Invoking our future: Has the magic gone?
The struggle is real, but Kali’s Creativity Revolution wants us to know THIS…
This is a long road we travel
Is it as bad as it seems
Does it captivate your every thought
Oh, reaching for your dream
- T’Pau, “Road to Our Dream”, 1988.
Strains of T’Pau awoke my memory body this morning, harkening back to long drives through the dark Scottish night over the Rest and Be Thankful (that’s a mountain pass in Argyll) with just my trusty yellow Walkman keeping me company in the back of the car.
If this is the road we take to our dream
Do we walk in vain
If this is the road we take to our dream
And fall on the way
Get up and do it again
It’s like a time-machine, teleporting me straight back to those moments: the foam-covered plastic headphones transmitting the scratchy, distant, cassette-recording into my dreamy consciousness as I gaze out over looming black crags and dark, falling valleys.
This is the power of creation. I don’t care if it’s pop music or highbrow opera - human creation1 resonates and creates deep, somatic wiring that connects all our past selves.
But what about our future selves? Can we wire those in through art too?
This year is truly feeling like a reckoning point. I think most of us feel discombobulated and fractionated, in a world which feels even more so.
- Where do we put our energies?
- What do we focus on?
What used to ”work” (in relationships, in business, even in our health and wellbeing) doesn’t really match up any more, and we’re trying to figure out what might instead…
But what brings us back to wholeness is another being’s magical creativity, their ability to invoke something in us we had actually forgotten existed - or more: that we never even realised was possible.
It’s true, art really can invoke our future selves.
That’s the very real magic - and it feels like we’ve forgotten that as Kali destroys everything we once knew around us.
We have forgotten that out of destruction comes renewal. Rebirth. Repatterning. (R)evolution…
What will we choose at this cataclysmic reckoning point?
Our past selves, forever looping on repeat?
Our unknown future, based upon current turmoil and fear, or hopeful thinking?
A messy, unconscious, survival-based cotton-ball of the two?
Or… is it secret option number 4, the one the world really doesn’t want you to know, let alone acknowledge and embrace…
…a fully-conscious, intentional invocation of our future potential firmly rooted in our somatic safety and generational wisdom?
That is the magic, right there, my friend.
And this is what truly great art - from energising pop to portal-like paintings - can do for the very future of our brilliant humanity.
Do you agree? If so, tell me what invokes your future self and what makes it so powerful! ⬇️
Come see a selection of my immersive energy landscapes this June during ArtWeek Exeter at the old MakeTank premises on Paris St!
And if you can’t make it to Devon, send some encouragement my way so I can get my perimenopausal ass on some wickedly enticing lives right here on Substack (and maybe Instagram) to walk you through my energy landscapes in person!
With an abundance of love; walking hand in hand with you into our collective future…
Zoë 💖
I say human specifically (and briefly) because AI has (not yet) learned to reach these places. As another Substacker so eloquently pointed out this week, AI creations are like “‘gruel’: sloppy on the palette, thin, monotonous, tasteless, anonymous and yet you have the vague sense that swallowing it is supposed to be somehow good for you.” - You are a Story with Will Storr.