by Manda Scott, author of the Boudica: Dreaming
series and host of the Accidental Gods podcast
We’re on the edge of change: The Great Transformation, Great Adaptation, Great Unravelling, or just a Great Deal of Uncertainty With Which We Are Currently Not Coping. If you’re reading this, you have some idea of the depth of the crisis. You may lose sleep to climate anxiety, or watch your children as they realise their future is not the one we imagined for them when we were their age. Whatever your emotional steps into this, what you almost certainly don’t have is a road map for navigating this level of personal and cultural insecurity.
What we all desperately need is a sense that we are not alone, that we have fellow travellers who share the dark nights and moments of despair, but who can also unearth
from the dark, nuggets of raw compassion, of insight, of self-reflection and, dare we say it, hope, even if it’s the Vaclev Havel kind of hope that is not the conviction that things will turn out well (because at this stage, that would be delusional), but a belief that things make sense, however they turn out.
These poems offer this kind of sense-making, from the Introduction where you reach the cliff’s edge and realise you are not alone, through the rhythmic promise of an
unravelling and reweaving in The Future is Already Here, to the wonder of engagement in Atoms and the joy of discovery through the telescope in Beyond to the implicit community in We Share a Dream… each of these pieces offers new insight, new possibility and the sense of cocreation that is at the heart of all the best art.
I share with Richard the belief that there is still time for a decent future to emerge from the collapse of the current system: that we can leave to our grandchildren’s grandchildren a flourishing world, where people and planet thrive, where humanity steps into the niche that the web of life offers us and where each of us brings the best of ourselves to the collective table, confident that we are a thread in the overall weave and this weave is beautiful.
If we’re to get to this, we need encouragement to let go of the old paradigm and step with joy, courage and conviction into the new. These pages will help pave the route. I commend them to your hearts and your souls.
Poems from the brink of a better tomorrow by Richard Wain
“Inspiring & beautiful”
Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning