Podcast Summary: On Being with Krista Tippett Episode: adrienne maree brown — On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life (July 3, 2024)

Episode Overview

This rich, expansive conversation explores the transformative power of radical imagination, spiritual practice, emergent strategy, and collective healing. adrienne maree brown—author, facilitator, and activist—joins Krista Tippett to discuss how we live, change, and move towards lives worth living in tumultuous times. Drawing on the wisdom of the natural world, science fiction, and social movements, brown unpacks ways of seeing and being hopeful within complexity, bringing language and practices to guide us through personal and social transformation.

Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. Spiritual Childhood & Family Foundations

• adrienne's Roots: She describes her upbringing in an interracial family on the horizon between shame-driven evangelical Christianity and an action-based, gratitude-oriented spirituality. Nature and compassion were core practices.

  “We were always like, wow, we get to be here. Wow. Like just be amazed by this world…” —brown [05:15]

• Intergenerational Spirituality: Recounts reconciling with her white evangelical grandfather over time, finding shared ground in their spiritual experience and love [06:35-08:38].

2. Imagination as Power: Science Fiction & Octavia Butler

• Influence of Butler: Octavia Butler’s work opened up new possibilities and solution-oriented imagination, centering Black girls as protagonists and emphasizing preparedness and adaptability.

  “She wrote so many stories where the main message was like, change is coming. You can be prepared for it, and you don’t have to be a victim of it. You can actually shape it.” —brown [11:17]

• Visionary Fiction & Radical Imagination: Walida Imarisha’s term "visionary fiction" and Terry Marshall’s “imagination battle” concept: we live inside imaginations projected by others, often shaped by scarcity and hierarchy [13:23-15:15].

3. Organizing as Time Travel & Making the Future

• Organizing = Science Fiction: Activists are future-shapers, not simply resisting injustice but projecting into futures and learning from the past [17:00].
• Creating New Worlds: brown parallels her parents' marriage to the act of making worlds that don’t yet exist—taking imagination from vision to reality [18:07-19:20].

4. Lexicon of Transformation: Emergent Strategy, Fractals & Ecosystems

• Emergent Strategy Defined: Drawing on Nick Obolinsky’s definition of emergence, brown describes how complex systems arise from simple interactions.

  “How do we get in a right relationship with change that allows us to harness and shape things towards community, towards liberation, towards justice?” —brown [21:13]

• Learning from Nature: Practices and strategies are drawn from observing mushrooms, dandelions, birds—valuing adaptability, interdependence, transformation [22:00-24:39].

Memorable Nature Analogy (Mushrooms and Organizations)

“Mushrooms, they’re our great detoxer. They're the ones who understand that nothing needs to be wasted, that everything can be used in some way.” —brown [24:43]
brown compares organizational life cycles to mushrooms: sometimes, the healthiest action is composting—letting projects end so new things can emerge [25:35-28:03].

5. Change, Fractals, and Practicing Democracy

• Change is Hard for Humans: Emergence doesn’t wait for us to be ready; change is ongoing and challenging at a creaturely level [29:00-30:34].
• Fractals as Wisdom: brown applies the idea that small systems mirror large ones. True democracy can only exist at the top if practiced at the smallest levels—with families, neighbors, and communities [34:04-35:34].

  “Every single large system...is made up of small things, of humans either having or not having necessary conversations.” —brown [33:08]

6. Transformative Justice and Accountability

• Beyond Punishment: Adding “transformative” to justice or resilience means getting to the root, not just rearranging surface symptoms [42:32].

  “I don’t want to be in a situation where we punish one person at a time...Transformative justice says, actually, that’s not working. Why don’t we get to the root system?” —brown [42:57]

• Collective Skill-Building: Citing Mariame Kaba, brown stresses that moving away from punitive systems requires communities to learn conflict resolution and mediation skills rather than relying on the carceral state [47:07-48:52].

7. Processing Harm, ‘Cancel Culture,’ and Conflict

• On ‘We Will Not Cancel Us’: brown shares her experience witnessing toxic call-out culture and the harm of disposability in movements. She advocates for honest accountability and love-based processing of harm, drawing from both ancient and emergent practices.

  “We become the toxicity we long to heal. We become a tool of harm. When we were trying to be...a balm. Oh, unthinkable thoughts now...I want us to live. I want us to want to live in this world, in this time together.” —brown (reading) [56:24]

8. Pleasure Activism: Joy as Justice

• Pleasure as Measure of Freedom: Advocates pleasure not as frivolity but as a necessary component of liberation and healing, especially for traumatized or marginalized individuals.

  “Pleasure is not a frivolous thing, actually. It’s a measure of freedom, that when you are free...you can feel pleasure.” —brown [60:05]

• Creating Magnetic Movements: Joy and satisfaction in activism are crucial; movements must be irresistible, as Toni Cade Bambara said [62:23].

9. Grief, Fear, and Imagination’s Double-Edge

• Fear is imagination’s shadow, shaping perceptions of threat and scarcity; recognizing this lets us reorient towards life-affirming possibilities [64:32-65:01].

  “Supremacy is our ongoing pandemic. It partners with every other sickness to tear us from life or from lives worth living.” —brown [65:51]

10. Living as One: Interconnectedness and Practice

• Moving Towards Life & Oneness: brown, referencing Grace Lee Boggs, grounds liberation work in everyday practice—how we treat each other and set boundaries, and how our micro-practices form the foundation for societal change [74:13-76:32].

  “We are one. And when I think back...that’s what we’re supposed to be figuring out. So then, if we are one, how do we do that? How do we be one interconnected living organism? And I think that’s our big human question for this time.” —brown [67:45]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Emergence & Readiness:
  “Emergence doesn’t wait for us to be ready for change.” —Tippett [29:00]

• On the Imagination Battle:
  “We live in this abundant world and we've been told it's scarce.” —brown [13:23]

• On Holding onto Vitality:
  “Trying to hold onto stuff and not let it die actually puts us in precarious positions...One of our biggest issues is we're so scared of death.” —brown [28:03]

• On Fractals in Social Change:
  “There are no isolated patterns. The universe has some favorites, and they repeat at every scale.” —brown [36:00]

• On Cancel Culture:
  “We become the toxicity we long to heal...We become a tool of harm, when we were trying to be...a balm.” —brown [56:24]

• On Pleasure as Activism:
  “I want to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences that we can have as a species.” —brown [60:05]

Important Timestamps

• Spiritual Upbringing: [03:50–05:41]
• Reconciliation with Grandfather: [06:35–08:38]
• Octavia Butler’s Influence: [09:15–12:01]
• Visionary Fiction & Imagination Battle: [13:23–15:15]
• Emergent Strategy Definition: [20:06–24:39]
• Mushrooms & Composting Organizational Life: [24:43–28:03]
• The Fractal Paradigm: [30:34–35:42]
• Transformative Justice Explained: [42:32–45:59]
• On Cancel Culture (We Will Not Cancel Us excerpt): [56:24–57:44]
• Pleasure Activism: [59:29–64:13]
• On Collective Imagination & Our Time: [65:51–68:48]
• Living as One, Practicing Transformation: [74:13–77:18]

Closing Reflections

The conversation ends with an affirmation of living into new, life-affirming patterns through intentional practice and interconnectedness. Each act, no matter how small, is a fractal of the whole; personal transformation is inseparable from the transformation of society.

“Life moves towards life, you know, that's the trick.” —brown [77:20]

Recommended Readings & Mentions:

• Emergent Strategy, We Will Not Cancel Us, Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown
• The Uses of the Erotic by Audre Lorde [61:17]
• Angela Davis, Grace Lee Boggs, Octavia Butler, Mariame Kaba (resources for transformative justice and radical practice)

For More: Visit onbeing.org for additional resources and to learn more about the ongoing work around these practices and ideas.