So you say you want a revolution?
Envision it with us July 11th
Beloved Community,
We’d like to invite you to the first in a series of community conversations to help us envision Hestia's role in creating the new world we want to live together.
Hestia’s purpose is to bring forward and nurture the new world that’s being born right now. It’s a world that has the potential to be radically more beautiful. And if you’re reading this — it’s probably the world that you’ve long dreamed of.
But there’s no guarantee that this new paradigm will emerge without you.
So join us on July 11th for the first of several conversations. And in advance of that conversation, below are two questions to spur your personal reflection:
1. What’s the world you want to live into?
To help you reflect on this question, let me share a story:
Deep in my bones, I’ve always longed to see our world radically transform.
In part, I get it from my dad: he was the wise-cracking kid who pointed out when adults didn’t walk their talk. He was the teenager who hated convention and ran atop the lunchroom tables in high school because it made him feel alive. He was the college student who loved films that brought to life new worlds and stories of ordinary people rising to the occasion to become heroes.
If you’re reading this, I’m guessing some of this might resonate with you.
But growing up in an immigrant family, and feeling the pressures of adulthood, instead of Film, he majored in Economics.
By the time I entered the picture, the price of living in a story without possibility was heartbreaking. The first words out of his mouth when he came home from work were, “Another day, another dollar.” Then, he’d turn on the TV to numb out for the night… only to repeat the same soul-crushing cycle again the next day.
I realize now he was stuck in the story of, “This is the way life is.”
Feeling the cost of his inner death, the driving question of my life has been: “How can the world be the more radically beautiful place I know is possible?”
This drive led me to spend most of college and the last 20 years trying to answer “Why is capitalism so f’ed up?” It’s what led me into the worlds of social enterprise, technology, and leadership development — all to figure out what could drive systemic change.
For years, the dream of radical transformation felt impossible. …until 2020.
2020’s hidden gift is that the story of “this is how the world is” has crumbled.
In just a few weeks, everything has changed in how we live and work. The belief that we can go it alone like cowboys is collapsing when flattening the curve requires collective action. And the story of “freedom and justice for all” has been eviscerated by George Floyd’s murder.
It’s unnerving to watch the structures that held up “normal life” crumble. But “normal” wasn’t so great in the first place. Normal perpetuated white supremacy and structural inequality. Normal kept us separate from each other and the natural world. Normal made us small.
Now that normal has been ripped apart, there’s no going back.
But there’s also not yet a clear way forward.
Some people are waiting for heroes to save us. Hollywood has taught us that the X-Men will swoop in when the apocalypse hits. But we’ve seen enough to realize that no one — not Trump, not Biden, not Charles Xavier — will magically rescue us.
The future is up to us. And just like in the stories my dad loved of the little guy rising to the occasion, we’re the heroes being summoned to live into our gifts.
The truth is, the future could turn dark… fast. In societal collapse, driven by fear, we could savagely turn against each other. Or, thanks to our collective choices, the future could be exquisite. We could learn to turn toward each other to create a world founded on love, belonging, and simplicity.
Which story will it be?
It depends on us. Because in the words of activist Joanna Macy, “We are the ancestors of the future.”
Yet if we’re to be good ancestors, trying to answer “What’s ours to do?” feels overwhelming when the world is on fire.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from years of trying to drive systemic change, it's that if we take a problem-solving lens, it at best brings us back to the status quo. And we’ve seen how the status quo is broken.
Instead, what we need to do is to create the future.
2. How can we use this community to create the world we dream of?
It’s clear that the new world won’t be led by individual heroes. (The challenges of our time all require collective action.) The community of the new world calls for decentralized leadership. And change starts with communities of like-hearted folks because genuinely new things can only be born from collaboration.
This change also can’t be done in the abstract. Wide-scale change happens only when people can tangibly see and experience how things can be different.
So the unique opportunity that we as a Hestia community have is to create the new paradigm together. In actively living the future we want, we have a chance to be force multipliers for change.
This is why we spent the last 2 years trying to foster a radically diverse community that meaningfully engages in joyful, heartfelt ways. This is why we’ve spent so much time trying to build a culture that supports us all in showing up as our full authentic selves. This is why we’ve been focusing on helping community members start to identify and live from their soul gifts to birth the new world.
It’s all been for this moment.
With this context, we’d like to invite you to the first in a series of community conversations to help us re-imagine Hestia to create the world we want to live into, together.
We know that you have a unique perspective on what wants to be born, and have soul-level gifts that will help bring this forward.
With love,
Melissa L & Hestia’s founding friends