Hello
Last time we talked about dystopia.
Remember what that is?
I never really defined it, but you get the idea... 😅
If dystopia is an imagined world where injustice reigns, utopia is its opposite. Utopia is an imagined world where everything's perfect.
Only thing is, who is the one defining it as "perfect" and well... how long's that gonna last?
Something To Think About & Discuss
The Dispossessed (Ursula K Le Guin)
Imagine two worlds, two separate planets. On one, society is organized as a collectivist utopia, where work is shared equally according to people's interests and skills. On the other (simultaneously moon and mother of the first), people have prisons and wars and rich and poor and lots and lots of waste.
This is what author Ursula K Le Guin has created in her novel The Dispossessed. She's imagined two worlds Anarres and Urras. A century or two before the story begins, people from Urras have left the home planet to colonize the moon. They seek freedom within collective responsibility. They want to form a utopia (Anarres). When a scientist from the utopian society decides to travel back to Urras in hopes of bridging scientific theories and disunited cultures, he encounters much he does not expect, political intrigue included. Readers are left wanting more.
OR at least this particular reader (me) was left wanting more... opportunities to discuss the story with others. So if you're curious, let's talk 😄
Something Seriously Friendly
Meg Bolger is a workshop facilitator and trainer who is continuously creating opportunity to reflect on what a just world could look like through her honest reflections via her Friday Email. Here is one such reflection, written earlier this year:
In the past few weeks I’ve really been sitting with this idea of knowing what good looks like. It started in my work world, where I was talking to a colleague about why so many people are satisfied with sub-par gatherings, workshops, and meetings and she responded, “Because they don’t know what good looks like.”
I see this everywhere. In relationships, in our jobs, in our (relationships with our) bodies, in our world, we so often don’t know what good looks like. Which makes it easy to settle for less-than-good/wanted/desired, without ever knowing or realizing that’s what’s happening.
It’s UNsettling. It is UNsettling to have our baselines reset, to start asking/wanting/believing in more. It makes us feel on shaky ground (because it’s new) but it’s also removing us from the unwise settling we have been doing.
So in that spirit I hope we all have some unsettling experiences this year (in the good way), as part of moving toward and accepting what good might look like in our lives.
Thanks, Meg, for sharing your thoughts!
The Fun Bit
"utopia" by björk
Imagining better futures musically-speaking might sound odd. It could be unfamiliar.
Birdsong and flute mixed with synthetically-produced computer-generated sound-beats? It's like an alien world! Yep.
That's what's happening here.
Utopia /
It isn't elsewhere /
It, it's here /
My instinct has been shouting at me for years /
Saying let's get out of here /
Let's go over there instead.
JPC