Last week I devoured ‘The Parable of the Sower’ by Octavia Butler. I very reluctantly turned the last few pages, and since then I have filled the void with pages of non-fiction that continue to spin out the themes. I haven’t thought about picking up another story yet; this one needs some reverence in the between, perhaps so that I can continue knowing it through its absence. Like a small grief, perhaps, this reliving.

This is the first I’ve read of Octavia’s works, and it won’t be the last. It is darkly beautiful, confronting, raw, unflinchingly human, and strewn with all horror and hope. Written in the 1990s, it depicts a future set in the years 2024-27. Unsettling one day to read the diary entry of Lauren Olamina on the very date I was living. Arresting to read about the wild fires - commonplace, indiscriminate - devastating the west coast of America. This is the fiction I need just now, the kind that holds me while it tells me an adjacent truth and urges me to imagine other ways. It is an urgency, the need to reimagine who we are to each other and how we might live. Adrienne Maree Brown, an ardent fan of Octavia’s work, describes science fiction as ‘where I go when I need the medicine of possibility applied to the trauma of human behaviour’. This.

It is the non-fiction world of Adrienne’s ‘Emergent Strategy’ I’m immersed in now, no less lyrical, no less real, no less hopeful. Her words in turn have inspired the theme for this Sunday’s therapeutic writing hour: fractals.

When I’ve not had my nose in a book, I’ve been paying more attention to the living world around me and much less to the continuous siren of a screen. Not long ago I felt the creeping return of a cold anxiety paired with a strange and new remoteness, as if watching my life from dispassionate distance. Also a siren, and one I could respond to with change. A slow, steady vitality has expanded into the interstices of my day, nudging out the constant, fragmented vigilance I thought I needed to stay informed and connected. I can still be a citizen, I can still act, I can still care, I can still learn…but this must be from a place of connection and curiosity, resource and replenishment, a place where I choose my teachers.

Adrienne writes that ‘it’s ok to feel beautiful in the process of creating justice’ and I’m letting this guide and teach me in place of feeling overwrought and under resourced.

In my renewed noticing, the gathering crows are hard to ignore. It’s usually the heron that signals to me, reassures me, guides me. But the crows have been noisily insistent, a few days ago gathering in flappy cacophony atop a tree outside my house. Demanding my attention. Since then they caw and circle in ones and twos, I spot them on chimney tops, on beaches, on streets. I look up their meaning and learn that they signify change coming, while I discard omens of death - for now at least, though death is change too of course, as is birth.

The crow is bold, and wily, and one of number. I learn that a murder of crows may assemble to protect those who feed among them. So the crow is organised too, protector and facilitator both. I decide, since we are in the epoch of simply renaming stuff, that crows gather in collaboration and not murder. A collaboration of crows, then, gathered in noisy fanfare outside my house, reminding me of change coming, change already underway, change always.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.

― Octavia E. Butler

Octavia’s fictional religion of Earthseed offers me the one god I might actually believe in. Change is at the heart of my work and of course all of our lives should we acknowledge it. At levels cellular to cosmic, relational to ecological, change is the one truth we know. A distillation of all therapeutic endeavour leaves us with the acknowledgement and expression of change, and the adaptation to it.

The hard truths of Earthseed provide surprising comfort in acknowledging the inherent precarity of life, while also offering a framework for action. This is real. Yield to change, Earthseed says, and also take opportunities to affect change. Here is the existential view that change is perhaps the one universal truth, and that we can be transformative agents rather than passive subjects. This is how we become truly alive to ourselves and each other, how we restore justice, how we imagine new worlds into being.

In a fractal conception, I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do. This means actually being in my life, and it means bringing my values into my daily decision making. Each day should be lived on purpose.

- Adrienne Maree Brown

Here are some of the ways change is wending its way through me, and how I am shaping it:

The Portal - wonderful things are coming on this new platform, and are already underway. I am in the process of migrating my courses away from algorithms, ads and tech bros and into this collaborative, female founded new space. It’s beautiful in there. Alchemy is already settled in and The Sunday Pages very soon too. If you’re a creator and looking for a warm, friendly and nurturing ecosystem to home your membership / course / offer, then take a look. It’s an exciting and empowering time to join.

The Sunday Pages is this weekend - 23rd February 6-7pm. This is my monthly writing hour, a private space in good company, in which I offer writing prompts to navigate a different theme each time. It’s an engaging, reflective, restorative hour. The theme this time is ‘fractals’ and my intention is to guide you in writing to explore the relationship between the small and the large of life.

Both aspects of my work, psychotherapy and writing, are rooted ever more firmly in social justice, and my belief in transformative change at every level of existence. There are new work developments coming this year, with my intention to live with more clarity and strength from these roots, intertwined as they are with others in community. I think this will be most tangible in my therapeutic writing spaces. Saying that, you might not actually notice anything even if you’ve frequently written with me; I think the shift has been by stealth, underway and interwoven for some time now.

I believe we write to know ourselves in relationship - to self, to others, to the world. We write to make our own connections through unfolding awareness and expression, and we write to know our interconnections, to locate ourselves as subjects and agents of change in the ever-shifting ecosystem of others. We write to understand the world as much as we can, to express our own world within it as much as we can, and to create new worlds, new ways of living, as much as we possibly can. I’ve always known this, I’ve just found some new ground to root further into and rise from.

Moving forward, I hope you’ll join me.