It's Looming

I've tried several times to create an online platform that could hold my ideas. I've created Wordpress accounts on a late night whim, a Squarespace site created as a part of a capstone project in graduate school. A Substack newsletter meant to document my personal growth and keep track of big ideas as I encounter them.

It's never felt quite right. Each of them was too specific or constrained. There is more to food systems than the Farm Bill, but how do I talk about Hadestown on a website about agriculture? Some thoughts are meant for journals, not for public websites, but shouldn't my life experience shape my writing? Couldn't one thing hold multiple themes? Doesn't everything contain everything? So, here's the newest idea: Looming.

In the Food Systems course I currently teach, I use a framework developed by Deepa Iyer called the Social Change Ecosystem. It describes ten roles that play a part in collective action towards equity, justice, and liberation. One of those roles is the weaver. According to the framework, weavers "see the through-lines of connectivity between people, places, organizations, ideas, and movements." I immediately identified myself as a weaver. That's all I do. I listen to podcasts, watch television shows, read books, work on farms, run, dance, and draw connections every which way. In my mind, the way information is organized is just as important as the information itself. Weaving is always always the meta-theme and the method, regardless of the topic.

While discussing potential names for this project, a friend brought up the idea of a loom. My eyes widened and I shouted "LOOMING!" Two interpretations were clear to me in that moment:

One, a loom is a piece of equipment used to weave threads together into fabric. In that sense, I am a kind of loom. A weaver of ideas. Two, the word loom as a verb means something else: "to come into sight in enlarged or distorted and indistinct form," "to appear in an impressively great exaggerated form," or "to take shape as an impending occurrence." This definition also applies. The things I think about generally have to do with impending occurrences such as ecological collapse, technology changing human cultures, and societal shifts in power. These occurrences might seem shadowy and unknowable but there are storytellers, scientists, visionaries, and others who can find the threads, follow the patterns, and zoom out to see the big picture, the fabric of it all. People like Octavia Butler, Donella Meadows, Gary Snyder. I feel compelled to try my best and join them in the ways that I can.

In fact, the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.

Octavia Butler wrote those words in an essay titled "A Few Rules for Predicting the Future" which I teach in the third and last unit of my Environmental Studies course. They've stuck with me ever since I read them for the first time in the summer of 2023 while developing my curriculum. Looming is an act of hope and a leap of faith; a hand extended toward anyone who would like to read, learn, grow, and try with me, for all our sakes.