Humans of Sweet Water...Meet Victoria Pratt Davis
Humans of Sweet Water...Meet Victoria Pratt Davis. Known by the Sweet Water community as ‘Mama Victoria,’ she serves as a vital source of inspiration, wisdom, and counsel for Sweet Water Foundation as a key member of its Board of Elders. One of the many contributions to Sweet Water Foundation that she has made is sharing her gifts as a writer. Read on to learn more about Victoria and read a piece she wrote about Sweet Water’s work, Seeds For Change.
Victoria has life-long experience in Arts Education and community engagement. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in South America, she worked with local artisans to create art co-operatives and with indigenous women to develop health initiatives. She has taught Arts Across the Curriculum in California and Virginia, always using the arts, theater, and dance as vehicles for community participation and outreach.
After graduate study in sociology, anthropology, and divinity, Victoria served as professor of French and Spanish at Virginia Union University and professor of Practical Theology at The School of Theology, Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia. While there, she received a grant from the Kellogg Foundation to create The Institute of Transformative Theology, an inter-agency collaborative which addressed issues of African American Spirituality and Health, Environmental, Social, and Racial Injustice.
Known by the Sweet Water community as ‘Mama Victoria,’ Victoria is the mother of Co-founder and Executive Director, Emmanuel Pratt. She currently enjoys life in Virginia with her husband, King, and her dog, Cheerio. She serves as a vital source of inspiration, wisdom, and counsel for Sweet Water Foundation as a key member of its Board of Elders. One of the many contributions to Sweet Water Foundation that she has made is sharing her gifts as a writer. Victoria recently completed a revision of her 2014 writing, Seeds For Change.
This month, we invite you to read Victoria’s words on the importance of the work of Sweet Water Foundation. An excerpt of Seeds For Change is below and the full piece can be read here.
Excerpts from Seeds For Change…
Seeds For Change
Growing Faith, Food and The Future
It's wake up time. Our nation continues to heave under the weight of complicated, layered crises - wars; a failing economy; economic, political and racial divides; collapsing infrastructure and urban decay; environmental devastation; soil and air pollution; and challenges that affect the source, quality, and supply of our food and the health of our people. The crises are so interrelated and polarizing that it is difficult to know where to begin to affect meaningful change. Perhaps, however, the real challenge involves making a shift in the way we think about change. Should you venture to listen beyond the bitter conflicts inside Washington and the deafening rhetoric within city councils and mayoralties; beyond even the overwhelming negativity, fragmentation, and divisive national conversations, you will find quite a different scenario unfolding. Critical numbers of people within urban neighborhoods are demonstrating a powerfully creative approach to issues that adversely impact the quality of their lives. The seeds of change are being quietly sewn and have already sprouted wondrous roots. At first glance, you may never hear or notice them at work as you drive through the neighborhood. Nevertheless, intergenerational bands of earth warriors, urban farmers, people from diverse backgrounds, ages, and cultures are busy at work. And while you may see increased evidence of gardening activity, far more than nutritious leafy greens are being produced….
Sacred Labor
Whether it is an individual or community in crisis; a neighborhood plagued by broken moments of history, neglect and oppression; or a city attempting to overcome the adverse effects of colonization, a plantation economy, industrialization, discrimination, or environmental degradation, the drive toward transformational insight starts from the single revolutionary act of sacred reconnection with the earth. Beyond the limited labels we like to use, the work of change introduced from within the garden has, in fact, awesome spiritual significance. It is a way of tapping back into the source of all creative energy that exists eternally, without condition. Those who dare labor in the garden become empowered to recharge themselves and return to their life with a different perspective. Despite the disconnected or broken conditions, we exist in a world that is always in need of more harmony, more justice, and more healing. Together, in a garden, there is a way to begin again….
Inside the Urban Cosmos
Contemporary co-laborers inside gardens and hoop houses share more than productive work. They are creating a new story of community building. They are re-storying their lives. They gather and share their life stories, their dreams, and visions of new homes and markets that provide places to work and sell their produce. They speak of new ways to nurture their neighborhood. Abandoned lots, buildings, and warehouses do not represent a blight of disintegrating land, wood, and bricks and mortar upon the urban landscape, but instead are re-envisioned as restorable “projects” and possible financial and community investments. Working together, people discuss opportunities for learning new skills, creating new small businesses, building better schools, and reviving vital organs for community life that can emerge over time….
A Place Between Stories
A woman in a walker moves slowly along the acres of The Commons. She nods at someone working in the garden. They speak. The worker smiles and extends her hands to offer a bundle of crisp collard greens. Grateful, the woman places them in a bag and moves on. A motorized wheelchair passes by, then shifts speed to pass more slowly. The older woman in the wheelchair soaks in all the images she sees and smiling, gradually returns to the route she had been on. Later on, a man who appears homeless walks by. He stops to sit on one of the hand-crafted benches conveniently anchored beside the street and stares at a dazzling cluster of bursting yellow sun flowers. "You okay?" he is asked. He nods yes. "I just like to come on by here to set a spell. Feels real peaceful here." He is welcomed and invited to sit as long as he needs.
The location of The Commons is wondrously significant. It exists as a place between two worlds, two stories. The visible, fresh green beauty and the imagery of people regularly at work from morning light to setting sun, presents a dream-like quality that is, by contrast, both enchanting and seductive. It signals safety, peace, and a stolen moment in time, but just enough time to feel a moment of reconnection. It offers a curious sense of belonging and a quiet suggestion that there just may be a way out of no way after all, and not even very far away. A new story is evolving right before their eyes, where people and plant life may stretch toward the sky, sprout new growth somewhere in their mind, and envision a new life for themselves….
Digging Deeper
These reconnecting moments are frequent and fundamental to the Sweet Water visioning experience. Most people become uncomfortable when pushed to express their vision of what they see with the naked eye. It is risky to describe in front of others what you are not quite sure of yourself. But this challenge is so important to Sweet Water that one of the restored houses on the property is dedicated to this work. It is called "The Think-Do House" and that is exactly what is done inside. A colorful, wall size mural has been painted on the outside facing one of the garden areas. People who pass by can see it and those working in the garden can look up and see people who look like them watching over them. Inside the house there is an ever-moving flow of activity. Nutritious food being prepared by "Mama Betty" and her crew; conferencing and work areas; large eating-thinking spaces; guest rooms; art space, and, as wallpaper, you see photo images of Sweet Water participants who are thinking and doing the work that feeds the visions and dreams of the people.
A wisdom saying from the book of Proverb tells us that "Where there is no vision, the people perish." While this may be true, it is only part of the story. Scholar, Abraham Heschel has another perspective. He suggests that the problem for people is not the lack of vision, but the lack of wonder. The Commons clearly began its new story in wonder.
People from across the country and, now, from across the world, join in with local apprentices and introduce what amounts to a cross-fertilization of ideas and dreams. They all gather in the Think-Do House to feed their bodies with good food from the farm. They feed their minds and spirits with intense re-thinking, visioning work and nurture the sense of "inner wonder" which is experienced out on the grounds. The dried up, neglected dumping grounds of a decade ago have come to life, larger than life, as lively spaces in which to live, work, and grow-together as a community. The area is re-viewed by us now as a four city block art installation of thriving, flowering green space and crafted works, all co-labored by people deeply invested in its total recreative process.
We can now say that The Commons has been re-membered and re-connected to a hub of transformative creative activity that is making a difference. It has moved from blight back to a humming song of life, from space once filled by neglectfulness and history lost in time, to a bustling, breathing community of people who belong and who appreciate how to express new life from the inside out. In the eyes of the artists, it has become an enormous canvas upon which they re-imagine the fullness of life. The spaces of Sweet Water represent more than room to grow further. They serve as a symbol of a field of all possibility. An aged community can, indeed, re-emerge with regenerated life, new purpose and drive. Art-making here at Sweet Water, has activated an inner-drive to express those visions and dreams nurtured inside the Think-Do House. And the Sweet Waters flowing through The Commons since 2014 have irrigated the dreams of active solutionaries who help make manifest this outward expression of abundant life….
THE STORY GROWS
The work of Sweet Water is not confined to one location. The Humans of Sweet Water carry this dream work, thinking, and doing across the country. Others also see and become attracted to what is happening here. This, after all, is the function of powerful art-making and creative activity. It calls out from the hidden, forgotten, truncated depths within hearts, minds, and souls. It awakens those who dare to wonder, to see, and to learn how to seed their own vibrant expressions of life. And those who are called to ''just stop by" - the teachers, planners, architects, preachers, neighbors, or homeless - are all invited to see something different, to grow new stories in old communities and to become solutionaries who will dare seed new ideas. Those outside the community are now beginning to surrender their fearful images and see something hopeful. The sacred laborers from within the garden are calling us all into something far larger than Sweet Water.
What is being woven here, being revealed, are the missing pieces of a wonder-filled, ancient story that can fit very comfortably within a growing, new universal story. And what we are "seeing" here is just how giving and forgiving the universe really is. The recreative energy exercised here may be revealing to all who dare see, that enfolded within the earth here, and in similar depressed communities, are deeply enfolded secrets of the earth. In our ignorance of her bounty, we have done great damage to her and to those who depend upon her. Yet the secrets themselves are indestructible, very discernable, and patiently in wait of visionary thinkers and doers to get busy sowing their seeds. With a new consciousness, "We the people," can become greater stewards of the earth, of all created life, and more responsible for her restorative, order - creating secrets that have gone too long unseen. Failing to answer the call, we are condemned to repeat the old, dying story of care-lessness, destruction, and abuse of land and her people. Far more promising, however, is a simple move to just stop by, to listen, and labor in the garden, then gratefully observe how “There Grows the Neighborhood."