Practices for expanding imaginaries around death & loss, part 2: zooming out
This blog post is part of a series documenting a peer learning journey exploring death & the collective imagination. Meet the cohort here, and learn about the journey here.
In this post, we track three of six sessions hosted by our participants. Where the first half of our journey started close in, this second half took a broader view. We asked ourselves: what elements of Western modernity need hospicing for us to survive and thrive? How can nature offer a gateway into difficult conversations about endings? And what is the role for hope?
Exploring… Hospicing Modernity
With Stella and Justin
Few texts have come up as often in this huddle as the wonderful Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, by Vanessa Machado de Oliviera. Only a few years into publication, this book has already seeded new language around the critical importance of disinvesting from aspects of modernity we believe to be desirable, necessary or even inevitable.
As a learning ground for collective imagination practice, the huddle was keen to explore what the grand notion of “hospicing modernity” might feel, sound and taste like, in practice. Guided gently by Stella and Justin, we embarked on an imaginative journey to meet the edges of this new paradigm. We practiced sitting with gratitude for all that modernity provides, sitting with the suffering and violence associated with modernity, sitting with fear, and sitting with interbeing with the Earth.
This was a deeply rich topic that could have stretched over an entire curriculum (and well beyond!) — but what became clear to us was the value of collective imagination practice as a vital companion to some of the dense, academic book formats in which challenging thinking often arrives with us.
Exploring… Garden Thinking for Endings
With Will & Hilary
“Gardens offer us an in-between space, which can be a meeting place between our innermost dream infused selves and the real physical world.”
- Sue Stuart Smith
With limited imaginaries around death, we lack a vocabulary to describe the different ways we might support something to die, and the different benefits contained within those ways. But for those who work directly with the natural world, no two endings are ever the same thing. This session was about exploring ecological metaphors as gateways into speaking and imagining our relationship to death.
What qualities can we bring to composting, for example, compared to pruning, coppicing, or deadheading? What kind of energy transfers might happen in a bonfire compared to the gentler practice of seed-saving? If we’re weeding, does that imply new power dynamics (after all, who decides what’s a weed?)
Will & Hilary’s intention with this exercise was not to encourage academic analyses of these different metaphors, but to use metaphors as a gateway to exploring the active roles we have taken (or might take) in facilitating the endings of our lives, and what their various qualities unlock.
Those of us who work with groups or organisations who are resistant to the harsher language of “hospicing”, immediately saw the potential of this exercise to facilitate new kinds of conversation. Would an organisation prefer to see their ending of a defunct practice as bonfiring or coppicing? What different qualities might each of these practices coax into life? These “garden thinking metaphors” have the potential to normalise discourses that are often still taboo in many mainstream organisations.
Exploring… Radical Hope
With Naomi
The climate crisis has backgrounded much of our huddle, with many of us in climate-related day jobs. While sitting with our climate & ecological realities offers a clear link to death, loss and grief, the counter-themes of joy and hope have been unexpectedly alive for us throughout this process. So it felt fitting to close our sessions by exploring the concept of Radical Hope — led by Naomi, whose MA thesis was on this very topic.
If hope is generally understood as a desire for something, where the realisation of the desire is perceived to be possible, where does this leave us if this desire isn’t perceived to be possible? Or if our current consciousness cannot entertain it as such?
This is where the concept of Radical Hope comes in. Naomi introduced us to this idea via Jonathan Lear’s seminal Radical Hope: Ethics in the face of Cultural Devastation. It explores the question: how should one face the possibility that one’s culture might collapse? The idea leans on the history of the Crow people, a Native American nation, and their leader Plenty Coups, as their culture was devastated, irreversibly, by settler colonialism.
In Lear’s words, ‘what makes this hope radical is that it is directed towards a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.’
This felt, to us, the essence of the power of collective imagination: to recognise the limitations of our current imaginaries, and engage nevertheless in relationship with future goodness that’s beyond our own consciousness or understanding.
Critically, this is not something to be gifted to us, but a muscle to be built, through ongoing practice. In the words of Junto Diaz, ‘Radical hope is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility, openness.’
These ideas perfectly underscore our belief that not only are these collective imagination practices critical, but that sustaining them, over time and in community, is our only path forward. If these blog posts have interested you, get in touch via email or the comments. We would love to hear from and collaborate with you.
Dive Deeper
Dig into a few key resources & stimuli that shaped these last three sessions.
LISTEN: The Collapse of the House that Built Modernity is a great podcast interview with Vanessa Andreotti about the ideas in her book Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. Start here, then get the book.
READ: Garden Thinking is a practice that Will has been cultivating. This explainer gives more context.
READ: The Well-Gardened Mind, Sue Stuart Smith, has had a strong influence on our practice of Garden Thinking.
WATCH: Let This Darkness be a Bell Tower, a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.
READ: Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, our source text for our last session on Hope.
WATCH: an extraordinary conversation on climate grief & hope, with Bayo Akomolafe, Naomi Klein, and Yuria Celidwen.
