Imagination & Justice Meditation and Freewriting Circles

Imagination and Justice: Meditation and Free-Writing Circles

with Lisa Freedman

An activist’s faith can never be unquestioning … can never oversimplify, as believers and activists are often tempted or pressured to do. Adrienne Rich

A question is a pursuit, an invitation to envision and explore a series of possibilities, to struggle and empathize and doubt and believe. The question moves, whereas our sense of what an answer is can often be static, a stopping point. Tracy K. Smith

We women writing in the fall of 2024 are blessed and cursed to live in interesting times. For just one example, we have the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” which the Center for American Progress calls “the playbook of a dictator.” But extremists don’t have a monopoly on ideas for the future. What does your vision for 2025 and beyond consist of? How do your identity and life experiences shape your priorities? How might we come together and contribute to the process of imagining a more just United States, a more perfect union, a process that started to unfold and has gotten derailed repeatedly over the past 400 years?

This round of the Imagination and Justice meditation and freewriting circles will pursue and move with the questions above. The I and J circles are both intimate and expansive. We hold space for the complexities of our own and each other’s stories and dreams. Each time we meet, we start with a few minutes of silence followed by a brief guided free-write and share to check in. Then Lisa guides us in two more rounds of meditation, free-writing, and sharing. The sharing is always optional.

Holding silence together is a bonding activity, and as the weeks progress, we connect more deeply through our writings. This is how we help each other take writerly risks to reveal ourselves and our imaginings. And this is how we support each other as we dare to share our voices and visions.

Meditators, writers, activists, skeptics, and idealists at every level of experience are welcome. All genres are welcome. These circles are a place to write or re-write material that dwells (or wants to dwell) in the realm where the personal is political. You may already be working on a relevant project, or you may be starting a new one. Either way, you and your stories, your writings are welcome here.

Participants receive the prompts and background materials each week. These come from Tracy K. Smith’s writings and a wide community of other voices that complement hers.

While this is a generative, free-writing circle, participants are often surprised by the power of the words that land on the page. Those of us in the first Imagination & Justice Circle, which took place in the fall of 2021, are delighted to have our writings collected by the IWWG in this anthology, which you can read here: Roots/Trunk/Sky.
https://issuu.com/guild2021/docs/imagination_and_justice_an_iwwg_writing_circle

Lisa Freedman is an author, activist, and professor of creative writing. She holds an MFA from the New School and is certified as a mindfulness meditation teacher by Dhama Moon. She founded and directs Breathe/Read/Write, an online community where mindfulness and writing come together.