“Many words are walked in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us. There are words and worlds that are lies and injustices. There are words and worlds that are truthful and true. In the world of the powerful there is room only for the big and their helpers. In the world we want, everybody fits. The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit.”

Zapatistas: Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle

The following roundtable essay from our recent issue of The Arrow Journal is a discussion between five facilitators from this seminar series who gathered to create a new course, Sensing Alternatives, in the summer of 2024. The course was a response to challenges, blocks, and variations of “stuckness” many of us had been feeling in our communities, organizations, movements, and cultural worlds. We each sensed, in our own ways, the growing fracturing and fragility of so-called progressive movements and spaces, as well as an inability for folks to meet each other in their fullness and complexity. These fractures and reductive ways of relating to one another were undermining the relational fabric of our groups, and also wearing away at the foundation of our movements.

Together, we aimed through our course to help folks catch on to these limiting habits of “one-world-worlding”, by which we refer to hegemonic tendencies of our so-called progressive spaces to suggest that there is “one right way” to think, organize, and act. As we learned to catch onto these limiting patterns, we began to explore practices and strategies for countering them through embodied practice.

We share the roundtable with you as background for our seminar series, which builds upon and deepens the work of our team and community.