I sometimes live in this imagined community, this imagined space, this fictional city in my head.
It’s an escape from the reality I see around me, around us, which is dark and exhausting. Also a focus on what needs to be done to change that, as in, where might we go now, for real?
My imagination has developed the capacity to create whole cities that operate in ways that are often based upon the antithesis of the ways I see that things are here and now, in this current dominance culture that we have all been sold and commandeered into believing is the only option.
When I was very young and things that hurt showed up, I would get upset, unsettled, and cry and shout, and as that wained, I’d feel into this;
“Did that hurt need to happen?”
From there, the imagined other possibilities showed up as… maybe if… still the same for me now, many years on.
My friends and family were always there regardless, and I also had other relationships.
Me and my bike, I loved it as much as I loved anything.
Me and the trees I liked to climb and sit in, one in particular that I spent more hours with than I could have counted back then.
When a friend was cruel or dismissive or violent, that hurt in one way. When I fell out of a tree and landed awkward, or fell off my bike and got a bit bust up, that was a different kinda hurt.
While still pre teens, I recall asking the question of myself;
“What would it be like if the stuff that didn’t have to happen, if the hurt that could be avoided was no longer a thing, how might that look?”
These flowing, moving strands of thoughts and feelings are still a go to for me. Maybe in bigger, systemic ways. Along the lines of;
“What might it feel like if we all grew up being and feeling loved and cared for. What might it be like to live in a community, or on a planet, where us humans managed to be generous, trust each other, interact with kindness, and share and create from there. And in doing that, what if we all understood ourselves and each other as a meaningful part of the whole of everything.”
I can’t recall speaking about those thoughts and feelings when I was young , or sharing them with anyone. Not sure why I kept this to myself and I am pretty sure I did.
Maybe it was because I so often heard these phrases from family, friends, teachers and more;
“You are over sensitive Mark, you just have to learn to put up with it, you will get used to it, just ignore it.”
And back then, and still;
“It’s just the way things are Mark, you’ll never change that, it’s human nature.”
As I got to be older, like twenty plus, I could no longer just bury my thoughts around why we all put up with systems that seem to limit and reduce so many of us, and I did start sharing my fave question;
“What might it be like for all of us, and all the other life here on this planet, if we did this or that differently?”
I didn’t have set strategies and processes ready, but I did feel it was worth moving in the direction of… let’s make this whole thing different.
Do you have the capacity to imagine and share how you would like things to be? Do we as communities have the capacity to look beyond the material emphasis of… I would like to have a better car or a nice house with a garden, or a job that paid better.
I believe we do.
Do you believe that as a species we are capable of designing communities and lives that are based, at core, upon all of us having opportunities to live meaningful and fun and satisfying lives?
I am not sure whether I need to ask this last question, maybe it’s more like, considering the ways we have treated ourselves, each other and the planet in general over the last few decades, centuries, millennia, might we not at least try and do things in ways that do not involve so much violence and self inflicted anguish and pain?
And I know that I don’t know that we have capacity as a very new species to manage ourselves and build communities based upon trust and mutual influence, and even more so, I know we may as well give it go, cos this current set up seems to serve so few of us.
Conscious of my trust in anyone reading this and feeling that I may have a valid point and maybe even considering the question, so what do we do to make those big changes then? And from there I can only offer, where do you see people behaving in ways that open up conversations around alternative ways of being, living, loving, sharing and caring?
And if you do see examples of individuals or small groups or whole communities, coming together to build models that draw a smile from you, and pique your curiosity, maybe you can share what they do and why that’s important to you here?
And I offer this as my way of moving beyond what I was taught as a child, and daring to imagine alternatives and share them with others.
I carry an aware and a discomfort as I imagine and feel that this piece here might fall into sounding like I’m proposing some kind of religion, or cult. Along side that, I am conscious that for many, many thousands of years, ancient indigenous peoples lived without temples, weapons, massive palaces and deep, embedded inequality. And, in order to keep me heading along this path, I can recall some time I spent with an indigenous, nomadic, matriarchal community. They had their gods, their rituals, their cosmicness, and they also all looked mostly very happy and confident in the ways they lived and loved, and had done so for way longer than we modern people had been around. One of the things that fascinated me, was how easy the boys and men seemed. They had space to be men and still occupy their boyishness, and know when to step in and out of those two options.
Anyway, my time with them maybe something for another story. I just want to place this here, there is much value in recognising that we modern people, have not always been this way, maybe we used to know better, and some of what is in front of us, was with those who came long before us.
Hesitant about sharing media here that relies upon the very systems I’m against… I still feel the need to share this here as an example of things that catch my attention and make me smile… and that’s the way it is just now hey… so this link below, feel free to offer feedback.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zrtq_l9t8k0
Thanks for being, best wishes, MT.