You made it into 2026.
And maybe like me, you’re feeling the weight of it—the escalating injustices, the murders and detentions, the international instability.
For the last few newsletters, I’ve been writing about dreaming. Not as escapism, but as resistance. Not as naivety, but as necessity.
(If you need action and community in this moment, along with dream tending, you can always start here: Indivisible, ACLU, SURJ.)
Here’s what I know: the more we practice dreaming up what we desire for each other, for our futures, and for our communities, the more we claim a power that belongs to us and extends far beyond us.
This isn’t soft work. This is strategic work.
When we dream collectively—across generations, in community, for something bigger than our individual survival—we create a counterforce to greed, cruelty, and shortsightedness.
Your dreams matter. Your dreams for your own life, your body, your future—they matter.
The dreams of others matter. The dreams held by the generations before you. The dreams held by the children living down your street. The dreams that communities birth together after honest conversations about what they have, what they’re up against, and what they want to change.
I’m in the business of dreaming.
It usually gets called by a stodgier name: strategic planning.
But good strategic planning is dreaming work. It’s asking bigger questions than we normally allow ourselves. It’s reflecting on what we’ve done, what we’re good at, what problems we want to help solve, and where we want to go together.
A good strategic plan is big enough that it’s a dream, a chance, a risk—and everyone is pulling in the same direction, trying it out together.
I was born to dreamers, though my parents would never call themselves that.
People who know them might say, “They’re not dreamers—they don’t have their heads in the clouds.” And that’s true. They’re not the wander-around-imagining kind of dreamers. (My son is that kind of dreamer, making entire worlds out of nothing. We need both kinds.)
My parents are the kind of dreamers who sit down together, reflect on what they want for the future, hash it out, write it down, and then get to work making it happen. They built a successful business in the fruit industry by dreaming first.
That’s the kind of dreaming I’m talking about. The kind that connects vision to action. The kind that holds possibility and pragmatism at the same time.
I need to be honest with you.
When I started writing to you about dreaming, I was struggling. My own heart is aching from current realities. I kept thinking, “How dare I write about hope and possibility when everything feels like it’s falling apart?”
But that’s exactly why this matters.
We don’t dream because everything is fine. We dream because life is hard (and beautiful).
We dream because when we lose sight of what we’re building toward and we can only see the immediate crisis, the next devastating headline, the mounting losses, we lose our capacity to make good decisions. We lose our ability to lead with intention.
We burn out trying to survive instead of working toward something creative.
Dreaming isn’t about pretending things are okay. It’s about remembering what we’re fighting for. It’s about connecting to something larger than this brutal moment so we can keep showing up with purpose instead of just panic.
I need this reminder as much as I need to offer it.
So: let’s keep dreaming.
Let’s dream while we take action.
Let’s dream so we know what actions to take.
If you missed the earlier newsletters in this series, you can find them all here – Dream Tending in the Hardest Times, How to Remember your Capacity to Dream.
I’ve put together a guide with concrete ways to invite more dreaming into your life and leadership. Get it below. Share it with others.
🏮 BEACONS
Use and share this concrete guide to dream more and build more dreaming in your organizations and businesses.