During the pandemic, my friend and collaborator Alma Tetto, wrote an essay called Radical Repair And the call for imagination, which was in part about orienting ourselves inside a fractured world by attending to the resonance and patterns of living language, tracing them back to the source of separation and the potential of experiencing revelation in total darkness. After my first reading of this essay I craved to hear it spoken, read aloud and to start a reading series centering repair.

Tailor and textile artist, Viktoria Gokun and I met at Community Chorus, a choir organized by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs that emerged in LA during the uprisings surrounding the murder of George Floyd. I mentioned to Viktoria that I was deeply in need of opportunities to merge the practical and the emotional, to do explore some kind of embodied reflection on the mending that has come to pass since the pandemic and perennial tending to grief and growth. Viktoria, had been synchronistically wanting to offer mending workshops so we decided to organize a garment repair knowledge-share in conjuction with the reading series.

Prior to moving to LA I had been living in a remote wilderness  studying permaculture and solidarity economy and felt intent on maintaining that way of life in the city.  While in LA I tended to a community of worms in a vermiculture tower that fit onto my tiny patio and when temperatures dropped - they lived inside my closet. During that time I had come to know an artist named Maru Garcia who was providing people in south central LA with soil testing kits and lead remediating plants for their backyards, parks, and schools.

I began to shred my writing for the worms as carbon offerings and felt deeply affected by the idea that my inner and my energetic mulch crop would be decomposed and recomposed into nourishment for plants who were then able to repair some of the effects of civilization's toxicity.  

A vital element of Rhizomatic Repair is the work of Laura Sullivan Cassidy, an artist and writer, dedicated to end-of-life care, who for many years, opened up her home in Seattle for community gatherings called Write On.  After telling Laura about my desire to merge the written carbon offerings into the garment mending a reading series, she divined a spell prompt called Isochronal Confirmations. 

What emerged from this confluence is a participatory ecological and intrapersonal engagement with mending called Rhizomatic Repair. Practical knowledge-share sessions give way to group writing praxis, the results of which literally feed worm communities, merging our byproducts with their own, creating compost to sprout toxin remediating botanicals and plants who will become the paper for future iterations of the practice. 

The other face of letting go is holding on, Rhizomatic Repair holds these faces in relation rather than in opposition.