Our children put down their guns when we did to imagine with us.
We imagined the shining link between the heart and the sun.
We imagined tables of food for everyone.
We imagined the songs.

The imagination conversely illumines us, speaks with us, sings with us, drums with us, loves us.

– Poet Warrior, Joy Harjo

I was in a room the other day, a consequential room, one might say, given the authority and responsibility of the people attending this particular gathering of healthcare leaders. (I am not one of them, although I do work for and with some of them.) The seemingly intractable problems of the U.S. Healthcare System in general and a rural, regional healthcare system in particular were the topic of conversation. These multi-factorial problems are well-documented, have been steadily building for decades, and seemed to cross yet another proverbial Rubicon during the Covid-19 pandemic. The people in this room reach for levers to pull and dials to turn, desperate to repair any one of the thousands of structural cracks which are steadily dismantling the system’s ability to care for people. For my part, I try to help them pull the best levers, or find new levers, or just see new connections and pathways underneath the swarming complexity of these so-called “wicked” problems.

Later that same day, M. and I were speaking in our kitchen, she sharing with me some discoveries she is making in preparation for some new work. She is learning about the myriad issues unhoused people face, the bureaucratic systems they must contend with, and all the ways in which our society has decided to allow people to not have safe shelter. The seemingly intractable problems of the crisis of unhoused people in our community, our state, and this country felt overwhelming in our conversation. These multi-factorial problems are also well-documented, have been steadily building for decades, and seemed to cross yet another proverbial Rubicon during the Covid-19 pandemic. Reaching for any lever at hand to pull, M. went to the grocery store, bought bags of canned goods, packaged food, and apples, and dropped them at the community pantry in town.

These two conversations swirl around each other, entangling with all the other mounting evidence before us: extreme climate volatility, the rise of fascist demagoguery, vast economic inequity… We will not be going back to some Neverland of perceived stability and calm. The world is changing, as always, but now, doesn’t it just feel different? Doesn’t the pace of catastrophe leave your head spinning and your stomach woozy at times? And then, aren’t you dumbstruck by the question of what is to be done?

Thinking back to that consequential room, I am struck by the dearth of imagination within the minds of so many people in a position to influence so much – not least of which is my own acceptance of the status quo as indomitable. Institutions are often totalizing, burying creative collective action beneath the rhetoric of change and the apathy of exhaustion. Existing paradigms are notoriously myopic, shutting us off to the possibility of imagination. But look around: someone has imagined all of this.

Off and on over the past several months, I’ve been turning over adrienne maree brown’s words in my mind like a mantra: “We are in an imagination battle.” This is the opening salvo of her book, Emergent Strategy. “I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.” Because someone else has imagined all of these systems, institutions, and social structures, we must collectively imagine new ones for ourselves. She builds further:

We have to ideate – imagine and conceive – together. We must imagine new worlds that transition ideologies and norms, so that no one sees Black people as murders, or Brown people as terrorists and aliens, but all of us as potential cultural and economic innovators. This is collaborative ideation – what are the ideas that will liberate all of us?

The questions I have to add: Whose imagination are we living in? Why and when did they imagine these institutions and structures that shape our lives and relationships to each other? To what degree are we able to inhabit a world of our own collective imagining? How might we reimagine this world to be other than what it is? How do we enact our reimagination? Billions of people the world over are imagining all sort of things – alone, in families, in small groups, in neighborhoods, in towns and cities, in institutions and corporations, in governments – for all sorts of reasons. The imaginations of a few seem to have so much more power than the imaginations of the many. So, we come together in our communities to imagine alternatives to the status quo, and we organize ourselves in the attempt to make our imaginations real. We may succeed or not, but no outcome is possible without first imagining that which does not yet exist.

In solidarity from The Ministry of Imagination,

Jeremy