<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FydrQW2cLsY" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> - "Everything great that ever happened in this world happened first in someone's imagination." Astrid Lindgren, Swedish writer, and creator of Pippi Longstocking (her books have sold more than 165 million copies and she is the 18th most translated author in the world) - David Fleming: If we are to build a sequel to the market economy, it will be a work of the imagination. - COP26 had the most striking poverty of imagination. The closer you got to the center, the more inability you found to imagine anything other than business as usual [I like this - re-defining what real poverty is. This is a poverty we ALL suffer from.] - Hopkins would read in George Monbiot or Naomi Klein that climate change is a failure of the imagination, and then they would leave it at that. His own work is a deeper investigation into that notion. - At this very moment in history, when it is pivotal that we imagine new ways of living, it seems that our imagination is at its weakest. [Could we tell a quick history of the various onslaughts on imagination that has led us here? Perhaps look at the writings of educators?] - His favorite definition of imagination: "the ability to see things as if they could be otherwise" - Imagination helps feed the longing that will invite us to explore how to get off the cliff safely, to get to a place that we desire. It's the challenge of getting a kid away from a birthday party at which he has been given too many sweets. - "Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in an exercise of speculative fiction. Organizers and activists struggle tirelessly to create and envision another world, or many other worlds, just as science fiction does ... once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless." - Walidah Imarisha, co-editor of Octavia's Brood - "We live in a system that has been locked into a false sense of inevitability." - Mariame Kaba, author of "We Do this 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice". She says we cannot build what we cannot imagine. - We live in an economy focused on delivering us short-term dopamine pleasure. How do we move into a feeling of contentment? - Sun Ra - - "the possible has been tried and failed, and now I want to try the impossible" - He was an "every day Utopian" - like a Burner - "an emissary from the future" - poem - the imagination is a magic carpet, If we came from nowhere here, why can't we go somewhere there - Rilke - the future must enter into you for a long time before it happens - Anthea Lawson wrote a good book called The Entangled Activist - Recommends Mariame Kaba's book We Do This 'Til We Free Us: - https://www.scribd.com/book/493125687/We-Do-This-Til-We-Free-Us-Abolitionist-Organizing-and-Transforming-Justice - Mentions African Fractals by Ron Eglash - Time travellers Rebellion - people who have come back from 2030 to bring us what we need - Imagination Sundial - Space, Place, Pacts, Practices - Space - we need mental and emotional space to exercise our imagination - This is where things like Universal Basic Income fit in - Practices - long-term stress and fear has caused our hippocampus to shrink - Artangel - a campus for the hippocampus - How do we build an imagination infrastructure? - Having a healthy hippocampus is a side-effect of everything else in the system being in balance - Getting better at asking "what if" questions - Pacts - Pacts invite the imagination to grow back from its dessicated state - Reminds me of Mary Oliver's advice to write every day, because to court your imagination, you have to be a steadfast Romeo. If Romeo only turned up inconsistently, would Juliet respond to him? -