Envisioning Our Future

This week’s words are taken from a section of the Courage Rise course, offered by the group courageofcare.org.

In its affirmation of the sacredness and inherent value of all life, love is central to our project of futures-building. It connects us to each other and to our world and reveals our deepest instincts for care – to care for and protect each other, our planet, and life in general. Love calls us to act not only to preserve the sanctity of this moment, but also to act with future generations in mind. In this way, love and care are visionary practices.

Love is what helps us sense the potential in others. When we are our most loving, we sense that we are seeing and speaking to the divine in others, or speaking to their deepest potential. In love, we call each other into deeper and more meaningful ways of being together and back into ‘right’ relationship. Love is connecting, energizing.

When we feel loved and cared for — when we feel safe, networked — we have a greater capacity for creative thinking. When we’re stressed, feel threatened or alone, or when we feel we are in competition with others for our survival, we are less able to access our creative faculties. Instead, we orient our energy into our survival needs. Thus we think love is not only foundational to visioning, it is also protective against more dystopian tendencies of our contemporary collective imagination.

Love is also realistic. For all the criticism of love as naive, silly, or foolish, it has been the energy that has sustained life for millennia (or longer!). Why should we settle for less? Why give ourselves over to such a terrible fate? There’s nothing unrealistic about wanting a better world. We must give ourselves permission to dream of the beloved community and act to make it reality. Envisioning is courageous.

Our innate capacities for joy and pleasure offer natural ways for us to reconnect with the visionary aspects of love.

Joy signals to us what is possible and what is already present.