02/09/2026
When I was 11, I entered a competition called How Do You Imagine the Future? I won with the drawing you see here (1st slide)
My mother turned it into a tapestry (2nd slide). Every thread sewn by hand. It took her 3months.
After having my children, I stopped creating for a while. Life became about keeping little humans alive and my own creative outlet grew quiet.
When it slowly returned, only recently (!) through all the fear of not being good enough, it brought me back to the same place:
We are nature. Not separate from it. Not standing outside it, managing it. We are it.
Psychiatrist and wilderness guide Brian Stafford talks about an eco-centric consciousness-a felt knowing, often present in young children, that our first home is the Earth itself.
I wonder if part of our crisis is that we’ve forgotten this.
Fires. Floods. Storms. Shifting seasons. Tipping points.
The climate crisis is not only technical., but it’s perceptual. A forgetting of something a child still knows in her bones. Before I knew anything about climate change, I drew a future in which we were still connected.
And my mother saw something in that drawing worth preserving.
So she spent three months sewing it, thread by thread.
Maybe that is what we need to do now.
How do you imagine the future today, in 2026? How would you draw it?
