Liberat.es
A bit on dreaming
I want to write about our capacity to dream, but I’m unsure how to go about it. I’m unsure that my view on it is broad enough. Something’s been moving in me for a little while, and I’m trying to find my way toward it. It’s a message about seeing the world through a larger lens, but I find myself being limited in my own view of things. I find myself afraid that I have too many blinds spots to be able to see clearly what needs seeing here.
Part of this is this view I have that we — and there’s much that can be said about ’we’1 — have been losing our capacities to dream. Collectively, we have become more and more narrow in what we believe to be possible, preventing us from actually being able to enter into a conversation about ways to address the greatest challenges we face: racism, global warming, and the inequities of our economic system. These issues are not going anywhere. Without new and meaningful approaches to shifting them, we will be crushed in their path.
Nearly 58 years ago, JFK announced that we would send men to the moon. It took less than seven years to make it happen. It took an enormous amount of collective dreaming to make that happen. We stand at the precipice of multiple disasters, each unfolding before our eyes, and we can’t get movement. It’s not just division that makes this true. It’s also our capacity to dream. In order to get beyond our divisions, we’re going to have to dream our way there.
It’s interesting — that last paragraph is not a direction I’d intended to go. I’m curious to explore it some more. In the meantime, I continue to sit with the inquiry, and will continue to do the writing that’s been calling to me — finding a way into an invitation. I’m beginning to see that the invitee, at least for the moment, is me.
I’m clear that my perspective is largely dictated by me being a hetero- cis- white-man. I’m under no illusion that I speak for everyone, or every community. What I’m pointing to is largely about the overall white culture that we live among. It’s super clear to me that there are communities out there that do amazing dreaming…especially Communities of Color.↩