We are a commitment to exploring the following questions with the intensity
of knowing everything that’s at stake:

How do we heal ourselves in service to collective liberation?
How do we rehearse a future of safety, belonging and abundance until we
meet one?
What is our most audacious vision for the future where empire is obsolete?
How can we act as stewards of the change necessary to make our vision a
reality?
How can we use art as a radical medium for change?

We know that we do not have all the answers, and we are orienting away from
certainty and the binaries of western thought leadership. These provocations are an
invitation to inquire, to discover, to explore, to be in community.

Why do we use the statement, ‘we are a commitment to’?

We acquired this phrasing from Staci Haines’ The Politics of Trauma: Embodied
Transformation in Polarization, Grief and Overwhelm course. This declaration, in
present tense, known as a sankalpa in yogic philosophy, is a constant reminder of the
future we are marching toward. Embedding this declaration in our embodied
practices means we are committing to connecting our day-to-day actions to
Conditions of Satisfaction (COS). This means we use these commitments to engage
our somatic (body) work for practical change, and to mark strategic points of
realisation where we are recognising that we have met our goals (COS).

A note on our lineage

We are a part of an interconnected chain of activists and artists, dreamers and
creators, that travel through time; past, present and future. We acknowledge that our
work is built on the road paved before us, the trauma experienced by our ancestors,
biological and beyond, their resilience and joy runs through our veins. We
acknowledge the work of our spiritual ancestors, who guide us in how we can heal
the soul-loss colonisation enforced upon us and our communities.

It is important for us to name Octavia Butler here for her profound philosophy:
Earthseed, which has directly in

uenced Story Of’s inception. Butler shares the gift
of Earthseed in her books, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, where
God is Change. We do not worship this God of Change, instead we recognise the
opportunity to shape god, to build utopia (heaven) in this life. Story of the Changing
is a commitment to exploring how we shape change, how we steward the change
necessary to organise toward a liberated world where empire is obsolete.

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