A passage from the poet Wallace Stevens (1989) has guided me for many years in my understanding of both religion and depth psychology: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly” (p. 189). These words are not as radical as they may sound at first. You just have to accept that everything we say is colored by the limits of our understanding, our emotional biases, and our hopes and wishes. Imagination shapes everything we say and think. Whenever we tell the stories of our lives, we are all novelists. In his book Healing Fiction, Hillman (1983) went further. He said that therapy offers the opportunity to opt into a better fiction, tell a more advanced story about your life.

Exploring that space between memories and the stories we create allows us to emerge as the leaders we were born to be. My journey as a leader has taught me that my childhood demanded a hypervigilance and that, to stay safe, I learned to work ceaselessly to try to make sense of the world (even as I was confronted with insensible acts and facts). As part of that effort, I listened closely—collecting and holding the stories of those around me as clues to a puzzling life.

The result is that I often see, hear, sense things that others miss. This can be a source of great wisdom. But this sensing can be an impediment to my peace of mind as well, for I can create whole ships of fiction out of the random flotsam and jetsam that float my way. Still, when I sit well and quietly, I can see a way through the puzzle, especially when another is blocked. I laugh as I recall that one of my favorite childhood pastimes was completing books of mazes. I like working my way out of mazes; I am good at it.

I am open to critiques of course, if they are offered in the spirit of collective liberation. Staying focused on our foundational miraculous nature is actually very hard work in our modern culture of deconstruction. We are socialized to see what is wrong, missing, off, to tear down the ideas of others and uplift our own. To a certain degree, our entire future may depend on learning to listen, listen without assumptions or defenses. So I am open to hearing what doesn’t work about this book, as long as you promise to stay open to what does work.

Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice. We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. All organizing is science fiction. If you are shaping the future, you are a futurist. And visionary fiction is a way to practice the future in our minds, alone and together. Visionary fiction is neither utopian nor dystopian, instead it

is like real life: Hard, realistic… Hopeful as a strategy. Visionary fiction disrupts the hero narrative concept that one person (often one white man, often Matt Damon) alone has the skills to save the world. Cultivate fiction that explores change as a collective, bottom-up process. Fiction that centers those who are currently marginalized—not to be nice, but because those who survive on the margins tend to be the most experientially innovative—practicing survival-based efficiency, doing the most with the least, an important skill area on a planet whose resources are under assault by less marginalized people. Visionary fiction is constantly applying lessons from our past to our future(s). The best way to practice visionary fiction is to get to writing. The Octavia’s Brood website offers workshops, and you can also write on your own, form writing groups, and share stories with others. You have worlds inside you. You have permission to share them

It is a bewildering fact that while we launch out to distant planets, while we approach the wonder and dread of a new millennium (one that could see the human race bring about its own extinction, or enter the greatest stage of its development), as human beings we have not yet begun to see one another as people who are forced to be together must. Human history is hundreds of thousands of years old and still we look at one another with superficial eyes — as if we haven’t learnt in all these millennia of interacting that we are all merely human, that beneath our skins there are continents of similar desires and eruptive dreams, swirling universes of thoughts, pre-historic urges, lightning flashes, and an eternal bloom of flowers. It is bewildering because it seems that beneath the strife of our age, internecine warfare, tribal antagonisms, religious intolerance, racial violence, the disharmony of the sexes, beneath all these lurks the most ordinary discovery that we are human, and that life is

Holy.