Permission to Vision
On the battle for imagination, and the power of creative visioning and freedom dreaming
For some people, the call to envision one’s creative future feels inspiring and energizing, but for many folks - envisioning a more ideal or fulfilling future brings up feelings of inner conflict and may ask us to contend with real cultural or systemic barriers that make future dreaming feel impossible.
Especially now, as we move through these particularly challenging and uncertain times, I often receive the question:
How can I envision a creative future when the world is on fire?
On the other hand….radical visioning and freedom-dreaming (a term first coined by Robin D.G. Kelley to describe the power of imagination as a visioning tool for individual and collective liberation) is and has always been the work of some of our most inspired creative thinkers and social movements.
Freedom-dreaming is the work of many Black and queer science fiction & speculative genres, and some might say, artists have a key role to play in it - as they probe deeply and empathically into the human condition, insist on and persist in finding authenticity of expression, and as they imagine and practice new selves and worlds into being.
In 2017, working with my artistic collaborator, Eva Peskin, we launched Queer Scouts, a civic performance project which took shape as an imagined but fully functioning Queer Scout troop / performance troupe. For the project, a diverse group of queer and trans-identified artists met regularly over one year — bringing their respective creative and organizing practices into conversation with the histories, principles and methods of American scouting, and commonplace survival practices.
Our motto: Practice Now to Make Better Memories in the Future.
We carried this ethos as a central part of our work together, and as a way to imagine and actually inhabit/embody new ways of being and being together (as queer folk, as a group of queer artists, and as part of a larger community).
The project culminated in a Queer Scout jamboree - a campy, artful and totally earnest re-imagining of the classic scout jamboree, meant to celebrate a year’s worth of individual and group practice, and our investigations into self/group determination, queer friendship, and collective futures.
As artists and creative practitioners, we have powerful muscles and capacities for imagining and creating futures.
As human beings, we often misuse these gifts, spinning sugarcoated fantasies or projecting abject catastrophes. Humans can’t help but make stuff up - we are imagination engines, biologically driven to launch and spin stories for our own survival. I’m sure we have all experienced firsthand the powerful potential of those stories - either to stir or stifle the self, and the creative spirit — not to mention, the larger power of culturally-held stories and imaginaries.
As artists, how can we take our creative capacities more seriously, and how do we want to wield our innate talents for imagining and making story? What if we were to direct our creativity to a vision for our (and our collective) creative lives, and futures?
Visioning (alone and together) is a powerful creative act.
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I’m looking for a vision, but I can’t see it, yet…
A vision can be a lot of things.
It can be lens for assessing and evaluating your life as it is now, and how you’d like it to be. A vision can be a way to imagine and build deeper connections with other people. It can be a container into which we pour the hopes and desires we carry for ourselves, our families (chosen or biological) or our communities, but that we may not feel ready to speak into being, and may not see in the world, yet.
A vision can also start as just an image, or a feeling.
In a beautiful piece on freedom dreaming, queer and trans artist, Tourmaline, shares, “freedom dreams often look like asking myself, “What type of ease do I want in my life?”
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Give yourself permission to vision.
Often, the artists I work with get stopped before they even begin visioning - having internalized messages from their families or the culture that they are not allowed to dream, or there is a ceiling to their dreams.
Ironically, the presence of a critic or other limiting part of self might also mean that you are doing something right. If you feel the presence of resistance or a critic emerge when trying to vision for the future, please know that you are not alone, and this phenomenon is common. These particular parts of self prefer the status quo - critics don’t like change - protectors want to keep us safe and secure - and, visioning is change work. We are imagining that things can be different. And in doing so, certain parts of ourselves can get activated and contract in response.
Knowing this, how do you want to relate to these parts as they act up in reaction to visioning, and to the prospect of change? How can you vision with intention, and not out of reaction?
We need your visions in the battle for imagination.
We need artists’ imaginations and whole-hearted, authentic creative visions right now in order to battle the other imaginaries and skewed (fascistic) visions (nightmares?) that are taking hold - twisted imaginaries that portend as Truths.
Artist, activist and emergent strategist, adrienne maree brown lifts up visioning as a kind of attention and intention - and she positions visioning as a part of a needed skills for adaption in a rapidly changing world - in this way, visioning can be considered a survival tool.
“(…)we must figure out the intention that we’re moving towards. What must we do to survive? Some people articulate it as a goal or a vision. But how do we also make sure, as we’re changing, that we are actually good at it and that we’re not just changing in a reactive way(…)”
- adrienne maree brown
But, visioning feels selfish.
We do not vision alone. I have held space for hundreds of artists to begin to set out their creative goals and visions - helping to guide and coax them into being - and, not one person has launched a creative vision for themselves that doesn’t include other people, and that doesn’t express a higher set of guiding values and principles.
A meaningful, heart-felt creative vision will inevitably guide you into an intricate web of relationships, and into interdependence. In fact, creative visions can even connect us, beyond the present, to creative lineages, powerful ideas and movements that stretch behind and before us. Creative visions can also connect us to larger movements to create real and structural change in the creative fields we work in, and in the culture, at large.
Some questions as you vision:
Who is in your vision?
How do you interact with and relate to the people in your vision?
Who shares in your vision, and holds or carries parts of it forward, too?
Who or what do you serve or care for in your vision?
Who do you receive care or support from in your vision?
Who, before you, made this vision possible? Who inspires it?
What values are celebrated and expressed in your vision?
Who and what are you collaborating with in this vision - be they people, institutions, systems, movements, legacies?
Your vision need not be big or lofty - it can be small and true to you - even the smallest ripples and circles can be profound.
I am just surviving.
Some artists may find it hard to vision as they feel pressing concerns about meeting basic needs, and navigating the daily pressures of modern life. Another question I field: How can I launch an expansive creative vision when I’m worried about basic survival?
This is real.
Center your needs in your vision - as you dream, how can you see yourself, not just surviving, but thriving?
How can your vision for your creative self be based, not on self-sacrifice and hardship, but on personal and creative wellbeing. Bring your imagination there, and see what you discover.
The world doesn’t make it super easy for artists - which can be doubly-felt depending on your particular access to resources, and to power and privilege within the dominant culture. As you vision, it is important to see where you may be aided by these systems, or where you may be bumping into barriers.
For those artists who may feel the impact of those systemic barriers, see if you can keep dreaming, and explore how some of your emotional and practical needs might be addressed inside your creative vision.
Visions take time.
This process isn’t always easy. A good vision takes time, not just to enact and build in the world - but first, to emerge.
It sounds corny, but I heard a quote the other day - how can you make your dreams come true, if you don’t even know what they are? I cringed a bit when I heard it, but I also wrote it down. Why does it feel so cringey to dream, and to share our dreams with others?
There is so much healing of our inner artists, and our wounded inner child parts, that can happen as we encourage ourselves towards creative dreaming, and dreaming creative futures.
Freedom-dreaming, in particular, is delicate, tender, difficult and urgent work. We must hold ourselves kindly as we do it, especially if it is hard to feel or see into at first.
And, especially, as dreaming may bring up strong feelings and limiting beliefs, absorbed from family or the larger culture about what may or may not be/feel possible for us. Again, visioning is different for each of us based on who we are and where we sit, and are situated, so proceed with care.
Nevertheless, can you persist and insist on your ridiculous dreaming?
Don’t worry yet about how you’re going to get there, or how you’ll find the resources and support to pull it off…this work can come later, and there are creative tools to help you build structure, and to access the resources you need, to move you closer to your vision. (I’ll be offering writings and tools on these topics coming up).
Carry your creative vision, lightly.
While we can do our utmost to build up the habits, actions and practices to move our visions into fruition - visions must also be allowed to unfold - to collide with reality, to reshape in relation to the people and world around us - ultimately unfurling in ways that we might not be able to predict or control.
Once clarified, visions must also be allowed to evolve, transforming into something that may be just beyond our individual (and collective) imaginations.
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Creative Visioning 101: Exercises for Clarifying and Creating a Vision
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