The word "sermon" has evolved in meaning over time: from "conversation" to "discourse", described as a lengthy speech delivered with great passion. Early sermons were delivered in the form of question and answer, and only later did it come to mean a monologue. Futurefarmers commissioned Bernadette Mayer, writer/activist Rebecca Solnit, and fiction writer, Cooley Windsor to create a series of contemporary and relevant "Soul/Sole Sermons" which were read aloud at the Church of the Ascension in Greenwich Village, Manhattan and at the Guggenheim Museum and later printed upon the Pedestrian Press. The Soul/Sole Sermons contemplate this space between the two soul/soles - one being something that has its feet planted on the ground and one that has various contested meanings historically and culturally- a definition that floats-while both are highly crafted either by hand or through symbology, language, things and media.
Bernadette Mayer
Integrative Paleontology:
The Paleontologist Is Barefoot Today
Poet and Author of Midwinter Day
excerpt podcast now>>
Aristotle did us all a great disservice
On the surface of carboniferous flakes
By famously avocating cause & effect
Fossil leaves carry the fine veins we know
We'd all have been better off going sideways or backward
Like or from living leaves
Things don't lead upward & get improved
If it seems soulless to attribute
Nor is everything higher better
The glories of arboreal form
North isn't up
South isn't down
To natural design alone
My dog Hector never wore shoes
Underestimating an appropriate sense of wonder
Socrates, a cynic, used to hang out
At the extraordinary & creative inventiveness
At the shop of Simon the shoemaker
Which life has repeatedly shown
Where he found thought more relevant
I became a land-dwelling mammal in a house
That of sandaled kings
Cooley Windsor
Futurefarmers Rosary: A Series of Spiritual Excercises for Perceiving the Soul
Author of Visit Me in California
excerpt podcast now>>
Imagine yourself as transparent as glass, and everything that is inside you can be seen by the environment that you are in. You do not need to offer words or thoughts or change anything, just imagine that everything that is inside you can be seen by whatever is outside of you. This is an offering, and what is being offered is your soul.
Rebecca Solnit
A Road Made by Walking
Activist and author of Wanderlust
excerpt podcast now>>
Walkers are dissidents, and vice versa, and if you were to imagine them all walking together, the banner would say what the insurrectionary Zapatistas of southern Mexico often said as a policy position and ideal: "caminando preguntamos," or "walking, we ask questions." To walk is to venture into the unknown, to persevere, to push into the unknown, to recognize that the journey is never finished and the truth never comprehensive; that you have to keep going with a hope that is not a hope for completion but for continuation of the process; and that it's always improvisational and never complete. The very restlessness of pedestrianism is itself a mode of questioning, a way of being in the world.