Into the Fire
Pit Fire, October 2025
In Robert Bosnak’s course Fear of the Future he examines the deep psychological structures behind our resistance to change. He does this through embodied imagination, dreamwork, and reflection on historical cycles in order to support participants' development of adaptive versatility: the psychological flexibility to engage creatively with a rapidly changing world.
I started Robert’s course around the same time I pit fired my Groundspring vessels.
Out of the fire came vessels with dynamic patina surfaces, which brought me back to thinking about the origin of these vessels and my inquiry into fracture as a generative force and necessary disruption that creates conditions for something new. In Bosnak’s course he offers a perspective on how to be with both the violence and the vitality of this process.
Reading the intro of Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There is No Future? by Slavoj Žižek I was struck by the following passage.
“In today's apocalyptic situation, our ultimate horizon - the future - is what Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls the dystopian ‘fixed point’: a zero point of nuclear war, ecological breakdown, global economic and social chaos, Russia's attack on Ukraine exploding into a new world war, and so on. Even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the attractor towards which our reality, left to itself, will tend. The way to combat this future catastrophe is through acts that interrupt our drift towards the ‘fixed point’. We can see here how ambiguous The Sex Pistols no future chant really is at a deeper level, it designates not the impossibility of change but precisely what we should be striving for - to break the hold that the catastrophic ‘future’ has over us, and thereby to open up a space for something New ‘to come’”.
What are these acts that interrupt our drift towards the ‘fixed point’?
…acts ///fractures/// that break the hold that the catastrophic ‘future’ has over us and open up a space for something New ‘to come’
We have scholars like…
Joanna Macy who showed us how to collectively turn toward our fears, terror and despair, which miraculously opens a spirit of connection, a clarity of focus and release of energy that fuels strategic planning and action
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira who, in her book “Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism”, asks the question ‘What if racism, colonialism, and all other forms of toxic and contagious divisions are preventable social diseases?’
Donna Haraway who guides us with creative ways to stay with the trouble
“There are so many losses already, and there will be many more. Renewed generative flourishing cannot grow from myths of immortality or failure to become-with the dead and the extinct” Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
Robert Bosnak invites us to imagine our worst fear of the future and to sense into the atmosphere of the image and embody the image. I have included my photo collage (below) as a representation of my imagined fear of the future. It is called “The House of Horror” and includes the following images: Edward Burtynsky. Nickel Tailings No. 30 and Vivian Browne, Little Men # 7.
The House of Horror collage (Edward Burtynsky. Nickel Tailings No. 30 and Vivian Browne, Little Men # 7).
In Bosnak’s course I am confronted by my desire to tip toe around the ‘horror’ and go directly to a desperate longing for peace, which he would say is a mis/take. I am struck by how we can go on in our daily lives like nothing catastrophic is happening. Perhaps seeing/imagining/talking about what is right in front of us is too horrifyingly disruptive and we choose to turn a blind eye…all the while living with an internal anxious knowing that is on a low burn.
When we turn head on toward our worst fears something happens …something internal shifts…
