On Friday, I participated a session of Moral Imaginations, a group of storytellers, facilitators, and practitioners that Phoebe Tickell has been virtually hosting for the past five weeks to collectively imagine a new narrative and world out of crisis. I didn’t participate in the first four session, but I wasn’t the only newcomer to the fifth. We were all welcomed and immediately included in the collective work, contributing something we were (metaphorically) bringing with us to the video call chat and reading them aloud, strung together, one by one, into one long collective poem. Then Phoebe led us in a collective visioning session, walking us through an imagined scene, the sounds, the scents, the sights, the feelings.
We were asked to imagine ourselves as a grandmother in a future world, asked by our young granddaughter to tell the story of this time, the time a pandemic stopped the world and everything changed. Below, my response to the quick journaling exercise that came of that prompt. Thank you to my friend and source of eternal future optimism Tantek for including me! Enjoy, and follow Moral Imaginations on Twitter if you’re curious to see how all of the collective work evolves :-)
For years, powerful people had been comforted by the story of Momentum. They were scared to pause, scared for things to slow down. Slowing down, after all, is not a function of speed but of attention. But also for years, there had been a story of Change. Of the seedlings and more-than-human relations and care and life-serving practices that had been powerful in their own ways. The story of Momentum did not want to listen to these voices, because these voices would mean the end of Momentum. Because Momentum, after all, is a story. If someone stops telling it, people will realize that there were other stories being whispered all along. If Momentum pauses, a new story can take over. Things that seemed like the ways things were, the bones of the story, reveal themselves as options. As just one set of bones that can be reconfigured with many others into something different, a new story. During the Great Turning, the powerful people who had been shouting the story of Momentum so loudly for so many years became more afraid of a pandemic than of a slowing down. And so, they paused. They stopped telling their story for a moment. They asked others to stop telling the story, to stay home, to pause. And in that breath, before they knew it, their story had ended. In those first moments, when those telling the story of Change realized that the story of Momentum had put itself on hold, they knew it was time. People who hadn’t been considered powerful for decades now took up the mantle of the story, looked at the bones that could be assembled, and started speaking. So if you only remember one thing, it should be that even our new story, the one we are telling now, is not the only story. And you cannot stop listening. There are always stories of Change, stories that see the holes and the pitfalls of the story we are telling. Don’t forget that what you are listening to is always one of many. There are always choices, alternatives, whispers. Hear them.
