Embodied Strategic Dreaming

Come and DREAM with me, and bring those dreams into REALITY.

I was born Nicole Danielle Rawls - my mother's maiden name. The only one of her 7 children named after her bloodline and not my father's.

I didn't find out till I was 17 when I applied to college and had to do my FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid in the United States) and it came back that Nicole Truesdell didn't exist (true story), but Nicole Rawls did.

I kept the last name Truesdell, even when I married, cause it was who I knew myself to be. And I was hell bent on not giving up parts of me, including my last name, to be in a relationship with another.

Even though I did loose parts of my to be in that relationship...

But than that version of my died - every so slowly and then at rapid speed. Season 1 of my podcast "Abolitionist Dreamscapes" captures that death and in between. As I was figuring out what it meant to break the things that do not work (for me /us /humanity) while daring to dream of what could.

It was a lot of grief. Which means, it was a lot of FEELING(S).

Having to sit with and transmute those feelings into a new way of being.

To be.

And I want to fully BE IN my humanity - that contradictory and messy state of existence where creativity lies and where our ability to save ourselves from these dehumanizing structures and systems resides.

So it is time to take our dreams and imaginations seriously as a way to reclaim what was stolen from us - our bodies. The materiality of our existence that you cannot transcend from until you have fully inhabited it. To be wild and free WITHIN the body as a way to ensure you are in relationship to other forms of life (including the elements) because you can only BE ALIVE in your body when these relationships are honored and practiced.

This is also why we must reclaim our childhoods . The place that we were suppose to BE as a way to tap into that creativity that underlines our humanities. But in a system based on extraction we learn very quickly how much childhood is not valued unless it creates value for someone else. So we see children as property and not smaller vessels of both Spirit and Creation/Creator.

It's reclamation in order to create the space(s) we need to go into our dreamscapes and bring out the possibilities as our strategies going forward. As I reclaim my own artistry, for I am so much more than an academic who left the academy, I also am reclaiming the name that claimed me - the Rawls. For they are the ancestors that have always stood by me, guided me, and helped me to remember who I am, really, outside of the scripts that were put upon my body.

For we are all more than one thing, so why limit ourselves to the imagination of a crumbling and inherently violence and mediocre nation-state? Because, how powerful and innovative can you truly be if the only way you can lead is to erase your own history?

This is why I am shifting my Patreon AND Podcast to its next phase of "Embodied Strategic Dreaming" as I embody the name given to me by my bloodline at birth - Nicole Rawls. You will see me use both (Truesdell and Rawls) going forward.

It is time to create, tell our own stories; listen to the stories from others who know something before the colonial (ancestors), who have lived in it (elders), and those who can still imagine beyond it (children); and learn with take seriously the POWER of CREATIVITY and the IMAGINATION to freedom take and make.

It is marronage, and it is time to become the new maroons.