This program was a communal ceremony with an ancestral drum journey facilitated by Jennelle Ramdeen (they/she), inspired by their journey connecting with their ancestors through dreams and drum meditations. This has been the bridge where they’ve been able to meet, learn, and grow in intimacy with their lineage.

Participants sat in a meditative space held by the energy of Reiki. We opened our space with reflection and sharing of our current ancestral practices and transitioned to an embodied experience with the ancestral medicine and allyship of cacao and honey. Participants were then verbally guided, accompanied by their medicine drum, to their bridge, where they connected in a dreamlike state to ancestors, personal or collective. We closed out our ceremony with journalling and sharing of our dreams.

Participants were invited to bring a personal journal for notes as well as a glass enclosed white candle and/or flowers for the collective altar.

Jennelle Ramdeen (they/she) is a Healing Justice Practitioner and founder of Lavender Veil, where they consult and coach to steward healing justice models as the foundation for liberation and systemic change. They have held a range of roles in the field of healing justice, from research in national organizations to reiki clinic organizer with the NYC POC Healing Circle. They also have a long history in youth work. In their Black queer feminist praxis, these social justice education spaces are also honored as sacred ground for healing —as youth start to name themselves and the world around them. Jennelle is a Usui Reiki practitioner, a shamanic Medicine Way practitioner, Daughter of the Waters apprentice and uses these practices in collaboration with ancestral work from their African diasporic lineage to hold ceremony and healing spaces in community. 

About Cosmologyscape

This program was part of Creative Time’s public art commission Cosmologyscape by artists Alisha B Wormsley and Kite. The multimedia and participatory public art project, presented by Creative Time, is an invitation to the public to dream. Cosmologyscape seeks to harness the duality of dreams—as both individual tools of self-awareness and collective acts of imagination and world-building—and encourages the exploration of dreaming practices through an artist designed interface. How does it work? Take a nap, zone out, find your dream state. After that, visit www.cosmologyscape.com to submit your dream, and if you need help dreaming, follow a Dream Path on the website designed by a group of interdisciplinary artists. The dreams shared with Cosmologyscape will then be translated algorithmically into a pattern derived from Lakota visual language and Black quilting references, represented first in a growing digital tapestry of our collective dreams, and ultimately, into a series of sculptures unveiled in the fall, designed for further rest and dreaming.