A Time for Re-imagination
A two-part online workshop, responding to the global pandemic and lockdown, offering space for community, connection and deep reflection.
As we continue to adjust to life with COVID-19, the shape of the future remains unknown. But in the midst of this rupture in the fabric of our day-to-day lives lies an opportunity for re-evaluation and reimagining. What inner alchemy is taking place within us? What do we want to take with us from this crisis and what do we want to leave behind? What are the deeper stories within this experience and how might we participate in their telling? How can we be attentive to what is emerging?
This workshop brought together over 100 participants from around the world. Together we engaged in discussion, deep listening and reflective practice to explore the deeper themes present at this time and how we might choose to emerge. A Time For Re-imagination was offered in June 2020 by Emergence Magazine, as part of their community offerings.
“I keep getting asked if the coronavirus pandemic qualifies as an initiation or not. What I do know is this: something urgent is trying to be disclosed to our hearts. Our response will reveal the pedigree of our attention and the corn that could grow from this.”
PART 1: Listening For Disclosures
Inspired by the essay ‘Is This An Initiation’, by Dr Martin Shaw, Part 1 focused on the theme of Listening. We reflected deeply on the inner landscape of our experience over lockdown; our challenges and grief, dreams and longings, nourishments and inspirations. In the words of Martin Shaw, we began to pay attention to what is trying to be disclosed to our hearts.
Articulating the calling to come together, we first acknowledged our sense that within this crisis lies a hidden opportunity to ‘stitch a new garment’ (Sonya Renee Taylor), and our intention to be attentive to, and fully participate in this unique moment for re-imagining our world. We know that we will not return to normal; and there is a deep longing for something different to emerge from our of this rupture.
We recognised how this opportunity is tied to overwhelming realities of suffering and loss - statistics, stories and images that may have impacted our own lives and hearts over the past months. Witnessing the darkness that has been revealed; huge structural injustices and inequalities, we must face how this burden falls most on poor, marginalised, indigenous and communities of colour.
And yet, perhaps for the first time in our lives, we have also had living experiences of stillness, compassion, vulnerability, global connectedness, community, generosity and ecological regeneration like never before. So much has changed in previously inconceivable ways, and we too, have been irrevocably changed by this initiation.
“We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalised greed, inequality, exhaustion, depletion, extraction.. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature. ”
PART 2: A Future Existing Now
In the second part of this course, we took the threads of our inner disclosures, and explored how we might weave them into new stories and practices in our outer lives. Inspired by the essay ‘The Other House’ by Jake Skeets, we reflected on the idea that ‘re-imagining’ is not something out there, abstract, or in the future; but that all realities are interconnected and born of the here and now.
“So perhaps time actually extends from within us and beneath us, from our pasts. And because we are in active movement, each moment of present time is actually our future. Our bodies are our future. Our landscapes are our future. So if we return to the manifesto of an anti-colonial future, we can also employ an anti-colonial hope. One that relies not on linearity but one that is deeply intimate, from the deep space and time of the self. One that is birthed from the deepest parts of our bodies and times. For me, the best way to achieve this is through storytelling and language. Storytelling has the ability to conjure the deepest parts of ourselves and reimagine time and thus reimagine hope. Storytelling allows us to embrace what is far away, remember what was forgotten, and hope for a future existing now. It starts with Ałkʼidą́ą́, ‘Once upon a time…”
We began by considering an anti-colonial notion of time, and therefore of re-imagination and of hope, as proposed by indigenous writer Jake Skeets. As we approach the work of ‘re-imagining’, how can we hold this nonlinear perspective? In this understanding, we become rooted in the present moment, and in our bodies, knowing that the future lies within us - rather than somewhere ‘out there’. We reflected on the power of storytelling as a tool for capturing this de-colonial relationship with time, since, as Jake highlights: stories contain simultaneously the past, present and future.
Finally, we stepped back to reflect on the deeper personal contribution we can make at this time, inwardly and outwardly. Avoiding naivety or denial about the forces that wish to prevent radical change, and the reality that many aspects of our world may remain unchanged, we offered an intention to honour the new consciousness of connection, compassion and regeneration emerging within us at this time.
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”