Over the last year, I have been writing to you about many things that, at first, may have seemed separate.

I have written about immigration and the hemisphere, about institutions and artificial intelligence, about philanthropy and community organizing, about the Garinagu and Maya weavers, about narrative, governance, consequence, continuity, and what people are asked to carry. Most recently, I wrote to you about Harold Gatensby.

I have been thinking about the relationship among all of these writings.

Poetic Futurism did not begin because I sat down and decided to construct a theory. It emerged through years of trying to understand what allows human beings and peoples to remain whole through rupture; what happens when institutions leave consequences for others to carry; how memory and relationship survive across generations; how people reconstitute themselves after what was meant to break them; and what responsibilities arise when our lives are bound to one another across time and place.

Harold was one of the people who helped me understand these questions long before I had language for much of what I now write. And so were many others.

Communities have taught me about continuity. Organizers have taught me about relationship. Indigenous peoples have taught me about sovereignty, memory, land, and responsibility. People living inside institutions have shown me what happens when systems become separated from the consequences they produce. Immigrant communities have taught me about carrying more than one world at once. Our hemisphere has taught me what rupture looks like across generations—and what people create in order to remain.

Over time, I began to understand that these were not separate questions. The question of who carries a culture when its people are displaced is related to the question of who carries an organization after funding leaves. The question of what survives rupture is related to what a human being must do to remain coherent. The question of who experiences the consequences of a decision is related to who had the authority to make it. The question of how a people carries memory is related to what institutions choose to remember and what they allow themselves to forget. And all of these questions are connected to the future because our relationships in the present are continually creating the conditions in which others will have to live.

That developing body of thought is what I have come to call Poetic Futurism. Many of you have been reading it as it has developed—in books, essays, reflections, and emails like these. But I recognize that encountering the work piece by piece can make it difficult to see the relationships among the ideas. So I have created Poetic Futurism: A Basic Introduction to the Theory.

It is an introductory reader meant to make the larger architecture accessible without requiring anyone to first read the entire body of work. It explains some of the ideas you have already encountered—coherence, continuity, rupture, consequence, Terrenales, Love Politics, coherence terraforming, and coherence creation—but its deeper purpose is to show how they move together.

At its simplest, Poetic Futurism asks us to pay attention to the relationships among meaning, power, responsibility, consequence, continuity, and time. It asks us to notice when the coherence of one person, institution, or society depends upon someone else carrying what has been displaced. And then it asks a different kind of political question:

What would we have to create so that a fuller life no longer depends upon hidden sacrifice?

You can read Poetic Futurism: A Basic Introduction to the Theory here.

For those of you who have been walking alongside this work, thank you.

You have not simply been watching a theory develop. In many ways, you have been accompanying the relationships, histories, people, questions, and experiences through which it has become possible for me to see it. Perhaps that is appropriate.

The future is a relationship.