Living Study Intro
undulating observations conducted and remembered by
A. Alfie Chambers
This is a living study.
A Study of Black Ecologies for a young person in an aging world.
Video was shot by Adenike Amin (2015)
Header photo was taken on film by my heart, 4year old Matilda :) (2024)
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Audre Lorde, Lyall Watson, Steward Pickett, Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Gay Walley, Callum Coates, Rudolph Steiner, Maya Angelou, Science of the Sustainable City, JT Roane, Nathan Hare, Martin Luther King Jr, God.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Audre Lorde, Lyall Watson, Steward Pickett, Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Gay Walley, Callum Coates, Rudolph Steiner, Maya Angelou, Science of the Sustainable City, JT Roane, Nathan Hare, Martin Luther King Jr, God.
Author with k-3rd students during the forest school (2024), introducing pollinators: honeybees and carpenter-bees.
(Bees generously sourced from the Bee Lab, MD)
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
In 1965, James Baldwin wrote: “For history is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are consciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations…’’ The math is correct. Since we are among and from those people who lived during the eras of Jim Crow, Civil Rights, Reganomics and now Super AI times, then we must be situated to upend them. The only way out is through.
The will to complete this journey of storytelling began well before I was made aware of the final form. This impetus has given me the requisite focus to channel the myriad of memoirs and research that I am working with, to seek new avenues in expansion of my lexicon, and to challenge my perspective.
My day-to-day is a constant submission to borrowed time.
So here’s to the Surrender! To the creation of joy! and empathy needed to resuscitate the dying and challenged relations we have with each other, our children our earth, ourselves.
(2024)
