Soulcraft Musings

Decolonizing Imagination

Friday, September 12, 2025

Tossed around by storms of political mayhem and multiplying uncertainties of our time, it can be supremely challenging to remember that this moment in “modernity” (a word that strangely offends my tongue) does not reveal the only possible story. Reflecting on his many encounters with complex, vanishing cultures, ethnobotanist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence Wade Davis writes,

Just to know that such [extraordinary] cultures exist is to remember that the human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention. Our way of life, with its stunning technological wizardry, its cities dense with intrigue, is but one alternative rooted in a particular intellectual lineage. The Polynesian seafarers who sense the presence of distant atolls in the echo of waves, the Naxi shaman of Yunnan who carve mystical tales into rock, the Juwasi Bushmen who for generations lived in open truce with the lions of the Kalahari, reveal that there are other options, other means of interpreting existence, other ways of being. [1]

When I first encountered this marvelous paragraph from Wade Davis long ago, it felt like a kind of balm, and feels even more soothing (as well as challenging) now. If our modern ordeal actually is “but one alternative rooted in a particular intellectual lineage,” what other possibilities might emerge now for creatures whose innate faculty for “imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention”? Whew. I bow with gratitude to reminders that human beings still have agency and choice.

But something that troubles me now more than when Davis’s words first blew me away is awareness that we are living through the greatest colonization of imagination ever known — and that we have, in some sense, relinquished our own vast imaginations to social media, ubiquitous screens, algorithms, “influencers,” constant advertising, and bombardment with political positions (and so much more).

What I mean by “colonization of imagination” is this: Images, ideas, memes, slogans, viral stories, political views (and so forth) that have been created by others — sometimes by very sophisticated advertising professionals or propagandists — are being seeded and grown in our personal imaginal terrain, shaping what we desire, the directions we lean, what we think about, what we believe — and perhaps smothering our own wildly imaginative capacities. Our ability to envision stunningly beautiful, creative, vital alternatives to the (often-bleak) patterns offered by the industrial consumer culture diminishes under the weight of so many compelling yet often purely awful images, ideas, stories, and dominating worldview. In our time, one extreme and powerful segment of the culture wants us to believe that the global flood of refugees has nothing to do with the collapse of fisheries, or sea level rise, or desertification, or the spread of life-assailing economic or political systems. Meanwhile, images and stories of ecological apocalypse find us, along with radically opposed narratives to explain what’s happening.

It’s true that I can be fervent for “news” in these strange times. Like so many others, I want to discern what is happening in our world; I want to respond in useful ways. But the flood of incoming information often seems endless, and endlessly horrifying. An overload of images/stories of despair or powerlessness has a cumulative, dispiriting effect —diminishing my own capacity to envision life-enhancing relationships between human beings and our planetary home. And yet, even so, I will not turn entirely away. There are so many human beings living in despair, who perhaps simply cannot imagine another way amidst the soul-deadening crush of modernity. Images of a possible world might not even be available to some of us.

So I seek stories and images of vibrant, life-affirming cultures, stories of individuals and communities choosing dance, art, dream tending, village-making, Earth ceremonies, land regeneration, river keeping, universe celebrations, or the deep honoring of children and elders — all of which are subversive to modernity. I seek images and stories of communities whose members know how to resolve conflicts and share “resources” without killing each other.

I know the stories and images are out there, beyond the range of my self-limited “news” intake. I know there are bands of fantastically creative and visionary human beings whose ears are attuned to the dream of the Earth, who are perhaps engaging similar sense perception as the Polynesian seafarers finding distant, unknown atolls. I know there are those learning to shape economies and social networks that are coherent with living systems, in rhythm with the pulse of the universe. I know of people who are inspired, like Joanna Macy was, to be living in — and organically responsive to — this time of immense change. I am fortunate to know some of them personally!

But when bleakness for modernity overwhelms and the imaginal world goes dim, when I am longing for palpable re-membering that we are a species whose “imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention,” I do know how to take myself deeper into the wild Earth, how to remember the Moon, to sit while pollinators adore late summer blossoms, to listen for hints of how the newly discovered feral apple trees hidden in riparian vegetation want to be tended, how to be delighted by the calls of poorwills. These small acts of attention to the Earth community are something I can offer right now, no matter the mood of the news cycle.

Another person might make gallons of compost, or practice feeding the holy (as Martin Prechtel charmingly invites us), or sing as a beloved crosses the river Styx. Another might harvest a community garden, or build a temple from mud and straw, or gather community to honor sacred grief. Another might quietly celebrate the daily miracle of photosynthesis. Another might inscribe poems on her body, or listen to dreams at breakfast.

All of these are (at least) moments of decolonizing imagination – and liberating imagination! — which may help crack open the portal for the spectacularly creative dreams of Earth to find us.

What is your way of liberating imagination in this time of chaos and possibility?

To read previous musings click here.