Holding a Hidden Promise for the Future

“It is very important at this moment that we imagine the future that is possible, not the future that is being shown around us.

- Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

I was given this teaching more than ten years ago in the summer of 2014, during an interview I conducted with Sufi Master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about these words again. Perhaps I needed reminding, in the liminal time at the end and start of a new year, as the page turns onto a new sheet of stories yet to be told, and as I sit and think about my hopes and wishes for 2026, that the world, too, has a dream and a possibility for what it could yet be.

Yet I wonder whether, if asked, he would give the same message today. With each passing year, the distance between the world of our imagination and longing, and the world that is being shown around us feels more and more like a chasm. That potential which Llewellyn refers to seems hidden, perhaps even, sometimes, it feels lost.

How do we endure in our imagining? How do we keep trust and remembrance in the greater potential for transformation during this time?

From a practical perspective, maybe it’s good to recognise that timelines have shifted in the twelve years since my interview. As the pivotal decades that will dictate the degree of warming and severity of breakdown progress, and we witness continued loyalty to the path of desecration, we move ever deeper into the territory of the radical unknown. In the words of Rob Hopkins, if you’re not terrified about climate change, then you’re not paying attention.

It is evident today that the transformation from a life-destroying to a life-sustaining human culture is now a multi-generational epic that will likely involve some dark and dangerous chapters. We can’t even take it for granted any more that there will be humans around to live it.

I was pondering some of these questions when my thoughts were disrupted by an image from a poem that I happened to listen to on a BBC radio show about Winter poetry. A stanza from Ode to Winter by Gilian Clarke caught my attention, offering an image (or a response, in the way poems often do):

Under the stilled heartbeat of trees,
wind-snapped branches, mulch and root,
a million bluebell bulbs lie low
ready to flare in lengthening light,
after the dark, the frozen earth, the snow.

In more recent talks, I have heard Llewellyn describe our time, when the light of the old era has faded, but the light of the next era has not yet been born, as akin to winter. Perhaps we are at the start of a multi-generational long winter, and maybe this is why the practice of imagining a possible future sometimes feels hard to do; it is so out of sight.

Yet, this image is a powerful reminder. Above ground is death and dissolution all around, but below ground, in the invisible world, lies a hidden promise of beauty and joy, being silently nourished by the rot, ready, and waiting for the light to return, for it’s time to come. The future lies low in the dark, and we must learn to listen for its presence.

However things unfold in the world in 2026, when I look around at the world, and the way feels lost, I will remember the invisible bluebell bulbs. I will remember that winter is a time to tune my ears to the flowers growing in the dark.

As all winters ask, I will practice faith and perseverance.

I will hold the hidden promise of the future waiting to be born.