A Moment to Dream

For those who have had the space and inner resources, this year has provided fertile soil to contemplate the world we have created and imagine one we want to live into in the future. In June, we ran two workshops through Small Giants Academy which took people through a powerful visioning exercise to conjure up imagery for a more beautiful world in 20 years’ time. Inspired by that work, we collaborated with our friends at the Coalition of Everyone and invited a small group of people to tell us what that future world looks and feels like for themselves, their families and their communities.

The work is part of a larger storybank at www.thefuturenowproject.com where we invite everyone to write, paint or use multimedia to envision an ideal future.

Ronella Gomez

I’m Ronella, and I work in fair food systems. I share our little home and community on Woi Wurrung country with my husband and two young children.

This is what I want to be able to say to them in 20 years.

In the beginning I used to be unable to sleep at night.

So we composted the plans we made and determinedly lived into new processes. We took the next step with the most potential for life to unfold. We learned to hold the urgency of the many connected problems with knowing the work is generations in the making. We held the space between teaching our children to think in new ways, while living in the old structures. The holding was heavy work, sucking away our energy. Then, our elders started inviting us to look through windows into expanding universes that took our breath away.

And so awe became our renewable energy, inspiring us to garden for those not yet born, to time travel and see through their eyes, to embody ancestors lost through cultural interruption, and become the inner mother we need. I was one half colonised, and one half coloniser. Ever the immigrant and not of any place. Then we gardened our soil and people, and they gardened us. Now we are home at last and belong to each other. I sing your song to you, you sing mine to me, my child, friend, river, kookaburra. I honour you in our Saturday night candlelit dinners. I have become me in relationship with you. Moving on from a broken system fuelling our children’s anxiety, we discovered embodied learning. Beyond thinking about goats and mountains, to herding goats and exploring mountains with curious minds and able bodies. And we fused work and learning together through interdisciplinary projects where our seven-year-old child could collaborate with a 70-year-old and offer value depended on by others. Thus, building diverse forms of capital that cannot be hoarded.

We moved from jobs to livelihoods to ways of life. Our economy is turning into beautiful cultures, sequestering carbon and rehydrating our lands. Floating all boats and meeting our deep underlying needs. Our healers are the growers that tend soils. Our enterprises are run by people for each other. Our artists are our wise ones. Our gardens are our cathedrals.

And when it is time to truly rest, I can be laid into the soil and a tree planted so that my children can hug me still, lay their weary head against my limbs, trace the lines of my life and be