I’ll admit, I was feeling stuck about what to say in this newsletter. Partly from a typical case of writer’s block and partly from a heaviness and despair I’ve been carrying, as I know many others have, due to the ongoing war and violence in Israel/Palestine. As my eyes wandered around my office for a stroke of inspiration, they landed on a beautiful illustration a friend recently gifted me. It features the following quote from feminist philosopher and playwright, Susan Griffin:
“No one can stop us from imagining another kind of future, one which departs from the terrible cataclysm of violent conflict, of hateful divisions, poverty, and suffering. Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands.”
The idea of simply imagining a future radically different from our present reality can feel naïve, foolish, or fantastical. But at other times it feels audacious, empowering, and tremendously courageous. I am reminded how much this quote echoes a sentiment that is core to abolition, developed in particular by Black, feminist leaders like Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba: the idea that imagining a world without prisons is a critical step to building toward that future and that we alone do not need to have the whole picture of how we get there to take small steps to embody that imagined future.
A quote I frequently use to close my restorative justice trainings is from activist and scholar Angela Davis:
“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world and you have to do it all the time.”
When exploring a vastly different paradigm for how to structure systems and be in relationship with each other than the one that dominates our culture in the United States and, to some extent, much of the globe, requires the kind of stamina Davis describes. It requires anchoring in these futures we want to inhabit, as far away as they may seem, and asking what we can do today to support that vision in the long term, even if it happens long after we will be around to see it.
In an episode of the wonderful podcast, On Being, with geography professor and longtime abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Gilmore describes something she calls “evolution consciousness,” reflecting many of these same principles. She says:
“And so when we think about evolution, we understand that it’s not magical, and yet there are surprises. So what we do is keep doing things, keep doing things, keep doing things. But what we have is the capacity to imagine things and to realize those imagination, that imagining. And that’s not idealistic.”
I lean into this ethos often to center in a sense of purpose around my work fostering more restorative culture and practices within communities and organizations. When it feels so small or too slow-moving or just plain hopeless I grab onto these words and remind myself to keep doing things, keep doing things to realize that imagining.
For those of you that may also feel hopeless, so far from believing a different vision of our world can exist, perhaps somewhere you see a glimmer of hope, of a future, you can grab onto. Perhaps you can believe, even if only for a moment, that together, in the long scope of history, we will see that future come to pass.