Spring is subtle and it is dangerous. It holds the promise of thaw and thunder. In Anishinaabe culture, Ziigwan (early spring) is a time of letting go, inviting us to loosen the grip of winter, attune to the running of maple sap and harvest specific medicines.

We’ve reached full capacity for the Spring Cafe. Registration is now closed!

This Spring Café is an online, 5-day cross-cultural complexity immersion.

We are calling it a collective wisdom journey. Join us!

 

This Spring, we are inviting you into an embodied experience of decolonizing time. Working across lineages, cultures and practices we’ll explore our relationship with time as a systems leadership capacity. What is possible when we shift our perception of time? How do we hold the potential of all time at the same time? 

We will be introduced to the Anishnaabe teachings of waasa inaabidaa (we look in all directions) and held in the Ashanti teachings of Sankofa. We will retrieve the medicines that were left behind, bring a 'second attention' to the present and plant seeds and strategies for the future. We will explore non-dominant stories and languages of complexity - including visual, sonic, somatic and the deep imaginations of Lakota and Urdu - to invite us into different world views and access the liminal, the less known, the edges of awareness. There will be tea. There will be artistry. There will be what emerges in the space between us.  

Bring your quests and the questions that have you stuck or bewildered. They will be welcomed, unraveled, witnessed, and shaped with the ingredients of Spring and the wild company of our faculty, friends, guests, artists-in-residence, guides, kin, and of course, the mystery.

What are the medicines that help us navigate complex systems?

How do we nurture and protect the seeds of our new or radical ideas - and our revolutionary selves?

What systems fluencies and artistries are these times asking of us, individually and collectively? 

How do we navigate complexity when we ourselves are disoriented? And how might we partner with discomfort, ambiguity and uncertainty as generative and life-giving?

How might our practices and our own selves transform to meet the urgency and complexities of these apocalyptic times?

The Café is an inquiry into decolonizing systems thinking, mapping visible and intangible systems, and understanding our self as integral to systems.

The Café at the Edge of the World is our virtual learning space, crafted and curated by our faculty to nourish, challenge, provoke and support you so that you may bring yourself with renewed possibilities to the system to which you are committed and engaged. Here at the Café, we don’t teach about complexity, we live into it. There is an external dimension - tools and maps, theory and ways of knowing - and an internal dimension in the way we bring ourselves to our work, and the way systems live in us. Here, it’s not about answers or solutions. Instead, we cook up capacity, courage and relationship. The conversations are pathways through turbulent times and the cycles of change. The practices are grounding. The company is a bit wild and unruly. There is a long view and a deep breath.

We’ll cook up conditions for complexity learning with:

  • Healing Self and Systems

  • Embracing Uncertainty

  • Complexity Mindset

  • Strange Attractors

  • Non-linearity

  • Artistic Practice and Creativity

  • Speculative Futures

  • Emergence and Third Spacing

  • Relational Systems Thinking

  • Land practice 

  • Tea as Complexity Methodology

  • Yarning

  • Live Performance

  • Somatic Intelligence 

  • Reflective Practice

  • Inner work 

  • Systems & Story Crafting

  • Conversation and Inquiry

  • Collective Sense-Making

You’re grappling with real world challenges and asking questions to which you don’t have the answers. You are experience-rich but seek context, frameworks, practice, peers, guidance – and a space to pause and make sense of things. There is a poignancy to the particular place in which you find yourself– stuck, confused, curious, frozen, excited, inspired, overwhelmed. 

Maybe you call yourself a systems leader, or an intrapraneur, a provocateur, a complexity guide, a systems artist, an outlier. You are seeking your pack, a hearth, a welcoming fire to shed a skin and commune with others who are also on this frontier. 

We’re inviting you to come with a co-learner (see below).

We’ve reached full capacity for the Spring Cafe. Registration is now closed!

Is This For You?

How Does the Café Work?

The Café at the Edge of the World’s spring session opens for the whole week of April 17-21, 2023. 

We are inviting a dedicated group of travelers who can commit to the entire journey to join us. Each 3-hour session is itself a deep dive into complexity, systems, story and practice, and together, and the 5 days are a progression of learning experiences that build on each other. 

We will meet Monday through Friday, everyday at the Café. These are immersive, experiential, engaging learning sessions. We combine content and creative pedagogy with time to process and sense-make with the cohort, faculty, your co-conspirator and our guest guides.

Flow of the Week

Monday April 17: 1 - 4pm EST

Welcome and Orienting to Complexity

With Wolf Willow Faculty

Tuesday April 18: 1 - 4pm EST

Waasa Inaabidaa (Looking in All Directions)

With Wolf Willow Faculty and Guest Guide

Wednesday April 19: 1 - 2:30pm EST

Time Travel & Making a Mark in the Unknown

With Wolf Willow Faculty and Special Guest Asma Khan

Wednesday April 19: 7 - 9pm EST

CommuniTEA and ComplexiTEA

Evening Tea and a Yarn with Sly Archambault and Melanie Goodchild

Thursday April 20: 1 - 4pm EST

Sankofa Teachings - Catharsis, Emergence & Performance

With Wolf Willow Faculty and Special Guests

Amuse-Bouche

Preparing our Bundles

Friday April 21: 1 - 4pm EST

Seed-Planting and Futurity: Enacting our Learning

With Wolf Willow Faculty and Artist-in-Residence Dainty Smith

To find your time zone, click on the time zone converter

Digestif

Wednesday May 24: 1 - 3:30pm EST

Stay tuned!

A Few Things to Note:

 

  • All sessions invite your engagement and reflection, and take place on Zoom.

    You will join our online learning space called The River’s Edge where we will share all our content and communications (and so we will be inviting you to join our Mighty Networks platform).

  • There is no fee for this programme.

    It is generously supported by our partners at the Suncor Energy Foundation.

  • The language of teaching and conversation will be English.

  • We will host each other with the principles of radical care and interdependence core to the movements for Black Lives and Disability Justice. We have our Care Team joining us. And we invite you into the practice of hosting yourself as an inner practice of sitting with what is emerging in you and in the field between us.

  • The Café at the Edge of the World is a virtual learning space crafted and curated by the Wolf Willow Institute for Systems Learning. We are a group of scholar-practitioners, artists, activists and systems entrepreneurs who are dedicated to supporting the people who are building the world we most yearn to live in.

    Our hosting team includes our faculty Melanie Goodchild, Syrus Marcus Ware, Vanessa Reid, along with Julian Norris and a spectrum of special guest Guides and Artists!

    You’ll see that we invite our close kin to host with us; those people with whom we are in life or in a field of deep inquiry and practice. We’ll cook up emerging ideas, brew our home tea, and together, be at the edges of our practices and questions.

    Among those you’ll be meeting at the edge of the world are Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Sly Archambault, Kristofer Kelly-Frere. We are blessed to have as our Artist-in-Residence, the somatic storyteller and burlesque performer, Dainty Smith. We will meet the quantum world of digital artist Asma Khan, alongside our Care Team and other dear friends who will come around the Café hearth.

Before Registering

Time: Are you available for the entire journey?

We will be building our knowledge bundles from each session to the next, and building our learning container together - so we ask that each participant be available to come to all 5 days. 

Take a look at your schedule and see how you might create space to spend at least 3 hours a day with us this week. Past participants suggest it’s a good idea to also make time this week for digesting and reflecting.

Learning: Who is your Co-Conspirator?

We invite you to register with a co-conspirator (conspirare "to agree, unite, plot," literally "to breathe together"). The idea is that we are more likely to make a shift, take a risk, be accountable and enact our learning when we have a companion.

A family member, a colleague, friend, mentor, a mysterious figure you long to work with… Maybe someone with whom you dream about plotting new actions and experiments in the systems you’re committed to. You’ll register together.

*if you don’t have one, we will match you with another traveller

The Price of Admission

Go to the link below and listen to Melanie Goodchild’s story of walking with complexity. This gaa-gii-kwe-win (teaching) is the story of her walk in the woods with complexity and the helpers she has met along the way.

We’ve reached full capacity for the Spring Cafe. Registration is now closed!