Today’s toops: Are you dreaming enough?
“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
Photo by Dziana Hasanbekava from Pexels
For someone who calls herself a visionary, hypes up her big optimist energy, says her work is fueled by imagination - I regularly underestimate the ways that dreaming has become a central part of my praxis as a changemaker and organizer. Deep down I know that my unwavering capacity to believe in better futures and optimal outcomes and to work towards them even when there is no path - is one of my most powerful and yet underrated skills - but I rarely admit that to myself, much less anyone else.
But I’ve been thinking about care a lot these last few weeks as you might have noticed from my last post - Beyond Self-Care - 5 Ways to Practice Community Care. And even as I reflected on the importance of caring for members of our communities (as opposed to encouraging them to meet all their needs on their own), I kept coming back to how that relies on a symbiotic relationship between our selves and our people.
It’s like breathing, or wave action, or birth (I imagine lol) - we push forward our movements and we retreat to gather energy and strength for pushing again. And while we rest, our people push, holding space for us in solidarity, knowing we will return, re-energized to support them. This is why we organize - because together we are able to go further and do more than we could alone.
Part of my retreating is to dream. I spend time thinking of the ways I want people to live good, safe, just, happy, fulfilling lives. I imagine utopian thriving communities where every person is cared for and regarded as essential, important, valuable - complete with leisurely strolls through Sunday morning farmer’s markets and community gardens and elder community members teaching kids to read in our library. That’s my idyllic future lol, but it’s also putting the money generated by our collective labour towards curing diseases and caring for the people afflicted. In my head, we’re far beyond the “isms and schisms” that oppress us, destroy our lives and our climate. Our whole society is built around a fundamental principle of ensuring that however long you get to experience life, it’s a good one.
And I find that when all the work gets overwhelming, or when the progress seems slow or retrograde, or when it all feels impossible - I know I need to spend time dreaming and engaging with the dreams of other people who dared to imagine better futures. It’s marvelous to realize that we’re living some of those dreams right now, even though when they were being dreamed they seemed impossible. Dreams help me to keep going.
Recently, for WE-Change’s 7th anniversary, I organized an Earth-Loving Picnic and we gathered members of our community to dream with us and share their feminist futures. And after a beautiful grounding and ancestral veneration, we sat beneath massive trees and dreamed. I’ve been carrying their visions of reproductive justice, Caribbean and Latin American collaboration, joy and life beyond struggle etc., ever since. And it’s been really comforting to know my idyllic futures aren’t just my imagination running wild, other people want to share in constructing and inhabiting my dream. It’s theirs too.
So are you dreaming enough? Whether you call it manifesting, affirmations, vision boarding or something else - are you spending enough time with the future that your heart yearns for? It doesn’t matter what your profession is - something calls to you, a life you’ll love, an optimum earthly experience. Fall in love with it. It’s not easy, part of the work of the isms and schisms is to cut us off from our dreams - to exhaust us with meeting material needs so we don’t have time to even dream this world could be better for all of us. Resist the forces driving the humanity - the marvel and wonder, the dreaming out of you.
Listen to your dreams, feed them, protect them like a secret kitten you don’t want your mom to find out about. Wish on your stars. And if your dream is still just about you and your life, spend time expanding it. What would that happiness look like magnified to your family, friends, community, nation, region, 8 billion people? What would utopia look like as a global reality? And share your dreams, light a fire in the people around you, find collaborators and dream together.
And I promise you, the more you dream, the more you’ll be able to tap into the infinite possibilities teetering at the edge of existence, asking us to keep pushing, and know that our everyday actions, the push and the retreat, the self care and community care and the dreaming are all a part of how we finally manifest. Feed your soul. Don’t forget to dream.
Tell me about your dream in the comments :)