It started with an inclusion to join the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Ireland Hub, Creative Community second meeting in Cloughjordan. I’d been to Cloughjordan only once before and was a little unsure of what I was giving up my weekend for. But the weekend was interesting, despite my small dose of cynicism as a bunch of usual suspects and some unusual ones were present. The sign of a good event is often who you meet and keep in touch with and in that sense 2 years later, it was very successful. It created an extended network that in turn led to bringing Doughnut Economics to Electric Picnic, Irelands biggest music festival.
Towards the end of the Creative Community event, I was exhausted. I choose weeding beetroot rather than facilitate and extract an outline of some sort as expected by the facilitator through a doughnut economics lens. The quiet of soil and abundant weeds gave me stòr.
It was not till driving away home from the event that I registered beetroot was the first vegetable I grew as a child, memories came flooding back. Great richness of a root vegetable unlocked my artist self. Over the next few weeks I played with an idea of a new type of creative engagement through images, storytelling, eating and seeds. The Beautiful Beetroot idea remains to be realised.
A few months after that weekend I got an email from the film maker Dónal Ó Céilleachair it read:
We are inviting WeALL Participating Creatives like yourself to contribute to this short film by writing a letter from a future ancestor. The plan is to then record each creative reading their letter to create a diverse montage of voices and insights emerging from our evolving WeALL community of practice. This will then become the primary soundtrack of the resulting film.
I’m attaching a 2-page brief with full directions and info.
Please let me know if you’d like to contribute and if you have any questions or concerns?
Among other things it had this quote in it:
Seeding the future when possible extinction stares us in the face
… calls for a quantum leap in our imaginations.
Vandana Shiva
The pdf attached included instructions and links, naming the invitation to be from the work of Joanna Macy.
This creative approach is drawing from the work of American ecophilosopher Joanna Macy’s Active Hope practices and in particular the ‘Seventh Generation’ deep-time ritual. This ritual allows us to envision contemporary times within a larger time frame, seven generations into the future, roughly 200 years.
For the purpose of this ritual there are four basic assumptions:
1. That there will be humans living on Earth in 200 years time.
2. That the future ones have a cultural memory of what is happening in the present time.
3. That they must be living in life-sustaining communities, because they have survived the collapse of the Industrial Growth Society/World Order.
4. The word ancestor here refers to all people of preceding generations and is not limited to one’s own genetic line.
I had first come across Joanna Macy’s work in 2021 when I studied Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance. I’d bought one of her books and had looked briefly at her work. It had not particularly resonated with me.
But the invitation captured my imagination.
I said yes.
Then as the deadline grew closer, it was tight, I got stressed, worried.
Creatively worried is a different form of stress and can move me into a flurry, a deep form of procrastination that channels activation of a hyper creative process. It’s a significant memory the fluttering that Sunday morning, noticing, walking the garden, taking photos, writing a poem, a blog post and a social media sharing of them. After all that preperation I was ready, I was connected enough to the thing to do the thing.
I wrote my letter.
It was a profound experience.
This blog post attends to the fluttering, my own politics of refrences on 1 November 2023 and the creative preperation to do the work.
The poem originally share on Instagram
I completed my letter. I don’t think I published it. Thinking it was somehow only for the film. I’m publishing it here for the first time.
I went deep, I thought about what if we didn’t get it right. I wondered about the dissonance of understanding words and how they sounded when spoken. Of how this ancestor in the future might know vague things of this time. I thought about if digital died and energy was limited so much would be lost. So I wrote my letter from 2223, from someone related to me through 7 generations forward.
Dear Ancestor:
I am writing to you from the year 2,225 . . .
I’ve loved going through your collections of poems and images, I’m so grateful you loved nature and captured it in your way. It has given us an impression of what kind of abundant world you lived in. A poem you wrote in 2023 you speak of “the intricacy a joy to behold, made easy to the eye by left over rain, enraptured I’m lost looking” after spending time staring at what you call cobwebs. We no longer have spiders or cobwebs. My MeMa treasures her heirloom resin ring of a spider.
Your last line in the poem “oh but it be a sight for seven generations to come” makes me long for your world. We lost so much, we lost so many. We regret-rage and bemoan in our hearts & in community. The chasms between your world and ours is climatcide. That for decades nothing was done. My MeMa says we are from generations of life robbers. Yet we were not spared, our reckoning came, despite everything everyone was effected. Many more than others and their loss and the lands loss is hard to bear.
We know you are among leaders that stand up for us and our world. Speak of us when you can.
What might you have done differently if you knew every action signified what are world is?
The last of the oak trees that you planted have begun to die. We tried to grow them but after 2146 no new oaks grew. Our community has come together to acknowledge the oaks gifts and shade, we are together in this giant loss. We tend our sadness like you seemed to have tended what you called a garden. As you tend to your oaks do everything to ensure they will live beyond even our existence. Our world depends on what your time do now.
What we have learnt from your intense observations and studies is sensing. We practice your onewin. It brings us to a looking beneath what appears dead and gone to become aware of new emergent beings and what we now know are different kind of life forms. We fall in rhythm with our surroundings. We don’t have choices but cognitive survival tactics.
The earth it seems will find a way with or without us. We no longer extract and mine the land but lay low with her, she tolerates us for now. Often kicking us back with unleashes and hurry’s, you called them hurricanes and quakes. We blending what comfort we can from what the earth allows and our scientific knowledge. It is also part of our bemoan and during our concordance we share new emergences. Our collective sings them into our dances and we live them forward. We hope to be wiser soon.
We are flooding your visual and ear with letters so you may find the strength and courage, be present to all you can do. Be with many find a way to do what needs to be done.
We remember you as best we can as you live us forward.
i mo chónaí
a bheith beo
After submitting the letter, Dónal followed up, to record me speaking the letter. I found it very emotional to read it aloud, it came across in those recordings.
Two sentences from my letter are used in the film.
Seeding the Future, Dónal’s film was shown in December 2023 at a WEALL Ireland event in Smock Alley. I was not prepared for the impact of hearing my voice on the big screen.
The film has also been screened widely in festivals, conferences, seminars, webinars and workshops, you can find out more about it on Anú Pictures.
Roisin Markham 