A week ago, very early Saturday morning, I looked out the window and saw a shimmering arch in the backyard. For a second, I wasn’t sure if I was having a vision or a hallucination. As the archway faded in and out, I saw how the lights from the front of the house worked their way through the living room and then reverberated off another light out back. And I took it to be a metaphor, a sign of where we are right now as a human community.
The systems that have gotten us here – it’s shorthand to call them “capitalism” and “colonialism” or just “Western culture” – cannot get us out of where we are stuck. Audre Lorde gave voice to this truth in 1979, in a speech that became “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in Sister Outsider (1984).
And, yet, as we build new possibilities, many of us are still living in – and some at least partially owning – the master’s house. There are many new things that are, like my arch, partially built and fading in and out, somewhere between a revelation of the future and something impossible to complete in the present.
I think that is really the point of this half-an-arch – which is actually not an arch, in any structural sense – it exists in our shared vision of what might be possible, but when we try to own it or control it, or even give it a name, it fades away fast.
Storytelling is a tool much older than the ones that built the master’s house and one we can use to create a shared vision of where we want to go next. I think of this as working forwards from where we are and backwards from that vision at once.
When you tell a story – even a story about something distant in the future or the past – it becomes real to you and to everyone who hears it or reads it or sees how you imagined it on paper or canvas. Storytelling is how we make that vision real – but not as one thing, as something as impermanent and fading as each of us sees out our own window on a foggy and sleepless night.
As the Jewish scholar Hillel wrote, “The job is not yours to complete. Neither may you turn away.”
I invite you to imagine – and then to write or draw – what our shared future looks like:
- What do people eat?
- What stories do they tell?
- How do they mark holy days in different traditions?
- How do they ensure everyone is free and equal?
- How do they balance the oppositions: between order and chaos? Individual and community? What exists now and what we have yet to imagine?
And then take a few minutes to read the visionary words of someone who is building this future in the present. As Resmaa Menakem says, “nibble don’t gorge.”