Steal A Way Project Description

Steal a Way is a collaboration between curators, Jiordi Rosales (The Emergence Network) and brontë velez (Lead to Life). Steal a Way is a practice, fellowship and convening that lives at the intersections of black traditions of fugitivity and Jewish traditions of sabbath. The curators sent termas^[1] to a group of 14 friends and community members whose work is committed to making and protecting sanctuary and livability for human and more-than-human kin within climate collapse. the prayer was to offer the black marronage tradition of stealing away – to practice sabbath as a fugitive and hospitable departure from racial capitalism and its attendant violences. We venerated sabbath as a “portable temple,” available anywhere, to allow the passage of anointing time rather than space – a “loophole of retreat”.^[2] Crafted at the beginning of the pandemic the prayer was to cultivate a muscle for other forms of communication and organizing that rely on the communal technology of prayer and attention even if gathered in distance. 

The termas offered the fellows space to craft ritual objects to court a fugitive and devotional relationship to the sabbath and the curators worked with various artists to contribute ritual craft-making to the container (gun ink^[3], wallaby and kangaroo vertebrate candle molds,^[4] and southern fugitive scrap recipes).^[5] The remote fellowship culminated in a gathering during Chanukah in 2021 in Kashia Pomo territory, northern CA. Fellows trained in prescribed fire and explored the Chanukah tradition of pirsummei nisa (publicizing the miracle) – we worked with the earth as menorah to send out smoke signals from the ridgetop to share the good news that there are folks here committed to protecting fire and offering sabbath to the land and one another. Each day, fellows were invited to make their own offerings and each evening there was an oracular space for those gathered to share a story of a miracle they experienced. 

The following year, 2022, Steal a Way evolved into a larger convening where participants received an introductory fire-ecology, ignitions and safety training, participated in a prescribed burn of 70 acres guided by Jiordi and Fire Forward, in collaboration with tribal members of the Kashia Pomo. Alongside the training, there were additional late fall ritual crafts including shabbat-candle making and soul candles^[6], medicine-making, harvesting and processing bay nuts, crafting hoshigaki, taking goat walks, and making music. 

The principal curators for Steal a Way are Jiordi Rosales and brontë velez.

^[1] termas, found in the Vajrayana Buddhist, Tibetan Buddhist, and Bon traditions, is a practice where a teacher conceals a teaching, text, or meditation system in a ritual object or in the earth for someone called a tertön to discover at an auspicious moment when the teaching is ready to be received and practiced. The terma can also be hidden in the mind of the teacher and be received as a transmission to a tertön who is an incarnate of a previous teacher. The termas are considered occult at the time they require protection because the wider conditions are not safe or aligned yet for the teaching to be lived into. Through Steal a Way, we sought to explore the ways observing the sabbath as a spiritual commitment can be a terma, or termatic (as we called it), while living within late-stage capitalism.
^[2] “loophole of retreat” is the phrase Harriet Jacobs used in her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to describe the garrett she hid, dreamed and plotted in for seven years after she escaped from enslavement and sexual assault from her enslaver.
^[3] Thomas Little, a craft wizard and alchemist, crafted ink from guns for the fellows to utilize for prophetic practice.
^[4] Harry Pickering, another craft wizard and alchemist, crafted the kangaroo and wallaby vertebrate candle molds inscribed with an incantation the fellows proclaimed at the beginning of the residency.
^[5] Makshya Tolbert, another craft wizard and alchemist, explored ancestral recipes at the intersection of fermentation, fugitivity and scraps.
^[6] soul candle practice comes from the Ashkenazi jewish tradition ritualized by women who would recite tkhines while measuring wick around the perimeter of the cemetery where their departed are buried, and then measure the wick again across the headstones. They would then craft candles, following the length of those sites, during the ten days of awe after Rosh Hashanah to burn on Yom Kippur as a way to honor their dead. Tkhines are Yiddish prayers made by women resisting the law that only cis-men were to recite scriptures/offer prayer.