Resources and Inspirations

These are some of the books, podcasts, and other media that have helped shape our culture, theories of change, and shared reality. We highly recommend all of them, and will keep adding to this page as time goes on and we remember or encounter new influential works.

Books

Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman
This book provided a helpful framework for navigating conflict, especially in the early years of our formation as we coalesced across lines of oppression and privilege, and encountered challenge after challenge, while coming from extremely different (and dare we say conflicting!) learned orientations to conflict. It has helped us not be permanently stalled by fragility within conflict, while also holding all participants in compassion.

Syllabus by Lynda Barry
This gorgeous chaotic instructional guidebook to empowering and nourishing the brilliant artist of daily life that truly resides within each of us is one resource that has aided us in serving our value of Beauty. 

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, and Sara Ishikawa
A beautifully thorough guidebook for designing physical space in ways that support healthy, functioning, alive, multi-generational families and villages.  Some of Cait’s favorite patterns are “Different chairs”, “Settled Work”, “Teenager’s Cottage” and “Secret Place”. 

Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk
This book was such an inspiration! The world Starhawk creates is one in which horrible things are happening but people are using community and radical interdependence to survive the horrible things! The ways she writes queer non-monogamous relationships that uplift pleasure and joy even in the midst of climate collapse and catastrophe was so beautiful and necessary to read. We believe all of the magic she includes in this story is real…and it inspired us to really practice healing and magic together with the land and animals and each other. 

Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
Thank G*d for this extremely validating and practical guide for those of us who are deeply disillusioned with the non profit machines, patriarchal tables, and power-under wielding, privileged victim cliques that masquerade as sites of radical movement work. In searching for guidance amidst the bullshit and AMB says, biomimicry!! Look to nature and understand that shifting the smallest and most simple ways we interact with one another will create new patterns that “…intentionally change how we live in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.” Her core principles were big for us in the early years of our coalescence as a family and are woven in at the center of how we conceptualize process. She taught us to “move at the speed of trust,” find the conversation that only we can have in the present moment, and that the collective field will always be a reflection of our smallest actions. 

Stay and Fight by Madeline Ffitch
Madeline Ffitch’s Stay and Fight came into our lives at a moment where we were facing a great tear in the fabric of our reality. She not only understood the threat, the terror and the harrowing reality of the mainstream culture’s drive to destroy queer families, she validated the miraculous bonds built among those of us fighting white knuckle against it. Family building in the hellscape of capitalist ecocide is messy. It’s painful. It’s not sexy 90% of the time. And to do it while staying as far from the state’s line of sight as one can and survive…it’s a story that’s otherwise going untold. Stay and Fight is a love story covered in blood, mud and fracked natural gas. It believes in the irrevocable bonds of chosen family. Madeline Ffitch writes, “That’s what family is. The people who stick around to fight with you.” We couldn’t agree more. 

The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive by Martín Prechtel
As with all of Prechtel’s books, The Unlikely Peace, felt more like an encounter than a reading. Only this particular encounter provided the sensation of being eaten alive, digested and metabolized into a new form. This so-called “book” reaches into the fabric of the Soul, seeks out locations of the wounds of colonization, sprinkles seeds of belonging into those cracks and leaves you responsible for watering them with your grief. The medicine of this book continues you heal us from our charity (aka white supremacy) mindsets, inviting us into deeper generosity (aka reciprocity) with the Land and Her Peoples. At once a deeply vigorous education in the complex and insidious systems of domination maintained by colonial projects, and an intimate Love Letter to our Mother Earth and all the Natural Peoples who still sing and dance the Sun up every day, and a practical guidebook for Spiritual Farming~this Wonderment of written word is central to our family’s ability to embody and re embody and re embody our values.

Octavia Butler’s works
All of Octavia Butler’s works have impacted us deeply. The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents are probably the most straightforwardly applicable to the state of the world today, and instruct us to be adaptable, prepared, to pay attention to the trends that we see around us, and to build relationships across difference to survive in the changing world. We also love the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, the Seed to Harvest series, and Bloodchild, her book of short stories.

Movies

Idyll Dandy Acres by the Hussin Brothers
“You know how you play the game where you roll your dice, and the guy goes two forward and one back, and then maybe you get lucky and this and that, then you go round and round and round and finally you reach home base? And you go ‘Ahhhh!’ But then you go on to the next game. But what if you just stayed there? And never left. What would that be?” 

There is a severe lack of Possibility models out there, but for many of us IDA and Short Mountain provided early peak experiences of seeing Queer sanctuary. This gorgeous short documentary about Idyllic Dandy Acres showed us that there were trans, queer, freaks out there – elders and peers who had fought their way off the conveyor belt and were lovingly dressing one another in mildewy ball gowns to stack firewood. There was hope.

Griefwalker by Tim Wilson
Cait and Silas watched this movie at a local community center while on a camping trip and it is one piece of media that has guided our reverence of death and dying, and the culture we are still building around living in ways that will lead us towards a good death. 

Podcasts

Mother Country Radicals
This account of raising kids within a radical guerrilla anti-war, anti-racist resistance movement in the US – told by one of their now-adult children – was a rare opportunity to learn from radical elders about the complex reality of raising a family while living according to your convictions within a violent empire, and to hear reflections on successes and regrets.