the future we want to live in may well be systematically — culturally, politically, economically – out of our reach. corporations and billionaires may well hold the power-to-change in ransom to a structure that goes on extracting compounding interest from a planet on the brink of collapse. and yet.
it may also be true that there is nothing and no one to fight. that the work of transforming how we exist today into how we will exist in a tomorrow that meets the conditions for all beings to thrive, it is not entirely located outside our reach.
that in fact, even imagining what those conditions could look like – vividly, persistently, vocally, collectively, urgently – alters the underlying pattern of a system that repeats in us and through us and touches all aspects of our lives. we may not yet be able to reach it but we can be ready.
we can be ready with our vision of what life could be like. we can express those visions in image and story, and as we reimagine we will find ourselves practicing another way of being and understanding life. we may be startled to find that the energy and order of this intelligent life we are embedded within carries those new, or very old, patterns into being in unexpected ways. as if the world has caught our eye and winked at us.
and then there may be conversations that you never thought we’d have. then the pattern of the day may begin to look quite different, and a wave that looked so gentle, lapping at the shore, might grow in intensity, the way we have seen it do in recent years.
because it could be that so, so many of us are thinking the same things. that the story that we are so polarised was only there to secure a fragile system in panicked collapse, and in fact, even quietly amongst those corporations and governments, the persistence of other visions has already altered the pattern that has held us in these dark centuries of colonial-capitalist-domination-economics.
that what i imagine tomorrow could feel like, it’s resonating with you so that i hardy even need say this and we are nodding and smiling together. just think what’s possible!
tomorrow when we wake up, life will be different again. life is altering rapidly now, there is no question. we are no longer waiting for the future, we are living it in every pattern of every moment, wherever we live and breathe and eat and drink and move and work and love.
even where the systems bind us we have altered everything because we are picturing another way of living so vividly overlaid upon a crumbling system, that when it falters we will be ready. we may not even recognise it coming into being, it will feel so natural after imagining with all our being, practicing in our minds and into our days until we find each other, in a massive cultural wave, shifting rapidly toward a way of life that makes more life.
then the power we thought was so unyielding, we may well find it was deep within all of us, in unison, all along.
what are the new patterns you see taking shape in your days?
***
this letter to you is an extended remix of a recent piece @appleturnover on instagram and i send it to all, to send onward to someone who needs affirmation of the possibilities on a wide-reaching scale. not least in this latest curious moment of witnessing the copping-out of those with too much power. we are many. we are powerful together. thank you, letters patrons, for your heartening support.
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