This workshop, held at Gloria’s Project Space, combined a hands-on plant-dyeing-as-inquiry project with open and approachable conversation about death, a fact of life that is both universal and seldom discussed.

If the system is broken, we should throw it away and try a new one, right? But what if systems are meant to be broken because breaking is always happening? The breakdown of structures redistributes their energy and materials, making these available for the growth of new bodies and behaviors. Let’s compost our system.

When I was little, I dreamed about receiving a mysterious box in the mail full of silky ribbons, lace and dresses. In my memory, the scene is something like the moment in A Little Princess where the main character comes back to her attic garret and finds it transformed into an rhapsody of oriental carpets and silk. Such spontaneous emanations of pleasure can wake us up to whole new realms of possibility.