Happy Sunday dear Imaginals - trusting this finds you well in the midst of our global heartbeat, as emergency and emergence is braiding rapidly both at once - and out of this chaotic emergence, is a choice of authentic exchange for humanity’s Sake. I have just been amidst a converging questioning tribe of Imaginals , becoming aware of the code of their butterfly 🦋 wings , at Villars Institute in the Alps -
So i took the feeling and frequency of this wonderful group and the fact that they bother as deeply as they are currently able , and that they were called to fund Open Planet Studios wonderful story telling films with OCEAN with Sir David Attenborough and another vital movie to be released in 2026 (which we have been fortunate to experience) , So i weave this as I write this poem - WHY BOTHER?
WHY BOTHER?
Why bother when I woke within the middle
of the road of a life where the true way was wholly lost,
as Dante named it - lost in the dark riddle
of compromise. Is heaven or hell the cost?
Why bother when my body turned on me,
consuming what was healthy and free;
and why bother when the earth we failed to tend
sends three hundred eighty million migrants to the wire:
extraction’s final bill, the dividend
of taking without giving has now come due.
The farmer knows this. Twelve cents in his hand.
Five fifty on our shelf he’ll never reach,
and forty-one percent of all we grow
finds no one’s mouth. The wasted harvest
of a world gone numb.
A refugee hut - twelve hundred dollars built
by hands that do not know a region’s soil and rain -
arrives at five thousand, wrapped in guilt
of border fees and middlemen’s cold gain.
Why bother when the woman at the loom
cannot know the Ganges carries poisoned bloom
through every polluted thread - fashion’s darkest cost
worn intimate to skin. So many we have lost.
Why bother? Ask the man who walked the path
of twenty-seven years and would not make
of vengeance any mathematics.
Mandela chose the harder road for forgiveness sake.
And Johnson Sirleaf - who faced the hell of power, named the wound and opened the shame -
she walked it. From heaven as freed slaves to hell again, of despots and child soldiers- Chose to bear
her wound as map, not monument.
Both their choice - truth and reconciliation.
And Yunus : twenty seven dollars, forty-two women,
every bank refused - the unbankable banked.
Fifty million lives re-composed.
The Kogi watched from mountains, said: enough.
They named us: younger brother. We who mine
our mother and call the mining free -
and now we are the sixth. Not witness. Cause.
And yet - a boy of eight, beaten for his curiosity,
his rebellion, in a Dorset dark prep school
had watched Lord Dickie hold the frame because
McQueen took wire and turned it into arc of The Great Escape -
and ran away. Through gorse, through night,
through bramble, barbed wire, ditch and Dorset hills,
propelled by what that camera made of flight:
burning still. And burning still.
The younger brother held a different lens.
Not prison camp but ocean. Not the wire
of Stalag Luft but coral. And it bends -
that sixty-year-old thread - from Dickie’s fire
to David’s depth. The boy who ran because
one brother filmed the courage to break free
now stands in the room that funded, without pause,
the other brother’s witness to the sea.
You chose to see. That is why this poem
finds its home tonight in your alpine air.
The question hasn’t aged. We are not alone.
You funded what he lived. We were always there.
Five mass extinctions written into stone,
yet are we here to help avert a sixth?
Why bother? - because my thread
had me work with all I speak about,
an authentic truth of why they bothered.
And why I bother still.
The ANCA ate my kidneys, not my heart.
The body fell apart -
and yet the heart held frequency. It knows
what extraction never can: that life
cannot consume its source and long survive.
Frequency. Remembering the tone
beneath the body’s separate hells -
the note that says: you are not alone,
you are the farm and farmer both,
the seed and soil, the rain and root,
and we have a choice to return to source.
Five hundred million hands.
Three billion lives. Fed.
One living thread from seed to sovereign yield.
Because the imaginal cells are clustering now
across the continents, the coffee shops,
the ceremonies, boardrooms, here - and somehow
they recognise each other. And it stops!
the long extraction driven by a desire for power. Stops!
Not twelve cents lost to air.
But value held at source. The farmer alive
inside the price. Transparent. Real. Revealed.
This is not rescue. This is remembering.
We are the chrysalis of what must be.
Not at the ending. At the frequency.
Not at the rescue. At the root.
The dark wood is not punishment.
It is the middle of the road.
We are standing in it now.
We choose.
Why bother?
Because the heart was never once attacked.
It knew. Its beat keeps the frequency we hold here.
And everything we judged was torn and cracked
is now herStory and history, authentically true -
emergency and emergence, braided as one,
one living thread from darkness into light.
We are the morphing of the imaginals.
This is how humanity is to heal and be free.
