Sensing the future through pandemic times
How does a place think about the future?
How does the future come to be in a complex landscape system, in its non-linear cyclical multiplicity?
In individual and human terms, the future can be frightening, distant, and outside us. It can be an inert or too vast place.
Within a simplistically factual and Cartesian culture, the imagination gets impoverished and disregarded when we feel the future out of us, for it is not real, measurable, or objective. In the illusion of a unique and absolute reality, we lose the connection to future multiplicity, becoming strange and disconnected.
Under a limited anthropocentric universe, the future is linked to destiny and fate. These ways of feeling the future tell us how we live it in the present, usually in a deterministic and unidirectional way.
We use the fear of the future for planning, probabilities, and predictions and in an emotional way that expresses our dreams, wishes, and hopes.
Future literacy tells us that thinking and feeling the future depends on our expectations and assumptions. It is indeed crucial to honestly reveal these often invisible premises to actively and creatively participate in future creation.
But planning, or simply expecting the future to come to be, is often not enough. Just planning is insufficient in tragic and traumatic times, such as the ones we are passing through, with its capitalist systemic ecocide and genocide, and the recent pandemic that changed our days. We need to become aware and listen. May we finally listen?
We need other references, deconstructing everything “normal” of where to go or what to expect. We need different narratives to use fear as a tool of life and not a norm of sight.
I do believe we live in a sentient cosmos. Meaning everything around is alive. So, the land itself, within its myriad of complex relations creating the future all the time. Being pattern replication or twists of burst creativity allow for something new to emerge. It can be slow or happen in a blink of an eye, like an earthquake.
So, how does a place dream its future? In its expansion and contraction timelessness, how does the future emerge? Does it fear it?
Landscape time is of a different texture than human time. Each place has its own time and rhythm, speaking its transitional language. Always radically present and potently open to what is. So, nature is in constant creation, the future immersed in present emergence, forever embedded in past recollections.
When the land dreams, it becomes itself, sentient awareness constructing what is, from cycles and rhythms to roots or paws. There is no planning. There is just radical becoming, entangled life, and potent immanent creation. The plan is life itself, unfolding with all the possibilities arising from the margins. There is no norm or normal. There is only flow and context.
The land is fearlessly creative in reinventing itself. Just look at all the diversity around. It is not afraid of mistakes. It just experiences possibilities, again and again.
May we remember from the land the real power of creation, not normative of hierarchical, but fulfilling and alive.
May we dream with the land all new possibilities, beyond cultural norms of what it means to be alive.
May we expect spontaneity indwelling all around.
