Our Captured Imaginations
“It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The Old Story—the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it—is not functioning properly, and we have not learned the New Story.” Thomas Berry
In Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown writes that we’re in an imagination battle — one where fear shapes how we relate to our bodies, tangled up with fear of Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, and difference. Radical imagination, she argues, is a tool for decolonization: for reclaiming our right to shape our own lived reality. I’ve been thinking about this as Crossroads reimagines itself in the world. That struggle is real — but not only because of fearful imaginations. It’s also about captured ones.
The fight is to liberate our imagination not just from fear, but from what it’s been reduced to: a tool of control rather than creation. Our collective imagination feels split. A huge share of our imaginative potential is being funneled into generative AI — which, by extension, serves militaristic, surveillance, and controlling ends. The rest is spent fighting against that very creation.
What gets captured, what gets limited, is our capacity — emotionally, somatically — to imagine the world we want. All our energy goes to tactics, strategy, the next action, the next payout a piece of creative work can be converted into.
It reminds me of an untitled sabbath poem from Wendell Berry’s “The Timbered Choir” collection. In it, he describes a world where liberation itself gets absorbed into the logic of competition and sale: people once oppressed are now merely “free” to sell themselves to the highest bidder, and every pursuit — victory, promotion, salvation, self-realization — collapses into the same transactional endpoint, until no one can find their way home again because the old landmarks have been erased.
I think a lot about how trapped we’ve become in pursuit of “the objective” — driving toward narrow visions of freedom and inclusion, toward transactional exercises, until we’ve forgotten what it feels like in our bodies and minds to imagine or create for its own sake. To sit in community. To be present while something is being born.
Cultivating Imagination is Critical
“Imagination is a field of struggle not an ephemeral afterthought that we have the luxury to dismiss or romanticize.” Ruha Benjamin
At Crossroads, we are convicted of two things: resisting and dismantling systemic injustice is taxing and depleting, AND without the spaces and practice to replenish our imaginations, it is unsustainable. That’s why Crossroads is spending this fall exploring imagination. We’re launching a new workshop, Creation as Sustenance and Resistance, on November 7th in Chicago. It’s practice-based: participants won’t just analyze racism (still critical work) but will cultivate other parts of themselves — imagination among them — in community. In November, that means dancing, cooking together, and leaning on music to feed our small revolutions.
We’re also running a companion Coffee with Crossroads series, featuring Crossroads Transitional Executive Director, Jessica Vazquez Torres, in conversation with creatives whose work — professionally or otherwise — keeps them connected to their humanity and to a future without injustice.
Together we’ll explore the links between creativity, imagination, and our capacity to resist — to work for justice that’s liberatory rather than transactional, that dismantles the logic of domination rather than dressing it up.
Coffee with Crossroads Conversation Partners
Droping on September 14th: A conversation with children’s book writer and Chicago based community activist Nina Sanchez. (Sent automatically to all registrants!)
September 17th: And we are Dancing! – A conversation with Crossroads organizer Sherita Love about the power of dancing in community.
October 2nd: The Ink is the Outcome – A conversation with reproductive justice advocate Kwajelyn Jackson about the journey to a tattoo and self-expression.
October 9th: Transcribing the Ethers – A conversation with social justice coach, capacity builder and poet Aja Couchois Duncan about what it means to subvert the fixed nature of the written word and what that teaches us about liberation.
November 13th: Setting Tables! – A conversation with Chicago-based community chef Andrew Shen about his love of food, cooking, feeding community, and why subversive tables matter.
December 4th: One Stitch at a Time – A conversation with James Potts, aka The Quilting Rev, about “the messy, beautiful, and meaningful act of piecing life together—one stitch at a time.”
January 8th: Shaped by Sound – A conversation with Chicago-based violist Clara Takarabe about music, communal health, and the power of music to heal.
February 5th: Rootedness – A conversation with North Carolina-Based songwriter, author, and speaker David LaMotte about the power of stories to root us.
We hope you’ll join us, as we work to awaken our own organizational imagination — not just for what the future holds for us, but for what the world needs.
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