Hope is Fractal

Fractals might just be my most treasured life lesson.

Problems (and by extension, solutions) repeat at scale. The patterns of harm, healing, and hope echo from the smallest moment of care to the largest systems we live within.

This means we never have to work out of our scale. In fact, I’d argue it can be a well-meaning distraction to try. The illusion that we must fix the world “out there” often leaves us powerless “in here.” That’s why fractals are profoundly relevant to a hope practice. We can hope at scale, but we act local. We can have aspirations and dreams at a planetary level, but the pathway to those dreams is traversed from where our feet are - on the ground in front of us.

Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba write in Let This Radicalize You: “You are not needed everywhere, but we are all needed somewhere.” We may feel the pain of systems unraveling at planetary scale, but every ecosystem begins in miniature. Healing the world starts with the microbes and worms in our own backyard. Our tiny companions remind us that life regenerates from the ground up, that small is potent. They are the foundation of every ecosystem. This is the right scale for humans who yearn to create change. People who hold hope often hold too much. They carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, and they often care for All. The. Issues. Its a lot. I would argue that it is simply too much for a human to hold to be well in this world.

I don’t mean that we shouldn’t donate to organisations who are helping on the ground in global conflicts, if that is our inclination. This is the ‘drop in the bucket’ approach, it can help to ease our pain, but it can do little in terms of creating systemic change.

The most powerful solutions are seeded at home, these are the ones where we can attend to the ecosystem of change, working on the relationships that hold the change in place. This is where we can influence the thinking underneath the harm, through our narratives, our consciousness raising with the people around us.

In Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Maree Brown writes, “Small is all. The large is a reflection of the small. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale.” Within this logic, being in right relationship with the people and ecosystems around us is systemic change.

The way we organise, listen, and love each other mirrors the future we are creating. Sustainable revolutions are made up of many small, intentional interactions. Together, these micro-interactions are the sum total of any movement. We carry the grief of burning forests and dying seas, but repair begins in our gardens, in our shopping trolleys, and in our retirement funds.

We may despair at the cruelty of distant politics, but real change germinates in our daily talk, in how we listen, speak, and hold each other through the noise. We may rail against the hatred and harm echoed across continents, but the patterns we shift in our own homes and communities are the fractals of wider change.

How we are at the smallest scale is how we are at every scale: individual, community, institutional, and planetary.

I’m reminded of the phrase “the personal is political,” which originated in the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s. It’s famously associated with Carol Hanisch, whose essay argued that the consciousness-raising groups where women shared their experiences of sexism, domestic labour, abuse, and restricted reproductive rights were a fundamental form of political action. Those personal stories revealed the systemic inequalities and patriarchal structures that shaped their lives.

This movement offers a powerful hope case study. Over sixty years it has shifted laws, language, and consciousness. Yes, there’s still much further to go, but it began the long work of dislodging male supremacy, patriarchy, and gender-based power structures and in many ways achieved its stated goals.

How do we extrapolate that lesson into these times? We talk. We share. We raise our collective consciousness. But consciousness-raising in 2025 is going to be harder, because the media landscape has changed. We have to raise consciousness within the realities of our bubbles and algorithms, our vanishing attention spans, our tribes, our biased news feeds, our plummeting trust in politics and media, and our conditioning as consumers.

I don’t have the answers for this part. I only know that we have to do it together. We have to make sense together, to tackle disinformation together. So what might it look like to “do it together” in your world… from the fractal position that the smallest act of care can ripple across the pattern?

I feel like this community of hope holders is part of the fabric of togtherness. If you are not part of the Facebook Group - I invite you to join, stay connected, stay inspired: https://m.facebook.com/groups/thehopedispatch/?ref=share 

May you have a hopefuelled week.

With love xxx Megan