If there was a job called Professional Creator, I could be THAT. I love to create stuff, all kinds of stuff. I like to find forgotten yarn and watch it become something new and beautiful. I glean from thrift stores or estate sales or garages or attics and find old balls of tangled messes and watch them unfurl, and then I create anew. I enjoy taking pieces of fabric, once serving their past-life purposes, and then cut and craft them into a new blanket or quilt. I am entertained by taking wood and screws and building stuff. Sometimes it’s bird atriums for my farm animals. Or functional things like a bench or a table. But outside of my play and tinkering, my lifework has been about imagining.
I have spent the past two decades reimagining what our world and our society will look like in the emerging social paradigm. I have been imagining the future. I have been watching the world around me and gathering the data that tells me where we are. And I have been imagining what the ramp and ark will look like that will take us safely to the new paradigm, the “what’s next?” or the “new norm” of our social existence. What have I been imagining, you ask? I’m glad you asked!
I have been imagining a different world. I have been imagining a world where communities are life-embracing. A world where we are equipped to take care of our citizens during peace times as well as in the midst of crisis or disaster. I imagine a world where our lives and relationships with each other make us resilient and strong. I imagine a world where we relearn the art of love — love for self and love for each other.
Oh, the joy I get from imagining! But imagining is like the many skeins of jumbled yarn I have found. I can dream up a wonderful scarf or blanket or skirt but I must undertake a complicated task (sometimes) of untangling the mess of ingredients (yarn) for the project. Even if I start with new yarn, there is a complicated rhythm of stitching necessary for beauty to emerge. I link together loops as I count and measure. I check my pattern and adjust to suit my vision. I choose which colors to merge and which stitches to choose. I create my vision. And sometimes my actions are a part of reshaping my vision, even while the work is yet in progress.
But just like my yarn or fabric creations, I imagine a better world. I have found that in my lifework of creating my vision, a loving, life-embracing, resilient world to live in, the journey has been just like those many jumbled balls of yarn. Life, as we live it, is a messy, tangled ball of good stuff. In its present condition, it looks all but useless and messy and tangled and … ugly!
But as I live, I create anew. If I still have breath to create, there is hope. So, I find ways to untangle my world and to offer aid when I can to my fellow visioners as we untangle this mess of life together. Because, you see, I create beautiful things. And what if I could create a beautiful world, or a beautiful community to live in? What does beauty look like to me — a loving, life-embracing, resilient community where love lives. What are you creating? Come create with me!
