hopefully! Would you be willing to help? Email me at brandi@thisplusthat.com!
