Decolonize Your Dreams

protection, abundance and justice mean something different to everyone in the room and that is the whole point

I want to ask you something before we get into anything else.

If I handed you a piece of paper right now and asked you to write down what protection means to you, what abundance means to you, what justice means to you, what would you write?

Take a second with that. Really sit with it.

Now imagine the person next to you doing the same thing. And the person across from them. And the person who grew up in a different country, who practices a different faith, who moves through the world in a body that experiences these systems very differently than yours does.

Every single one of those pieces of paper is going to look different. And that is not the problem. That is actually where the work begins.

We live inside systems that have done a very specific thing to us. Capitalism, colonization, white supremacy, patriarchy. These systems have taken our definitions of protection, abundance, and justice and shrunk them down to the size of one person. One family. One pile. And they did it on purpose.

I think about dragons sometimes when I think about this. And we are not talking about abundant dragons, the ones who move freely and share and trust that there is enough. I mean the toxic kind. The hoarding kind. The ones sitting on a pile of gold, circling it, protecting it, never letting anything out and never letting anything in.

A lot of us are moving like that right now. And I am not saying that to shame anyone because I understand exactly why.

In America there is no guaranteed safety net waiting for you when you get old. There is no system that says you will be okay. Your retirement is yours to build or not build. Your parents aging is yours to figure out or not figure out. My own parents have told me that one of the greatest gifts they hope to give their children is for us to never have to worry about their retirement. That is a real and profound gift. It is also a symptom of a system that was never designed to take care of everyone.

So people hoard. People scramble. People do things that are dark and harmful in the name of securing their family because the system has told them over and over that there is only so much pie and if you do not get your slice someone else will take it.

That is the lie. That is the one we have to start pulling apart together.

Our world is abundant. I mean that fully. We have enough. What we do not have is systems designed to make sure that abundance flows to everyone. What we have instead are systems designed to make sure that abundance concentrates. That it pools at the top while the rest of us fight over what drips down.

And it is getting more visible by the day. We are heading toward water wars. In Colorado right now we are in drought. We haven’t gotten enough water. The snow and rain did not come. Flint, Michigan still does not have access to clean water as a community. And meanwhile there are people and corporations who own water. Actual water. Life. The thing that every single body on this planet requires to survive. And if we keep moving the way we are moving, getting access to clean water is going to cost people more than they can pay.

Octavia Butler wrote about this. The Lorax is about this. We have been warned in our stories and our literature and our art and we keep doing this anyway. Partly because the system is designed to exhaust us into convenience. To drain us so completely that we do not have the bandwidth to make a different choice. To make Amazon the easy answer because figuring out the alternative takes time and energy we do not have after working the job and paying the bills and just trying to survive the week.

That exhaustion is not an accident. It is the design.

And so what do we do with that?

We start somewhere. But we don’t have to live this way, regenerative systems are possible. We start with our definitions. Because you cannot build a world where everyone is protected and abundant and living inside something just if you have only ever imagined what that looks like for yourself. You need other people’s sight. You need the person who moves through the world in a disabled body telling you what abundance actually feels like to them. You need the person whose ancestral and spiritual inheritance was violently interrupted telling you what protection actually means when the harm runs that deep. You need the person who has been told their whole life that the systems are working to hear what it sounds like when someone who has never been served by those systems speaks their truth out loud.

That layering is how we start to build something real. That is how definitions expand. That is how we begin to imagine beyond what currently exists.

And this is exactly why The Dreaming Table exists.

We do not sit with protection, abundance and justice as theory. We do not write essays and debate positions and go home unchanged. We sit with these things through creativity and play and joy. Through making things with our hands. Through eating together. Through listening to each other in ways that our daily lives rarely make room for. We let the body lead because the body knows things the mind is still catching up to.

The Dreaming Table is asking you to say something out loud that a lot of us have forgotten we are allowed to say.

I am deserving of a day of just creating and play. I am deserving of a day of being in community. I am deserving of a day to imagine the world I know should exist. I am deserving of a soft life. I am deserving of regenerative systems. I am deserving of communal abundance and communal protection and a world that is actually just. I am deserving of better than what currently exists.

You are. We all are. And we cannot build it alone.

If this landed somewhere in your body and you are in Colorado this summer, or you are passing through, we have two community days of dreaming left this year.

June 7 in Boulder County. Registration is open now.

August details coming soon.

These are small, intentional gatherings of people who are ready to do the harder work through creativity, play, and ancestral connection. Come sit with us. Come expand what is possible together.