Hope lives beyond the perception of now.

This week I was working at a conference on creating change in the Aged Care sector. My role was to listen, watch, and illustrate, turning the ideas that emerged from speakers and delegates into a giant four meter long mural that told a shared story about the change they wanted to create, and the actions that would help get us there.

The final session was delivered by self-confessed “cultural peace broker” DrYemi Penn, who lives her life with what she calls rebellious curiosity. She reminded us that the fabric of society is woven by us all, and that we need every thread to be intentionally placed to create a tapestry strong enough to hold us. Right now, our fabric is missing threads: voices of balance, reason, truth. The Indigenous. The matriarchal. The natural.

Yemi’s words resonated in me. I often feel as though I live life behind a veil, the truth obscured from me. The veil is made of layers of abstraction and obstruction, built from ideas about what it means to be human. And none of them are satisfying. I can feel that I’ve been sold a version of life that I’m squinting to unsee.

Our ancestors lived through embodied pain: war, patriarchy, religion, domination, class, and poverty. Our generation’s pain is different. It comes from emptiness, from being entangled in systems that reward consumption, competition, and complicity. From being called consumers when what we feel like are lovers, mothers, fathers, kin, and something far more eternal.

If our culture is formed, not fixed, then it can be re-formed, re-woven, re-imagined. The veil can be lifted. The box can be unbuilt.

So how can we (in)form our culture? How can we heal the past and present, and reimagine a new sense of hope and potential for ourselves, our species, and our place on this planet?

Yemi went on to say, “The wisdom normally sits in the rupture. Go back where history leaves clues.”

That line stitched beautifully into a thread from last week’s Hope Dispatch (an ode to my obsession with fractals). Because if the micro mirrors the macro, then every personal act of awareness, healing, or hope becomes a template for the larger systems we wish to transform.

I’ve spent the last few days pondering:
What can I in-form?
What will in-form me?

Our beliefs (collective, personal) are the box, the form that shapes the future. In the questions we ask, the stories we tell, and the dreams we dare to name, we are already weaving tomorrow’s fabric.

Can we un-see the box we keep being told to think outside of?

For this is the most hopeful potential that I see. As much as the old is crumbling around us, the new world that is quickening is asking for our attention, to be the ones who live it forward into being.

So this week, will you join me in peering beyond the box? Maybe come at your life from a different angle; as a marsupial, an ancestor, a worm, an atom, your child’s grandchild. See what shifts when you loosen the frame of who you and what you think you are, and what you think is possible.

Have a beautiful week, and let me know if you manage to glimpse what lies beyond! I am very curious what we will discover.

Lots of love,
Megan