Day 82 – An imagination battle

Photo by Vinicius "amnx" Amano on Unsplash

Day 82 – In my last post, I ended with the question of what role expressive arts therapy will play in these fights for justice and in the social movements for justice going forward – and today as I spend time with the following ideas – I was reminded that what we allow ourselves to imagine, how we direct our imagination, is critically important (for example, Samara Almonte writes about no longer dreaming of the apocalypse but instead imagining a world where mutual community care is a priority – and is a big part of what we as humans do). Almonte says,

 

Building systems based on care and relationships is not an easy process. The vulnerability and trust that this work requires us to demonstrate may be beyond what many of us have been indoctrinated to experience. However, [we] must continue taking small actions in this direction, in order to dream beyond an apocalypse.

 

And here I see a role for expressive arts therapy – is not expressive arts therapy about “building systems based on care and relationships”?  Are we not about helping folks to be more able to experience the “vulnerability and trust required?”

 

Almonte quotes adrienne maree brown’s book, Emergent Strategies. Almonte reminds us that brown writes, “about the importance of radically shifting our imagination from only working under capitalist and colonial frameworks. She states in ​Emergent Strategy, ​‘We are in an imagination battle’.”  This sent me directly to Brown’s current work.

 

I spent a lot of the day listening to the “How to survive the end of the world” podcast – by siblings Autumn and Adrienne Maree Brown.  Their episode “Love the Child: Care is the Throughline” was a poignant conversation between the two sisters about coping with the events of the past few weeks without losing love or hope.  The death of 19 children in Uvalde and the need to postpone the visit between the sisters due to one of Autumn’s children testing positive for COVID, sparked a rich conversation about how to keep moving forward, how to take care of one’s self even when disappointments and grief hit, and about maintaining “hope as a discipline” and love as an expansive experience in response to grief and mourning – that once we allow ourselves to mourn, love can re-enter our hearts.  In the podcast, Autumn reads the preface to bell hooks’ book, All about Love.

 

And so, I too, am going to direct my imagination to the possibility of expressive arts therapy joining up with these folks who are also already doing this work – and collaborating!  Finding ways to bring these worlds – of activism, art, social justice, racial justice, climate justice, abolition, decolonization – together with expressive arts therapy.