I'm thinking about abolition all the time, trying to understand how we bring it to pass: How do we defund policing? How do we defund the prison syste… - Adrienne Maree Brown

In that process, I started the work of emergent strategy, started to listen to what is up with the natural world — what can it teach us about how to be humans and how to be humans in a better relationship with each other? And what I realized is it is the work of radical imagination to do so, but also that we’re living inside of imaginations that other people told us were true and told us were like, this is how the world is. And I always uplift my friend Terry Marshall. He was the first person to say this to me, that we’re in an imagination battle, which just blew my mind. And I think about it often — that we live in this abundant world, and we’ve been told it’s scarce. And then we’re given all these stories of scarcity. So, so much of the work, for me, of radical imagination is like, what does it look like to imagine beyond the constructs? What does it look like to imagine a future where we all get to be there, not causing harm to each other, and experiencing abundance?

This pandemic has unveiled for a lot of us just how small our reliable communities are, and how much we need to deepen those relationships so that they can hold change and conflict and differences.

If you are born into an abusive identity, there's another way possible. If you were shaped into being someone who is driven towards conflict, causing harm to other people, there's another way possible.