UMBILICA HOMEPAGE of the CENTRE FOR REWORLDING
DISPATCHES FROM THE FUTURE
Dispatches from the Future are generated during the Assembly for the Future series.
Created by our future-building participants, Moderators, First Speakers, Respondents and Assembly Artists, they share new versions of future worlds produced through a process of deep, collective reflection, witnessing and imagination. They serve as a record of the process and a new imaginary.
The Dispatches take many forms including prose, sketch, poetry, graphic story and essay.
To view the piece at THE THINGS WE DID NEXT website click here >>>
Alternatively the extract text is below.
Please note this work contains reference to suicide and filicide. If you have any concerns, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Umbilica homepage
The Centre for Reworlding
Posted: 18 December, 2029
Entry by Jen Rae
Today marks the tenth anniversary of our first formal gathering. We came together in mourning after the suicide of Marjory Jane Nichols and the tragic death of her one-month-old daughter Sion. In an act of desperation and love, Marjory starved her infant child of oxygen before terminating her own life in a bathtub.
Whenever a child is taken at the hands of their mother, speculation and rumours often point to postpartum depression, anxiety and/or psychosis. The mother is often relentlessly vilified in the media with intimate details of lives lost becoming fodder to internet trolls and story sellers. We knew a different Marjory than the one portrayed in news and social media. None of us knew her personally or could even point her out on the street if she walked past. But we knew her and her story through her writing as MJ in our private online mother’s group. We celebrated with her when she announced her pregnancy with a suite of ultrasound photos. We offered her anecdotes and advice through her second trimester to ease the common anxieties of becoming a new mother. We even sent a million love-heart emojis when she posted a selfie of her swollen belly immersed in bubbles in the bathtub…that same bathtub.
We won’t labour the story with details, except to add that in September 2019, her tone completely changed to one of dread and deep regret…’existential terrors’, she called it. Marjory repeatedly expressed profound sadness about bringing her child into an increasingly troubling world, the magnitude and ramifications of which she was only beginning to understand. News of the global School Climate Strikes and Climate Emergency declarations compounded by the catastrophic Australian bushfires that year were taking their psychological toll on this young woman. Housebound in another heatwave, cluster feeding Sion, she was isolated and glued to the television and social media. Many of us empathised with her remorse, acknowledged her pain and offered her coping and self-care strategies. We encouraged her to call the PANDA (Perinatal Anxiety & Depression Australia) and offered calls and visits. In between our own pregnancy and parenting challenges, we all took a measure of responsibility to check in with her daily, as her words triggered at some primal level what most of us were also feeling. Marjory’s last post to the group was a photo of Sion, where she expressed self-defeat in thinking a new world could be created for our children, when historically most revolutions were born out of violence. Her second final act was altruistic filicide before extinguishing her own.
The Centre for Reworlding was born on the 18th December 2019 in honour of Marjory and Sion Nichols. Our Centre is dedicated to reworlding in the climate emergency through commons knowledge sharing, radical empathy and child-centred trauma prevention.
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We are the mothers of the alpha children living in and around Naarm on the traditional lands of the Boon Wurrung and Woiwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation. We are now 1.3 million strong representing motherhood in all its intersectional glory. Our offspring were in utero or born in 2010 onward, following the abject failure of the Copenhagen (COP15) climate negotiations, where we had a chance to divert catastrophic climate change. Our wombs carried and birthed babies through drought, bushfires, smoke haze and during the pandemic waves of Covid-19/20/21, where the lockdowns fostered the largest baby boom since the 1940s.
We endured through the rolling lockdowns, the subsequent race riots, food shortages, heatwaves, windstorms and floods in the years that followed. Husbands and partners left. Homes foreclosed. Jobs evaporated and suicides skyrocketed. While patriarchal institutions of the church, finance, judiciary, military and academia fell, starved of the oxygen that gave them centuries of caustic power, we were co-creating a reworlding curriculum for our children in the hours between naps and after bedtimes. We cohabitated and shared resources and childcaring responsibilities. Many of us wilfully left pay-for-service employment in favour of CFR roles, contributing our unique skills, knowledge and expertise to reworlding. We had nothing left to lose and everything to gain.
Our council of grandmothers, mothers and aunties representing the brains and nurturing trust built Umbilica, an alternate online and offline communication portal for reworlding pedagogical practice, maternal-child health and resource sharing. Core to our practice is critical thinking, collaboration and de-escalation training, to foster agile responsiveness and resilience in ourselves and children. Our work begins in utero through to adolescence. We have programs to help lessen cortisol and adrenaline in expectant mothers to support healthy foetal nervous system and brain development, as well as scaffolded activities to foster play, learning and emotional development for everyone.
Our 8 Learning Areas include: Ceremony and Storytelling, Food Systems and Traditional Medicine, Future-casting and Scenario-mapping, Experimentation (science and art), Landcare and Remediation, Observation and Navigation, Leadership and Communications, and Care Economics. Central to the experiential instruction are our cross-curriculum priorities of social justice, maternal and child health, and disaster preparedness.
Climate impacts continue to threaten our ways of life, but no longer our well-being. By investing in our children, we invest in our future ancestors’ capacity to build a world that should have been, before colonial disruption.
This future was generated Jen and Bron.