IA Happening: Chair Share with Magical Questions

Join us at Spafford Lake in the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Gardens on Friday February 27 to throw paper airplanes, relax in nature, and share conversations about community and belonging!

When: February 27, 11am-1pm
Where: Spafford Lake, UC Davis Arboretum and Public Gardens

The UC Davis Arboretum and Public Gardens’s Chair-Share Program invites students, staff, and the broader UC Davis community to spend more time in nature. The program is designed to foster reconnection—with nature and with one another—while creating a warm, welcoming space for healing, reflection, and creative learning. 

Hosted at Spafford Lake, this event is designed in collaboration with Imagining America (IA) using ideas from their Mail Art Project. This year’s mail art project takes inspiration from the 2025 IA National Gathering – Providing Passage: Practicing the Worlds We Want, and invites participants to find grounding and inspiration from the following “magical questions” (Priya Parker, 2020) as you engage in community, creativity, and collage-making:
• What carries you?
• What is your place of peace? How do you get there?
• What practices help you imagine?

Alone, we do not know the answers to these questions. Together, we have many answers. So we encourage you to gather with your people, roll up your sleeves, and consider one of our magical questions that open up conversation, make space for tension and grappling, and engage in ways that move us beyond habitual ways of thinking. 

About the Arboretum and Public Gardens Chair-Share Program 
Chair-Share aims to promote Nature Rx, a prescription (Rx) and wellness initiative that encourages better physical, mental and social lives, by spending time in the outdoor environment. Nature Rx, originally starting at Cornell University, is hosted at over 100 universities with the mission to grow inclusive, sustainable, and nature-connected campuses. 

About Imagining America
The Imagining America consortium (IA) brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across institutional, disciplinary, and community divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change that inspires collective imagination, knowledge-making, and civic action on pressing public issues. By dreaming and building together in public, IA creates the conditions to shift culture and transform inequitable institutional and societal structures.