Create Your Future

I saw this sign at Ceres Environmental Park in Melbourne today. It sums up all I believe in. How to create your future, one step at a time.

I remember when Ceres was a concept born from the optimism and grass roots organic/home building impulse of the 1980s. We were in the midst of an amazing zeitgeist of alternative thinking. Creating our future as we lived our dream.

My husband and I were part of that 1980’s alternative living movement. We found our dream acreage, built a cottage, lived the alternative life with milking goats, bees, solar power and no mortgage as we built our mud brick house brick by brick.

We believed we could create. So we started. First a tiny shed, then a bigger cottage which we lived in for 10 years with two children while we built our dream house. It was a bold vision that evolved as we lived. Of course would we have started if we knew how long it would take? Probably not. But we did it and I’m glad.

I went to Ceres and saw what can happen when a community of people with a shared vision continue to create. Each year the gardens grow more productive, new people come and go, the vision changes as new projects and ideas take root. It is a dynamic living entity.

Of course visions do change, and our family sold our mud brick house, moved north and began a new story and a new vision. When I saw that word ‘create’ today, I thought of the words of German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

I have seen so many dreams turn into reality once that first step is taken. That leap of faith, that boldness which has genius, power and magic in it. When people take bold action, they begin to manifest their own vision.

Yesterday I took the grandchildren to the State Library in Melbourne. The timing was superb because we arrived when the Climate Action Rally was taking place right outside. I noticed a group of woman of around my age holding placards aloft, boldly proclaiming Grandmothers for Climate Action. I am a grandmother too!

These are statements and visions. They are creations of future intent. When we start something, we take action. We start the process to dare to create. And that is powerful.