Imagine waking up in a future where the world is bursting with life. A world in which death, too, is honored as a sacred part of the cycle. As we enter this new year, take a moment to envision the following: 

The city where you live is spilling over with shades of green—buildings wrapped in living plants, rooftops bursting with community gardens, bike lanes flowing like rivers through neighborhoods designed for people, not cars. The bottom line of our economy is rooted in the well-being of the planet, in care, reciprocity, and restoration rather than extraction. 

Instead of prisons, we have restorative justice centers for healing, accountability, and repair—places where harm is addressed by strengthening the fabric of the community. Teachers, caregivers, healers, artists, farmers, and cultural stewards are valued and well-paid, recognized as the essential tenders of our collective thriving.

Food is grown locally, honoring the knowledge of Indigenous and ancestral foodways. Everything is composted and the soil is alive with microorganisms. Children learn from the land as much as from books. 

Communities gather for seasonal ceremonies, celebrating the rhythms of Earth and strengthening bonds of belonging. People make offerings to wounded places and engage in collective acts of restoration. 

Rivers run clean. People feel connected, safe and a sense of meaningful purpose. We listen to the voices and guidance of the plants, the stars and our more-than-human kin. Everyone knows they belong.

How does it feel to live in such a world?  Notice what happens in your body when you imagine it—what opens, what expands, what stirs? Holding a vision like this is not an escape into fantasy. It is a moral compass that guides us forward through collapse. It invites us to embody it in the present moment. Our dreams awaken the forces of the universe—and the desires of other humans—to conspire and collaborate with us. A compelling vision becomes a magnet, drawing people and energies toward it.

Organizer and movement strategist Gopal Dayaneni reminds us: “If we can’t dream it, we can’t build it.”

Vision plants seeds in our imagination that become the architectures of future realities. Every system humans have ever created—capitalism, democracy, education, prisons, borders—began as an idea someone dared to imagine.

Today, we face a different kind of imagination challenge. Cultural theorist and critic Fredric Jameson observed that in our time it has become easier for people to “imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” 

We are told, implicitly and explicitly, that “there is no alternative,” that collapse is inevitable, that we are powerless to choose a different trajectory. This erosion of imagination is one of the greatest crises of our moment.

Radical imagination is the antidote. Radical imagination asks us to believe that another world is possible—even when the old systems are crumbling around us. It asks us to trust our bodies, our intuition, our dreams, the quiet knowings that rise from places logic alone cannot access. It asks us to cultivate presence, to inhabit our senses, to listen to the whispers of the Earth and the future ones, who are depending on us now. It asks us to allow creativity, mystery, and Spirit to guide us. 

To imagine boldly also requires us to grieve. We must also make space for sorrow: for the species lost, the forests burned, the waters poisoned, the communities harmed, the futures stolen. We must acknowledge the numbness and disconnection that helped us survive but no longer serve us. 

Grief is a portal into our love for the world. As our beloved ancestor, Joanna Macy, often said, “The heart that breaks open can hold the whole universe.” 

When we allow ourselves to feel, we awaken. And when we awaken, we begin to dream again.

The world is calling us to be co-creators of beauty and to make the impossible possible. We are called to listen deeply to the future that wants to be born through us. We are called to reclaim our innate capacity to imagine, embody, and enact the world we long for.

In a time when everything is collapsing, the most revolutionary act may be to dream.  

The future ones are counting on us. 

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”― Arundhati Roy