The Transforming Power of Our Collective Imagination: A Different Kind of Activism

Can our collective imagination lead to real change? The future is a story we tell together.

Trust in journalism is collapsing, and I want to build a radical alternative.

What happens if journalists can change the way we do everything and stop reporting stories from the disconnected and wounded, profit-driven perspective of our publishers, instead drafting compelling narratives in collaboration with the community?

What if the most trustworthy news source wasn’t a newsroom, but a circle of community members and elders with pens?

While 85 % of people see local news as vital, far fewer feel represented in the media.

And according to Gallup, “Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media, with [only] 31% expressing a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of confidence in the media to report the news ‘fully, accurately and fairly.’”

I understand there are several reasons for that, but this is low.

Surveys also show only 33% of Hispanics and 25% of Black citizens feel the media portrays their communities accurately.

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Something powerful happens when we gather with others around a solid and shared intention, then speak them to life as we witness each other.

Magic happens in those spaces. It’s like a gold thread wraps around each of our hearts and stitches us all together into one human quilt, a comfy one to keep us warm.

What is that? That magic … I have been asking myself that a lot lately.

There is also magic in writing our truth, even if just a few sentences.

In one of my favorite books this year, “James” by Percival Everett, the main character uses literacy as a tool to carve out a sense of freedom and selfhood beyond the brutal confines of slavery.

This captures the magic of writing our story and being witnessed in a society where few listen and our voices have been too often muffled, filtered, or worse, stripped.

James escapes, and on his journey, he finds a pencil stub, some paper, and he reflects: "But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning."

Those sentences have haunted me for months.

It touched a pain of rarely being truly seen, which I’ve felt my whole life, granted for very different yet somewhat similar reasons to James.

It also touched something I’ve been brainstorming and creating, something that midwives more of the magic of being seen and heard in connection with others through shared experiences, layered in both writing and the spoken word.

In a time when voices and books are being banned, and likely the one I just mentioned, according to the BBC, literacy, creativity and connection are not just skills, but forms of resistance, subversion and survival in a world where some want us isolated and powerless.

Through achieving literacy, James was overturning a corrupt system, a power-over structure, and unkind established authorities in a quiet, clever and indirect way.

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There comes a time in our lives when we start to look back and see how all the dots connect, and everything we have lived through and worked for leads us to where we are going. Do you ever feel that way, that after some years lived, the lines between the dots start to form a picture that makes more sense?

When I was in it, my time as a college instructor in journalism felt like a deviation from the career I had before I moved back home to start a family. I had hoped to continue as a full-time newspaper writer.

It was during an economic downturn, and nobody was hiring staff writers, but I managed to get consistent freelance writing gigs while teaching part-time.

I ended up loving teaching news writing and creating that space for others. It now seems relevant to the work I am walking into.

The connection that happened in those classrooms was everything, and the ways I let the students know I deeply cared about them, that they had a voice that mattered, the way I hoped I made them feel, nurturing them as they began to create the first dots in the big picture of their lives as writers, was everything.

The material I taught seemed secondary to those classroom experiences.

As a journalist and, later in my career, news and magazine editor, I loved working with reporters in a similar way, and interviewing subjects, letting them know that their story deeply mattered. Crafting and weaving those stories for print to share with others was the most meaningful work in my life—it felt like a sacred act of service for those on both sides of the story.

Often, their story created change.

How often have you been told how much your voice and life matter?

I want to make a living out of letting people know they matter. Your stories matter. Your experiences matter. Your voice matters.

You matter.

From the space of my 20 years of caring deeply in this way, I am creating this platform, which I hope will heal communities, giving the voices back to the people, rather than filtering them through the layers of gatekeeping in legacy media.

The whole structure has to change. Circles are not hierarchies. Accessibility is honored over gatekeeping. Trust is built through shared experience and compassion. While there is a servant-leader and guide, it is not run by disconnected experts. It's built on mutual aid. That alone is revolutionary.

Can I call it journalism? Probably not. Perhaps it deserves a more comprehensive label.

I imagine myself and my future colleagues as bone collectors of lost voices, gathering the pieces of humanity that have been forgotten and lost. Buried.

The democratization of media, with the advent of platforms like YouTube and Twitter, has given us some of our voice back from legacy media, but the meaningful filter of craft, media law and ethics were left in the dust along with professional standards.

I want to find a balance between how authentic and real we can be without compromising the integrity of the work we share.

Misinformation and disinformation are twisting society into a knot of injustice. Whatever the motive, whether profit or propaganda, it must be checked.

When I stopped siloing my different passions and allowed them to coalesce into one thing, the dream began to take shape.

Could these writing workshops and story circles provide the connection, healing, and birth information necessary for crafting well-woven stories?

In a world where efficiency and utility often take precedence over human processes and experiences, could this be a radical way to provide information to the public and give the people's voices back to them?

Is there a world where I can wear my teacher hat, my spiritual hat and my journalism hat all at once?

Anais Nin once said: “I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.”

Yes, Anais. That.

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I have been working on a related exercise for an existing grassroots organization that creates change through community engagement and planned action.

What would it look like if we sat in circle together and wrote a few sentences about the dream world we want to live in? What writing could I birth through the scriblings and voices that rise out of this circle? And why does this playful activity feel so important and powerful?

Exercise

Step one: If you could create any world you would want to exist in, what would it look like? Write for a few moments on that, and make it as wild, as beautiful, as childlike and weird as you want.

Gourmet ice cream and pizza trucks can pull up to the office every day. Wait, there will be no offices in the way they have existed before in my world. They would be more like playgrounds for adults where we work in communion with each other and nature. Fall would last for six months, and the leaves would be the colors of the rainbow. My world would have the abundance of nature as there is enough sun for everyone. Healthcare would be universal and free as a basic human right. Childcare would be affordable (so I could afford to go to work doing what I love doing and I would no longer have to choose between my career and motherhood.) Loneliness wouldn’t be an issue, because we would live in tribal communties where everyone takes care of everyone and all flourishing is mutual. We would be so close to nature that flowers would grow out of buildings, like that Talking Heads song “Nothing But Flowers.” Flying horses would take me wherever I wanted to go. Oh, and they would talk. So would my dogs. Love would reign. Fear and hate would not exist. There’s more, but not enough space. Maybe another essay. If you’re up for it, send me yours. My email at the bottom of this.

Step two: Now write in a few sentence what you would change about the city you live in. (This one is a little more practical and grounded.)

Step three: Finally, write a few sentences about the ways you would help midwife that vision into this world using your creative gifts, following the path of purposeful work that brings you joy.

Step four: Share out loud with the group for one minute. Someone set a timer.

Step five: I gather all the notes and weave a narrative report together. I can’t wait to see what threads are revealed from the patterns found in this collection. The most fun research project ever.

I envision people laughing and crying. Because it could get weird (in a good way.)

It could also be really beautiful.

While I initially thought this was a simple way to daydream together, lift our heads and hearts out of the muck being pumped out on the news, and connect over shared causes, it occurred to me that this is so much more than that.

There is magic that happens when we write, and another layer of magic when we speak it out loud to another, and more magic when we play.

See, we are all conscious creators. Science now argues that when we speak, we cast spells, which is why we must be careful about the negative ways we speak about ourselves and each other.

Japanese scientist and photographer Dr. Masaru Emoto wrote in “The Hidden Messages in Water” that kind words produce beautiful, symmetrical crystal formations in freezing water, while unkind words result in chaotic, distorted and amorphous blobs. “Words are the vibration of nature. Therefore, beautiful words create beautiful nature. Ugly words create ugly nature. This is the root of the universe,” Dr. Masaru Emoto wrote.

This research shows that when we speak, we are sculpting the world around us. Our voice and pen become tools for a new existence.

Also, a reminder that our current world is a mirror of humanity’s past and limited imagination.

Don’t like what you see? It may be time to take a hard look in the mirror.

What do you like about our current world? Let your gratitude water those flowers and watch them grow.

Alternatively, when we visualize a new way, we create pathways to that new place. Think of them as quantum pathways. OK, hear me out. I know it sounds weird, but quantum physics is finally explaining how this is true (notes below).

When we imagine a beautiful world we want to live in from a place of love, scratch those dreams onto paper and give voice to our dreams, we collectively reach into the clouds of unlimited possibilities and pull them down into form.

Then, we look forward, together.

Think about it — the world we live in now was imagined by a collective of people a long time ago. The country we live in today was born of the imagination of a few founding fathers in rebellion against a corrupt monarchy, and it has shaped us.

But it has also been shaped by fear over time.

Fear that if our current world were to change too much and grant freedom to all, it would mean losing control, as one living in scarcity might think that too much personal freedom leads to chaos.

As we age as a country, we are becoming our parents, blindly, scarily.

If fear, scarcity, hate, narcissism and narrow thinking were people, they would all be friends in the same click. My hope is that these people would not become leaders.

Hate is born out of these limited beliefs and fear of the “other,” which is nothing more than the unknown. Then control follows as a “solution.” Both fear and control are illusions, imaginings of a darker polarity.

I believe if we knew everyone’s stories, we would have no enemies, and fear would dissolve. Then hate would follow it down the drain.

Love-based imaginings do not control, distort truth or confuse through fabrications, which humans have been doing to each other for millennia.

But we have also loved, and we have become resilient through love, not hate.

If we imagine a different world together, then it means it exists in our collective consciousness. There is no better resistance than holding on to our hope for a world where we all belong, using our creative skills to speak, write, paint and sculpt it into existence.

There is also so much power in coming together when we dream. Think of it this way: Each of us has our own consciousness, which is like a flame. When three or more flames come together, the singular united flame gets bigger, like putting too many birthday candles together on a cake … that thing is ablaze, and in the best way.

Science is pointing more and more to the reality that we are conscious creators through our words, our imaginations and our voices.

Imagination is the fertile ground where gardens of reality are born. When we write or dream together, we till the soil and plant futures.

We are the ancestors for generations to come. How powerful would it be to imagine a world based on love, for them, for us, where every human life’s personal sovereignty is honored, and bring that into form through our dreams of what could be possible?

Then I realized just how powerful this exercise is, and that this is the work I am here to do for this next part of my journey. I hope you will begin to imagine the reality you want to live in and join me in these daydreams.

In writing this dream onto these pages you’re reading, I put this into practice. I can’t wait to see what this becomes.

Jocelyn is a journalist, editor and the founder of the storytelling platform Narrative Moth[er], where she collects stories from “writing” circles as a form of connection and advocacy. Email her at narrativemoth@gmail.com to create a story circle in your organization on any topic and watch her weave magic and dreams into story form to support your cause or vision.

MORE NOTES:

(Some notes if you wish to keep reading. For those of you who are ready to stop, this is your place. )

If you aren’t convinced yet about the power of our imagination, written and spoken into form, and our focus and vision for the world we want to live in, quantum mechanics is showing us how our attention and intention alone create worlds.

The Quantum Explanation Notes:

Quantum physics shows us that at its core, reality is not made of fixed particles but of probability waves — pure potential — until we observe or measure them. This is a reflection of your own ability to observe, intend and bring form into manifestation.

Scientists have demonstrated this through the double slit experiment, where a particle’s behavior depends directly upon whether it’s observed. This illustrates your role as a conscious co-creator; your focus helps determine which form emerges from pure potential.

The phenomenon of entanglement reveals that everything is interconnected. A change in one particle resonates across vast distances, like light years, reflecting the profound unity of all.

Einstein famously called this “spooky action at a distance,” and while it still puzzles many, experiments like the Bell test have confirmed the reality of this strange connection between distant particles that are connected by origin.

A lot of this is over my head and hard for me to imagine, but it’s fun playing and trying.

Quantum entanglement is nonlocal, meaning the connection doesn't depend on distance or conventional transmission that we are familiar with (like radio waves).

So I will argue that when you create with pure intent and a loving heart, you send ripples through the collective field of consciousness. You are powerful beyond what you may think.

While I am not bringing religion into this, I am a spiritual person who draws inspiration from and borrows wisdom from ancient texts across all cultures. Who am I to think everything I share is an original thought? Credit is due.

There is a verse we have all heard throughout our lives, one that feels relevant in this project: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

Source spoke, and worlds were born. However, we are all waking up to a more profound, layered and inclusive reality, thanks in part to quantum physics: That Source, our Mother-Father God, lives within us and whispers to us through our hearts. Everything in existence is included. Nothing and no one are left out.

Through the density and polarity of our flesh, which is nothing but condensed energy (thank you, Oppenheimer movie … don’t worry, I fact-checked it*), some believe God experiences this contrast, resistance, opposites through our physical form, and like friction on sand, a pearl is born.

What is the pearl, you ask? You decide. Love, Beauty, Wisdom, Growth, New Life, New Worlds. Expansion of a universe and a soul within a universe, growing outward, one pearl at a time.

*The idea of matter being condensed energy stems from Einstein's famous equation, E = mc², which says mass can be converted into energy and vice versa.

So when we speak, when we write, our words become future worlds. Our microcosms are manifestations of our beliefs, whether conscious or unconscious. Often, limited to what we know and were born into.

Let’s change that. Let’s imagine more for ourselves and our world.