We Need To Dream Again

How We Make Change Happen For Ourselves, Together

There is no normal to go back to. There is only forward. We must build the power we need so that we have a say in what the future will be. We can not let our dreams, hopes, and our beliefs in a better world be ground down by the cynicism of this death cult called the United States . We can not accept performance instead of change.

I have been trying to write this blog post for a few weeks. Over and over I start one post then another, angry and hurt by one outrage and before I could process that outrage, another outrage would come along. What do we do when death is all around us calling to us like a siren leading us to crash against the rocks and all the institutions that were supposed to guide us have left us to find our own way in the thick and dangerous fog of the collapse of empire?

I think we must become the light and the leaders and the change-makers. We must remember we are the messengers, the storytellers and the pathfinders because all we have is each other. We have to be the dreamers and the conjurers and the builders of the better world we need and desire. We must fight and heal while we discover and recover the myriad of tools that will be needed to bend that moral arc Dr. King talked about and reimagine what justice looks like for those who have been denied justice for so long; Indigenous communities, Black folx, immigrants, disabled folx, transgender and gender non-specific folx, queer folx, poor folx, displaced folx, and refugees.

Living in fear, chasing the ghost of a time that never was, ground up under the heel of a punishing state, our ability to dream of a better day is under attack. We need to dream again, because it's hard to build what you can not even imagine. In a world that is becoming more and more isolating it is hard to imagine connection and interdependence. In a time when so many people want to take us back and death and displacement become our daily bread, how do we celebrate a life lived with dignity and the real possibility of having enough and being enough?

We fight and we heal by creating spaces that allow us to be vulnerable, that ask us to be accountable to ourselves and each other, where a plurality of people can feel belonging because we need each other. We make space for change and transformation. We dream, we imagine and we stay forever in a state of creation while we see clearly the moment we are in, while we learn from the past, and we build for the future we want and need.

If you would like to know more about how I use dreaming as a pathway to help organizations, groups, and individual artists re/organize, rethink and reimagine their work in the world contact me at crystalmason.net or treeofchange.net