Focus and Flow Summer Camp: Day Four

Imagineering

Jul 17, 2025

∙ Paid

Hello all,

We are into Day Four of our Wild Edge Summer Camp. If you are interested in joining in, there are still lots of ways to get involved.

A little more about what’s in store today.. read below and/or listen to the welcome note.

Day Four Welcome Note

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Today is all about the power of our imagination. I think this is actually one of our superpowers, and learning how to harness it is key to an enriched life, individually and collectively. One of the themes coming up this week in Camp has been the role of story and narrative, as shapers of culture and society. We were chatting about how the dominant narratives are both crumbling and failing us, narratives of linear growth, patriarchy and productivity. Into this collapse, we are wondering about how story can function in building and telling new ones.

At the heart of story is an invitation to imagining. ‘Come into this world for a while. Step into my shoes, or walk in their shoes, walk alongside us and see what we see. Story is a magic carpet. Story is a portal. It might be a life-raft too.

While story is the carrier, it’s our imaginations that help us take the leap. With its aid, we can step into that imagined world, or a potential future. And by welcoming questions which help us shape that future - the story of what we still can be- we get to see those possibilities as potential. If we can’t see it, we can’t build it. Our imagination is a lighthouse, shining a light ahead. Without it, we risk running ashore.

I have never met a child who doesn’t have a dream. In my years as a photographer, I’ve sat with hundreds of children across the world, in schools, on street corners, in hospitals, and have asked them, not what they want to be when they grow up, but what’s their dream. No matter their economic or social condition, they always had a dream. Some would say ‘be to a doctor’, or ‘be a football player’, ‘to be a teacher’, ‘to be with my family’, and so many would say, ‘to be happy’. If they were struggling to answer, I’d ask them, ‘how do they want to feel’. Happy was the predominant response.

I think the dream can get knocked out of us. It’s hard to keep dreaming when so much around denies the possibilities of a safe future, when the systems, stories and structures buttressed by those narratives which speak of control and dominance. But it is exactly for these reasons I think we need to keep asking the question, What’s your dream? The dream is the imagination at work. Imagine-nation. I think we can dream new nations too.

We could run a whole course on this (any maybe I will), but for today, let’s use the creative tools to strengthen our imagination muscles. What’s that they say? If you don’t use it, you loose it. Time to get imagineering…

(Members: The camp playlist - below, may be a good musical companion to today also)

Today, I have three exercises

The Secret History of an Object.
The What If Spiral.
The Dream Life.

Live Sessions:

2-3pm Owl Hour, creative circle.

6-8pm Ideas to Action Cafe. A peer-to-peer model for support each other to develop creative projects. Over a series of rounds of questions and dialogues, the idea is developed through the insights and experience of others.